runtothere

There is a spiritual saying: "keep your mind in hell and despair not" (Elder Silouan). It is one of those sayings that becomes deeper over time - the kind that Samurai/zen masters note: study this carefully. Always keep a grain of sand in the day. For pearls. I realized after my last post that I do the same even in my training, it is just that I have taken a zone of proximal development to my pain cave. When I began running after a decade-long break, I craved distance and would only get out to run far even though I would end up pretty depleted and in pain for a long time, both after the run and in the months after I began to run again - it is interesting how this did not deter me. So, my first step was to keep at it until my recovery improved. My new rule is that unless I am running particularly far, I must have no pain or exhaustion after runs. This also helps me note where stress is creeping in, to be ready to dial things back. Once I found I was recovering well from t

The days are finally long enough to go longer but it just doesn't feel like I am going that far despite the miles that are racking up. As a dogged distance 'jogger', I still don't understand how I continue to build muscle and efficiency on this regime. "It is better to be wrong than to simply follow convention," is advice given to the protagonist of The Power of One . When it comes to running, I flout contemporary customs involving speedwork and run my own runs, all of the time. Five years into my return to running I remain uninjured, running probably an average of 55+ miles a week (some are less, some are more). This was not a strategy, but the way to keep myself keeping on, getting out the door.* When I plan smaller mileage days, I find I want to skip them. And I have learned that I can manage going long even when cramming back to back (to back to back) long runs. Though not a strategy, it is demonstrative of the behavior of a type : the "endurance mo

The idea of speeding up is less appealing to me than stretching runs into the far distance. Sometimes I look at the gathering of trees in the hills that I run to and recognize where I'd once stored thoughts of what had been ailing me and am reminded of how enormous nature is, capable of absorbing so much thought and still go far beyond it, when those same thoughts, when trapped inside my mind, become unwieldy. Once in the forest, they blend in and gradually disappear: replaced with an almost inert snail on the path, syrupy summer air, the call of fighting jays. They beckon the mind out of itself and into the intricacies of creatures, plants, wind, weather. A unity is achieved, a balance restored. I occasionally speed up when I feel like it though, like to chase or pass the occasional other runner I encounter. But this month, I got a new training partner. It was after the rain. I was slogging up the steep, barely-a-trail that cuts straight up through the more tangled trees to the

cuddlie kittehs @ brushy mount? to go there expressly past  ersatz awards for arbitrary stopping points and Daily Planners forgetting what it means to try together but to be alone up there with the gorges, bluffs, and Platonic caves even a headlamp becomes a shadow so beyond things as to lose is to find the self, or the terrain, a breathing underworld what life is like underwater for years now all this grey coming down in strokes for traction, where’s the gravitude on this bed of ocean, where do I lie, or do I stand among wet sand a conch, and then the sleet in lines to fall while yet inclining to take that leg out of that swamp to feel the briars scratching the sound of a mind on doubt puffs white smoke, an effusion from the psychosomatic nature of feet for the underbrush that tears at this amusement of the motion to persist too easily slips out from under even the one who has done it. what is capable. no one has ever been here before, ever in reverse, the b

A great song featured on episode 60 of The Trail Show has a guy singing in falsetto: Back on the trail, back on the trail, we won't stop 'til we get up that hill . It has that same talismanic motivational power for me as the phrase: I eat hills for breakfast . When I think of these phrases on long runs, they make me laugh " which is nice " (link takes you to the almost eponymous Fast Show sketch) except that chortling internally makes me run slower. I love so much the 'mini training' that distance running gives; I do not know if it is because this was instilled in me through the Outward Bound camps that removed me from my otherwise asthmatic and, also, relatively inert childhood. But even on days when I am less motivated to get out, I know that once I get to the hilly forest, I will not regret the views, and also, that the fitness I build by getting out consistently will reward me on days when I really need to puff my way to an uphill panorama. And then, al