July Hibernation

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Am going through one of my regular mental crises at the moment. Am full of massive introspection doubtless brought on by the wet, miserable weather here and my seeming inability to rest my brain at all.

So I've gone into a kind of hibernation. I shan't be too long, or so I hope.

Keep sending the pills.

[El Gordo]

Am going through one of my regular mental crises at the moment. Am full of massive introspection doubtless brought on by the wet, miserable weather here and my seeming inability to rest my brain at all.

So I've gone into a kind of hibernation. I shan't be too long, or so I hope.

Keep sending the pills.

No worries, MLCM, everyone deserves a break. A whole month is too long though.

See you back here in 10 days max, or there'll be hell to pay.

Good luck, cobber.

[Ana]

Do no worry MLCM, sometimes winter is not only around you, but also inside. But spring comes always again.

I was seeing a lot of your neighbours kiwis the last time. Tell me please? Are all of them rich and suntanned, or it was just a dream?

[Sweder]

I know what you mean mate; I'm a bit in my cups just now. Thinks its a combo of weather, a few mini-crisises (that can't be right!) and life in general being a bit cr*p at the moment.

If you want poor weather you only have to pop over here. We're having the sort of summer to make you glad your family interbred to give you these fabulous webbed feet . . .

Still, an evening with the Mighty Plodder and Captain Tom in prospect tomorrow - a Black Tie do to boot - so hopefully I'll emerge from my funk to swing an irreverant boot towards your tardy antipodean bottom before long

[stillwaddler]

I recommend a Dr Guinness or three - chin up MLCM

[Ana]

Good morning MLCM,
hoping you're feeling a little bit better

[Bierzo Baggie]

Looking forward to reading about your preparation for that Mount Wellington event again (it's in November isn't it?).

How about doing a bit of "virtual" training together?

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Mind Tardis
I read a neat description the other day of Doctor Who’s Tardis. It said that the Tardis was conceived as a metaphor for the human mind, in that the mind is far larger and more complicated inside than seems possible for a small handful of grey lumpy stuff, and also because the human consciousness is the only thing we know of that can span vast interstellar distances at a glance whilst simultaneously traversing time.

And sometimes the mind, being the surprisingly large and complicated thing it is, gets slightly out of kilter and needs a bit of re-alignment. The code sometimes needs tweaking - especially true if you’re the kind of person who is interested in a squillion different things and so absorbs vast quantities of information and doesn’t actually get around to processing it correctly. The comms ports and buffers go into overload and clog, and then it becomes difficult to do anything effectively. This happens to me fairly frequently, and especially so just lately.

Alpha Beta Male
Doctors sometimes prescribe beta blockers for such conditions, but I am wary of such things, so lately I’ve been attempting meditation, which does more or less the same thing, but without the side effects. But it isn’t easy for someone whose mind races all over the place all the time. I’ve done a few of those brain test things and they confirmed what I already knew – my conscious and subconcious minds both redline much of the time. So when I’m in a relaxed state, all that happens is that my subconcious mind takes over and continues to scream along, making it difficult to get to that deep state of meditative relaxation (theta brain activity) – the state where the mind is completely at rest, something I (and perhaps most of us) only very rarely experience.

The goal is to get to that state of relaxation where the brain is barely ticking over, but not asleep. To slow down from alpha (fully awake) and beta states (a kind of daydreamy, creative state) without completely falling asleep (delta state). The neuron-thingies then sort of have the chance to get cleaned up a bit and get back into their starting positions before the next onslaught. It also leaves the brain somewhat open to suggestion, eg allows you to tell it and have it believe the idea that eating chips and ice cream is not actually a good idea. As if we didn’t already know that…

Sausages Are The Enemy
I don’t know why, but crap food does taste bloody terrific when your mind is away on holiday somewhere. Things like chips, chocolate, ice cream and particularly for me, sausages become mandatory food groups. Maybe they have inbuilt beta-blockers, I don’t know. But what an insidious enemy. It’s not like they sneak up on us in the middle of the night. We actually seek them out, pay for them and bring them back home! Crazy, crazy madness. It has to stop.

