More Rain, less Road

After dreams of someone named "Hugo Wolf", a name so memorable, I recalled it even after further dream 'chapters' unfolded putting me back in Pittsburgh, I woke before the alarm after 6AM. Sweeps of rainy bluster were pummeling the parking lot below; so I packed my gear and headed for the gym. The problem with treadmill running for me (well, there's many) is the lack of visual stimuli. The Right Brain in rightbrainrunner is partly about the immersion in the natural world, and how running places me within the body of elements, not outside of it, soaking up the air, heat, cold, winds, and yes sometimes rain. I've run int he rain but it's cumbersome and uncomfortable. Once you are soaking wet from head to squishy shoes, it feels somewhat like running underwater anyway. At the gym at least, the control over the run makes up for CNN, the work-out junkies, and a perpetual set of numbers inching along a mythical track telling me one more tenth of a mile, one more calorie burned....

I decided, after realizing the other day that I can pull out a decent 5K, to run that, and see if I match the same general time. Sure enough, even after the first easy mile, I clocked just over 36 minutes. A ran another mile or so to ease out of the pace and checked myself over. The 'hitch' in my hip is back. The flexor, or some combination of tricky bits around my right hip socket feel twisted up in themselves. In the marathons I've run this is my nemesis. There is absolutely no way I can relax into a run when this issue is acting up. And so I'm back to the basics again: do I invest the time, money and energy to really work this out? Massage, chiro, the elites have their endless array of therapies...do we think they get to that start line alone?
But for average street runners everywhere, we have to figure it out ourselves.

Last year it took tremendous effort to maintain. I am more strapped for time than ever. While I feel a small spark of hope that my base is there, and the ability to ramp up and increase my endurance will come, the change this year has brought new, subtle vulnerabilities. Willpower alone will not do it. And I am not a Dean, Scott or grandmother 100 miler (well, not yet). In yesterday's 'reading' from Tom Kenyon (look him up), the message was about jumping timelines into alternate realities which are now within our grasp, by identifying it, shifting focus to it and locking onto it by action which support it. Artists and creative types everywhere can understand this principle and process. We visualize to create; we 'see' where we want to go. So if locking onto Miami is my way of 'jumping' realities, it may take the rest of my Big Dreams along...to further unfold New Me, New Future, New Earth.