Find Your Pace, Find Your Peace.

One of the intriguing things about life, broadly construed, is momentum.  Sometimes, you can be pressing onward at a snail's pace, feeling heavy as a concrete slab.  Other times, things seem to moving along like a windswept parachute, pulled quickly off the ground and far afield.  The momentum may seem like it's random, and like you have no control over it, but I'm not so sure that that's the case.  For the past week, I have been quite busy, for the first time in recent memory.  I have had interviews at various possible employers, taken tests at a staffing agency, run into interesting research projects on the academic side of things, started taking steps to possibly move into a house with the woman of my dreams, and sorting out my future.  Were I not newly in the habit of pushing myself to keep going, I'm not so sure that I'd be up for all of it.  But lately, I've been pushing myself to keep moving; not moving senselessly and merely to stay moving, but to keep plowing through the tough terrain that is working to achieve my goals.  I am also not moving mindlessly, trying not to deal with my feelings and thoughts that make my present moment, for that would be more dangerous than even sitting still.  Rather, I am striking the balance between barely moving and thoughtlessly speeding along with no presence of mind.  Allow me to make one more analogy in regards to running (that is, after all, a main theme in this blog, is it not?)

Imagine the mind and the body as two running partners.  They're unwillingly tied to each other, need one another to do their best, but their tragedy is that they are so unevenly matched.  The mind has the ability to keep on running faster and farther into the future, into uncharted possible futures, and quickly as far backward into a cloudy past.  But the body can only run forward at the pace of the present moment, and unfortunately, it has to do so at the mercy of its reluctant partner, the mind, and its volatile changes of pace.

When I first started running, I wanted so much more than I could do in one session.  I wanted to be able to run at an 8 minute mile pace, I wanted to go on for 5 and 10 miles in one fell swoop.  In short, my mind took off at breakneck pace, and my body was left in the dust.  But at some point, I stopped thinking that I had to one day run a marathon--my mind slowed down a bit--or even that I'd have to run a half-marathon--slower--or a 20k--slower--or whatever large race toward which I was moving.  I forgot also that I had to run the 4 miles that I set out to when I left the house this morning--slower--and furthermore that I had to make it up the hill in front of me to get to the comfortable slight decline of the next road--slower.  In reality, all I had to do was take the next step, because that's all that I have to do right now--slower.  It was at that moment that my mind matched the pace of my body.  Perhaps the mind realized that ultimately, even if he crossed the finish line long before his partner, he'd still have to stand there and wait for him, twiddling his thumbs the whole time with that limitless nervous energy that the mind seems to posses. With my mind now matching pace with my body, I rounded out the four miles charted for today without stopping, and even managed to help two old ladies find the detour to the main road.

So while momentum is a very real phenomenon that pervades the experience of living life, the supposition that it comes and goes involuntarily is quite unfounded.  While you or your significant other may not actually run, your mind almost certainly does, at various paces, which rarely match that of your body.  But if you can manage to sync the two, and harness the power of the teamwork that happens when the two run at a complimentary pace, well you just might find real happiness.  But then again, what do I know?  I'm crazy enough to think that running a marathon will be fun.

Numbers:  I ran 4 miles today, after doing a big run of 6 miles on Monday (the record to date).  The times of both had me running at a pace of between 8:30 and 8:45 per mile (which I hope to improve by including speedwork in the regimen).  That brings the week's total to 10 miles, which I hope to increase to 13 or more, depending on how sore I am tomorrow.

Drastic Changes

I would like to start off this post with an apology.  Erin, I am sorry.  I told you I wasn't going to run, that I would take it easy on my foot and be prudent, but I felt crazy energetic this morning and did it anyway.  I'm sorry, baby, but I had to.  That last clause, however, is a good segue into the main theme of this post.  You see when I first started this quest of mine, a little over a month ago, I did so because I hated to run.  I had no love for running, especially long distances.  But I knew from experience, that the only way to make a drastic change in your life...is to make a drastic change.  Now this might sound like a tautology to most of you, and semantically speaking, it is.  However, instead of being totally non-informative, like most tautologies, this one holds the key to changing your life.  When I started this journey, I knew that in order to make it happen, I'd have to run on a schedule.  This schedule would stay the same whether I wanted to run or not.  If there wasn't a tornado, volcano, J-Lo, or anything else that ends in "o" outside, I would have to be there, running.  To do that would be the drastic change that I would make.  Now, having committed and made that change, I found myself today wanting--nay, needing--to run, despite the lingering pain and stiffness in my left foot (and lack of good running shoes to cradle it).  That is the drastic change that happened to me, which was the result of the change that I made.  So now the tautology should make some sense to you; if you want things to change drastically, you need to make drastic changes.  It was the workings of that law of the will that placed me in my living room, staring at my shoes as I put them on, thinking that a quick 3 mile run couldn't hurt.

But here's the kicker: though the pain kicked in pretty badly around the halfway mark, I used a little extra effort to keep the pressure off the left foot and trudged on.  I got in, iced it for a while, and it feels the same as when I woke up, which is far better than yesterday.  I wouldn't dare propose that the moral of this story is "keep running, even when your foot is begging you not to," but I will make the proposal that I didn't necessarily do the wrong thing this morning.  Yes, I could have sat around and nursed my foot, lord knows I have the free time.  I could've popped open a book, propped my foot up on the couch and let the day pass by.  But when it comes down to it, I have made running a part of my life.  I have never felt better than I do since I started.  I have more confidence, a sense of continuing accomplishment, and am more in tune with my body and my mind.  Simply put, running was that daily communion that I had been searching for, but never found.  In that way, it's kind of like your car keys; you're just miffed that you can't find them, and when you do, they're always in the last place you looked, and usually in a place you didn't think they could be.  Our world makes life tough enough as it is, take your peace where you can get it.  But just because you've found your peace, your spirit, doesn't mean you have answers, it just means that you're okay with letting the questions stay open-ended.