My Mind Is Out There, Somewhere
Which brings me back to the meditation business. It goes a lot further than just unplugging and letting the mind sort itself out (how does it know how to do that, by the way?)… it also has a lot of mystical and hallucinatory aspects which are simultaneously intriguing and maddeningly incomprehensible. But like dreams, they don’t have to be comprehensible I suppose. I read somewhere the idea that dreams were simply an evolutionary survival tactic to keep us asleep, and therefore prolong our lives, and have no other meaning at all. Maybe weird-shit-while-meditating is the same?

When The Sun Comes Up…
One of my favourite quotes/philosophies goes along these lines – you’ve probably heard it before: Both the antelope and the lion have to run to survive – the antelope to escape the lion, and the lion to catch the antelope. Whether lion or antelope, both know that when the sun comes up in the morning, they had better be running.

For me at least, that’s true both literally and metaphorically. Running keeps me healthy, physically. And in the metaphorical sense, I have to be kept challenged or I’ll just atrophy into slovenliness. But just for the moment, my lion nature is feeling a little off-colour and risking a lie-in (bad pun, sorry). I’ll be back in the running kit soon enough though. I am missing it. And I’ve got that darned mountain race in November to prepare for, and I’m determined to do it. So, sorry if I’m a tad quiet at the moment, and I do appreciate everyone’s thoughts and concern. I’ll be back into it soon. Promise!

[Sweder]

It's a funny old world MLCMan.
I was thinking of you when I went out this morning. I was struggling physically (no slight intended) and have recently been going through a bit of tough time emotionally. I got to wondering what might be in the air just now - quite a few people I know and care about are 'off colour' at the moment, and it's not just the weather.

So I got to thinking about you and your problems . . . then lo and behold here ye be with a round-up from Down Under. Whilst your problems are hardly simple it is good at least to know your enemy - even when the enemy turns out to be sausages - it gives you a place to start.

Me? I just need a kick up the arse.
It's good to hear from you

[El Gordo]

Great post, MLCM. I can relate to pretty much every word.

As a group, we seem especially susceptible to the slovenly demons. Our usual means of fighting back is bravado -- your November race, my May declaration, the October date with the marathon in Dublin, my claim that I'll run Almeria in under 2 hours, and so on. It's pretty effective on the whole, though it produces its own stresses of course. The mad thing is that we know just how good we feel when we're running well and feeding our bodies properly. But no matter how great things seem, those bloody sausage terrorists are always hiding just around the next corner. (My particular beautiful demons are rich Italian red wines and hunks of full fat blue cheese.)

What can I say? Total empathy, but no solution yet. I sometimes tell people that "running is the answer". And it is -- to certain questions. But the joy of a good running regime throws up other challenges. I think we've got plenty of techniques for getting us up the mountain again. Trouble is, we all tend to treat this particular peak the way we treat real-world peaks. We struggle up them, enjoy the exhilarating view for a while, then head on downwards again.

Perhaps this is what's wrong with the mountain metaphor. What we really want is to find a long plateau when we get to the top, so we can carry on, finding new vistas and new excitements at the same level.

Hmm. This is useful to me. Thank you.

In the meantime, we carry on, seeking new ideas. My latest one,a s mentioned elsewhere, is to dust down my Stratocaster and make some noise. I'm hoping it will help drown out the sausage sirens for a little while.

--------------

Gratuitous nutritional note: lean sausages needn't be too unhealthy. The ones we buy are around 160 calories, so a couple of those with boiled or grilled veg can make a meal well under 500 cals. Perhaps you're worrying unnecessarily. It's hard to make similar rationalisations about ice cream, chips, wine, beer and full-fat cheese.

But I'll see what I can come up with.....

