People will ask me why I don’t wear headphones when I run. Part of the reason is that when I began running, portable music players didn’t exist. Believe it or not, the first Walkman didn’t infect public space until 1979. I’d been a regular runner for four years before that.
The answer comes down to mental space. How during the time that I run every other day – be it twenty-five minutes, a half an hour or an hour – I want, no, need, to clear my mind. That means it is free to wander to the beagle straining on a leash that I see from the treadmill window of our neighborhood gym, or to a long-suppressed memory about home that surprises, or the mood of the walking public (are they as collectively depressed as yesterday, and if not, why not? . . ..) I feel that bordering the experience with a soundtrack invades the marathon mental space that is the drug of my addiction.
A word about time. I was greatly moved by David Grossman’s latest novel, “Falling Out of Time http://bit.ly/1e4LPx8,” which goes to the heart of how time need not be how we normally experience it. I find in the quiet of a run that time will fall away. There is something about practice here. If the body is being fed, rested, the muscles relaxed and supple from stretching, the conditions are right for that slipping away. On the treadmill that doesn’t mean you look at the readout clock and – Shazam! – five minutes vanishes into thin air. Rather the pace, the miles traversed, and the clock become like water not stone, the body in command as the mind follows in the flow, I trust, without any regard at all to what has happened before the run or what will happen after. I am in, a pitman drilling down his personal mine.
Running for Your Life: Rock ’N’ Roller
The answer comes down to mental space. How during the time that I run every other day – be it twenty-five minutes, a half an hour or an hour – I want, no, need, to clear my mind. That means it is free to wander to the beagle straining on a leash that I see from the treadmill window of our neighborhood gym, or to a long-suppressed memory about home that surprises, or the mood of the walking public (are they as collectively depressed as yesterday, and if not, why not? . . ..) I feel that bordering the experience with a soundtrack invades the marathon mental space that is the drug of my addiction.
A word about time. I was greatly moved by David Grossman’s latest novel, “Falling Out of Time http://bit.ly/1e4LPx8,” which goes to the heart of how time need not be how we normally experience it. I find in the quiet of a run that time will fall away. There is something about practice here. If the body is being fed, rested, the muscles relaxed and supple from stretching, the conditions are right for that slipping away. On the treadmill that doesn’t mean you look at the readout clock and – Shazam! – five minutes vanishes into thin air. Rather the pace, the miles traversed, and the clock become like water not stone, the body in command as the mind follows in the flow, I trust, without any regard at all to what has happened before the run or what will happen after. I am in, a pitman drilling down his personal mine.
Running for Your Life: Rock ’N’ Roller
