First, a review:
Newcomers: Running for Your Life is a part-inspirational, part-runner’s diary, part-nonfiction draft dedicated to the proposition that in one of these parts that you, the reader, can join me in running for your life, or at the least find a nugget of wisdom or insight to hold and meditate upon.
Casual followers: At 55, I’ve run five marathons (finished three, the latest on 10-10-10, see photo, below right). At 20, I contracted deep vein thrombosis, a pulmonary embolism, lost the equivalent of a small child in weight and very nearly died. Since then, yes, I’ve been running for my life, and in April will be competing in the Boston Marathon, a longtime goal of mine.
Careful readers: I believe in writing to the bone. (Yuck! What a phrase!) Consider Hilary Mantel’s dazzling “Diary” in the Nov. 4, 2010, London Review of Books, quoting the poet Jo Shapcott: in confessional writing you are “chasing your own ambulance.” “In my defense,” Mantel writes, “I am fascinated by the line between writing and physical survival.” It’s a writer’s courage I find inspiring. Also of note: Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker, Dec. 6, 2010, “A Widow’s Story: The Last Week of a Long Marriage,” who concludes her touching memoir: “Helplessly, I am standing here, thinking – the thought comes to me – There will never be a right time. Meaning, a time to leave the hospital room. Meaning, a time to turn my back, and walk away.”
*
Questions. There have to be many. Most runner’s blogs that I’ve been reading grapple all too literally with the line between running and physical survival, ie, Do you have any advice on what to do about recurring shin splints? Heavy socks or thin – Do you change with the season, increase thread-count in cold, decrease in warmth? And, of course, diet. (More to say here on Thursday, thanks to my old friend Gord Krelove who recently sent me a Web link on new research on carbohydrate-loading. Stay tuned!)
The purely physical questions are crucial, don’t get me wrong. But that’s only part of the game. As my pal Mike, aka Coach Tully, author of the Total Game Plan blog (see my blog list at right), says, mental toughness may just be the single-most important characteristic that completes an athlete.
So how do you keep it up, day after day, week after week, year after year? What motivates you?
In winter – and I couldn’t begin to tell you why, it is not a question that preoccupies me – my bad leg protests a lot more than it does in fine weather. Just as it did thirty years ago, when I start running, the lower part of my left leg swells uncomfortably, especially when I do my alternate-daily intervals, multiple climbs up the Prospect Park lake lookout steps. It doesn’t hurt exactly – imagine your leg from mid-thigh down slowly turning to half-wood, half-flesh-bone-muscle. The leg itself, after three decades of such exercise, is now a fireplug of tough calf muscle and Mackenzie River-like tributaries of protruded veins and arteries – not a pretty sight. But a small price to pay, in my mind, for a lifetime of running. One – knock on (real) wood – that I see no sign of ending.
It’s funny about inspiration. In my life, and in this blog, I find it comes in the least expected places: a 2:30 a.m. glimpse of Orion’s Belt through our now-leafless backyard oak, on a morning run with Thurber, the dark edge of a Windigo-like cloud, laden with the first snow of the year.
The mystic Rumi wrote: “To praise is to praise how one surrenders to the emptiness,” and similarly, “You think the shadow is the substance.”
And, an favorite: “We rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless.”
I’d like, of course to hear from you. Or to hear your questions about your own inner journey. My wife, the writer Mary Morris, talks about the inner and the outer paths that women follow, which I think speaks as well to the woman running for her life: “Because of the way women have cultivated their inner lives, a journey often becomes a dialogue between the inner and the outer, between our emotional necessity an the reality of the external world.”
*
Looking back at this post, I’m inclined to think I’ve blown it. That is in terms of trying to encourage questions and comments. Fine for me to expose these inner and outer struggles to you, my reader. How many bone-writing comments and questions should a reasonable person expect?
Which is to say, if you can, consider this blog an open book. And, of course, mental toughness is a broad term. But certainly, when it comes to long-distance running, or to any serious exercise discipline, it is NOT all about the body. I have written at length here and elsewhere on the blog about my “inner life” as a runner. And certainly I would welcome questions about it and how it helps motivate me to keep it going on the road. But how about you? Those nuggets of wisdom and insight I refer to in the “Newcomer” paragraph above have come as much from comments and emails I’ve received from readers as from my own personal experience. Ask questions, sure, but let others know how you keep going in your own running regimen. What’s your secret sauce? You may be surprised when you sit down to write about it, your source of inspiration, that the unique and personal way that you “surrender to the emptiness” holds lessons for us all.
Next: Running for Your Life: Barbs and Carbs
0 comments:
Post a Comment