Running With Xenophon

River Valley,  June 13
If you look closely down the path in this photo, you will see the runner that  I would like to be but I am not. Way in the distance, that little speck? That's the woman who caught me, passed me and then left me to consider the meaning of it all.

I run in part to substitute the pain of running for the pain of not running, having come to the conclusion that there is no equation free of pain. Either I sit at work and sit doing my school work and sit in front of the TV and sit in the car and develop the hip and back and knee pain that turns good moods to bad, or I run on the treadmill and run on the jogging paths and take the stairs and develop the hip and back and knee pain that feels better.

But I also run because thoughts drop in when I am in motion. There is probably some ancient basis for this. I remember from somewhere that Aristotle was known as a peripatetic lecturer, because he walked or moved around as he spoke. It's an attractive lesson, that somehow a body in motion is linked to a mind in motion.

When I run I try to put in action my thoughts about running. For those who read the blog, you know that I am wrestling with what my real goal is in training for a half marathon in California in November. And that I am trying to acquire the knowledge that will keep injury away.

In short, I am trying to come to real understanding of how to run, physically and mentally.

About 6 km into that 10 km run yesterday, this is the thought that dropped in and ran alongside me for a while. In life we have adversaries, opponents, obstacles. In a real way, they define us just as surely as the principles we purport to strive for. There is a fragment of Xenophon that returns at this point: know your enemy! It is very easy, too easy, at times, to identify your outside enemies, because, well, they are just so easy to identify. There they are, blocking your way, in obese, living colour. You hear them lie. You see them lie. They openly try to confound you, spread rumour, and it's all so easy and painful to see. Much harder, though, is to identify the enemy within. This suggestion that we are divided beings, that there could be an enemy within, or that we are some version of a civil war certainly goes against the beautiful desire for unity. And it's just plain hard to admit that we make mistakes, and, likely, the same mistakes that others make, and that these mistakes may issue from being, in a way, blind.

When my fellow (and superior) runner passed me yesterday, one of my enemies presented itself. Just for a second, there was the urge to pick up my pace and try to keep up. Is that competitiveness? Or is it what used to be called pride? I am not sure, but I do know that if I had been spurred on by it, I would have surely injured myself and been feeling more than the wobbly hips I feel this morning.

There is a difference between what you attack and what you defend against. Attacking the clock, making my goal a sub-60-minute 10K is making the clock the enemy, but it's the wrong enemy. I can defend against the clock, making sure I run a respectable time, but the real adversary is me, or the part of me that says the clock is the adversary.  And while I run, I see this clearly.

And, so, as my fellow jogger moved by and then moved out of sight, I let go the runner I am not.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more