Set-to-tember

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

It's bleeding obvious, really.

It was Samuel Beckett who said: Try again. Fail again. Fail better. This gives me comfort during the inevitable downturns and stuck-in-the-doldrum quagmires of this running life. Carl Jung also noted: what we resist, persists, which is of particular significance when trying to find a way out of the morass and back to a level of routine running and fitness. Fighting against all that life throws at us in order to get back on the road to health is so often self-defeating and only makes matters worse. I've experienced this to varying degrees many times, and I don't like. Not a bit.

As Jung was suggesting, the answer seems to lie not in resisting, but of surrendering to life's inevitable flash flood of dominating, non-running matters that plague us. Instead we should just go with the flow: only then will ways and means of getting back on track reveal themselves. And this is where cross-training; of mixing it up is really useful. When one stops trying to force the issue, other methods of finding some semblance of fitness reveal themselves: probably they were always there, but when one insists on reinstating some form of rigorous running schedule you remain obstinately blinkered to the bleeding obvious.

And so I have done the letting go thing: I'm relaxed and ambivalent about how much running I can actually squeeze in these days and have instead discovered pleasure in digging the garden; of walking rather than running, and of tossing in a few minutes of strength training as I can, with none of it dictated to by any onerous form of schedule or with a race deadline to meet. So while maybe as a form of running it classifies as a fail, I am at least failing better, with my physical and mental health in good shape. I may not be able to run with any conviction in any form of race, but I'm alive and healthy and for the most part, happy with it.

But I could use a holiday.