It's all Mind

I listened to the Phelipidations podcast today talk about a Finnish long-distance runner from the early 1900's, a gold medalist, and like all great people, a tragic and triumphant figure. Many many years before it became fashionable to think so, this guy felt running was all in the mind. We know, as runners, just how true that is, while we work incessantly at the very mechanics of our sport; the constant attention to food and water, training and goals, the gear, the goals, the times, the trials...yet the perseverance that makes all of us get out there day after day is a critical component. Not a lazy bunch. Not dependent on vast armies of support teams, we tend to be loners, solitaries, who revel in the privacy of the run, the sanctity of our inner life which no one can disturb as long as we keep on the move. The blessed relief from having to deal with anyone else's pain but our own.

I switched things up a bit this week. The new Brooks 'Ghosts' were so good as I began the week that I kept running each day, finishing out with well above 50 miles for the week after Saturday's very long loop. I continued west on Griffin this time determined to find a better way to cut down towards my mid-run stop at the Stirling Publix- and found one. Looping under the Turnpike and taking a left on Wilson, a beautiful country road took one amazingly long stretch past old Davie money houses set on the canal, as peaceful and beautiful a road as I've found in a long time; room to stretch out my stride and practice the opening of my body and mind before finding that store at the bottom corner. I was exhilarated and exhausted in the extreme heat and only halfway out. I looped back at Davie Rd and began the snake-like slog back through the Seminoles, over to the park which was my last pit-stop before the stretch home on Thomas, which was so long, sometimes so exhausting, that I completely forgot about the time.

Then came the visit to the cemetery, and the sad little marker, Mom's anxiety episode and refusal to get out of the car, and the few brief moments I had standing by the pads of grass that did not look as green as the rest to ask, Please Dad, please help. I'm all alone in this. Help me help her. And feeling that dull ache from days of feeling the unfolding of death with Ted Kennedy and the thousands of mourners who thanked and honored him compared to the mysterious dearth of company as we laid my fallen hero to his rest. Hardly time to leave the tiger's eye stone, to commemorate his courage to live, at all, through that last year of hell. To say 'I understand' to his isolation, fear, rejection and anger; understood because I was feeling it too. I was shy to talk, to say, to reveal my anger, my ache, my fear.

As we drove out of the cemetery I only wanted to get Mom home so I could go on to my own day. Sunday was a big blur of motionless emptiness peppered with chores, fattening comfort foods, and early bed. My expectations for today's run was zero. The prospect of training, of a race for christ's sake, a MARATHON seemed as unlikely as going to the moon.

So late out, with the sun already on the rise, I began slow hobbling jog over the overpass. All the way to my first stop on Griffin everything hurt, including my heart. I was determined to complete a normal 10 mile loop and had little heart before the podcast came on the the line "It's all Mind"...from the Finnish runner. I had to laugh to myself how the same old messages keep coming ad nauseum. At the bottom of every hole I fall into, the same few words are thrown to me like life-lines to remember, I can change, I can make it happen, I can change my mind.

It wasn't intentional, but by the time I crossed Stirling and began the long stretch down to Sheridan and my next stop I found a rhythm and was feeling strong. I picked it up again after my last Anderson park pit-stop and with one swoop down Park kept a pace and gait that I haven't felt in a long time, easy, comfortable (well, relatively speaking), and with as much energy as I needed to bring it in.

So maybe it was the chocolate chip cookies. Or the outpouring of emotions all week. Or maybe the mantra hits me just when I need it, the kernel of universal truth that unlocks the stuck door in my head. I trust. I try. I keep putting myself out there to test my every reserve. I don't know how others do it, how much they hide behind their hopes and ambitions. Maybe I have too, over other things. But this one thing, this running, has enabled me to put it to the test everyday. To declare myself a contestant in the race of life. Put me in coach, I can run it. I can make it to the end. For the first time today I thought of the marathon not as something I might be able to complete but as something I WILL complete, and pictured the full throttle excitement of crowds, friends, family welcoming me into their midst. I am so there. I am ready to go. I will be ready to run.