Running As Meditation

My injuries have forced me to reexamine my motives for pursuing my dream of running a marathon.  Overconfidence, I am learning, shifted my focus away from enjoying my runs and pushed down my goals of training in a way that would minimize the risk of injury.  No longer did I view long distance running as an opportunity to deepen and enrich my inner life  as it spills over into daily living.  Instead, my approach became an ego centered project as the momentum of my confidence led to take on difficult runs for which I was not yet prepared.  I abandoned my one minute walk breaks during my longer runs as advised by Galloway as way to avoid injury and rationalized that stretching out my running periods for few breaks wasn’t necessary for someone like myself who was making such long strides in progress.  Ego.  Injury was inevitable, especially given my poor running form, which I had ignored during my surge of overconfidence.  To complicate my marathon plans even further, I refused to allow the complete healing of my right calf muscle and sore tendons for fear that I would fall too far behind in my training and prevent a decent running time for my first marathon.  Ego.   I deceived myself into believing that a partial recover signaled a return to training, that if I walked without pain but felt a little pain during the first few seconds of running, I wouldn’t aggravate my injuries and would fully recover during the next few days.  Ego indeed.

I’m no longer wasting my time and energy worrying about whether or not I will be able to run a good time on July 24, or run the marathon at all for that matter, though I will continue to train for it after my body completely heals.  It’s time to relax.  It’s time to realize the reality that I’ll be ready to return to my running routine when my body is ready for it, not when my mind anxiously decides so at the expense of my body.  Most importantly, it’s better to take this time as an opportunity to transform my marathon goal into a a more general and lasting goal of fine tuning my running techniques, a life time practice, and remember that running speaks to a rich, inner life rarely discussed in sports magazines:

The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky.  Clouds of all different sizes.  They come and they go, while the sky remains the same as always.  The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass and vanish, leaving behind the sky.  The sky both exists and doesn’t exist.  It has a substance and at the same time doesn’t.  And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.  Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Murakami’s simile of clouds as a description of what happens to thoughts on a run is nearly the same description Buddhists and others apply when discussing the discipline of meditation. Thoughts that come and go leave behind a vast and empty mind, represented by Murakami as the sky.   Such an experience is inevitable when running long distances, but are there ways to enhance and deepen this experience?  I think so.  Danny Dreyer’s Chi Running technique mirrors aspects of sitting meditation; when thoughts run wild, bring back the mind to the body and become aware of its sensations.