[Sweder]

Maybe the metaphor we need is steps.
You know, clamber up one giant step on the staircase, stop for a breather, then on to the next one. Sometimes the steps are shallow and easily climbed; at other times the top of the next step is somewhere up in the clouds, yet still we climb it.

I'm not sure about that one - needs some work.
What I am sure about is sausages. Porky Whites - to be located in the Epsom/ Ewell area - are probably the finest mass-produced, sold-in-supermarket sausages known to man. I'd send some out to you MLCMan, but knowing how customs view shipments of meat between the continents I'll wait 'till I can bring some out in person.

I love the leek and stilton bangers on offer at our local Farm Shop - all free-range, corn-fed meat, low in fat, sky-high in flavour (and price). They have other fashionable varieties including pork and apple and a particularly fiesty chilli option. I'll pull in a variety for the Barbie on the 28th (Blackcap/ Lewes Pub Crawl/ Lewes v West Ham day). I suspect the Spanish mafia might like to chip in here to highlight some of their finest chorizo Wow I'm getting hungry . . .

Being blessed with a good deal less-functional grey matter than some I seem less affected by the night terrors. My preferred weapon of choice for bludgeoning the brain cells before bed is to soak up movies, preferably rubbish, late at night.

[glaconman]

Holy cow ... did somebody mention sausages?

I had a fine chorizo last night as-it-happens; thickly sliced and buried in a mound of chicken, prawns, roasted tomatoes and aborio rice.

As a purley abstract foodstuff sausages go from the sublime to the grotesque; but at their best (game ones featuring venison or bore are good) they are one of the greatest things on earth.

Good in a casserole with some sweet red cabbage and a glass of dry cider.

Good next to some fried lambs liver in the morning with a moderate hangover and a pot of hot tea.

Good sh*t full-stop gents I'm sure you'll agree.

[glaconman]

btw one of my favorite quotes regarding mental states is from Hugh Laurie:

"I've never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I'm wary of happiness. It is a snare and a delusion. It's jolly nice sometimes, like steak and chips, but is it a goal?"

I like this kind of attitude. It allows me to be content not being happy and yet to enjoy happiness when it comes along; which is pretty frequently, if only fleetingly.

Steak and chips makes me happy. Particularly if they're double-fried in beef dripping.

[El Gordo]

For supermarket sausages, Porkinson's is a favourite in the RC household, though we buy them less often now that they seem to have stopped producing the small ones. (It doesn't bother me, but some people are fussier...).

The prize must indisputably go to Green's of Pangbourne however, who make the greatest sausages and pies in England. Their sausages are densely meaty and richly flavoured. Absolutely irresistible. With some fried onions and mashed potato, and a splash of HP sauce, they are a dish fit for royalty.

http://www.sausagelinks.co.uk/producer_d...asp?id=460

I limit myself to just a couple of purchases a year however. Too much of a good thing, and all that.

[Sweder]

Hmm . . . I suspect there may have to be an RC sausage cook-off at some point. What a splendid excuse to gather together, selected ales on the side, to prepare not only each persons' favoured pork product (or Venison if you prefer, G-Man) along with mountains of mashed potato* and rich onion gravy. One suspects this should all be served in traditional plate-sized Yorkshire Puddings too.

By 'eck, t'internet's a wonderful thing!

Favorite 'mind' quote? It's a fairly cheesy one to be honest:
'Of all the things I've lost, it's my mind I miss the most.'

Sorry MLCMan, we appear to have hi-jacked a perfectly excellent thread :o

*[SIZE="1"]Before anyone gets excited my children would like it known that their Dad makes the finest mashed potato in the world.
Just thought I should mention it :o[/SIZE]

[El Gordo]

Hmm . . . I suspect there may have to be an RC sausage cook-off at some point.

I'm up for a banger-off.

[Ana]

Do not pay attention to all this commentaires about sausages

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

One of the things I think I really like about running is that out there, on the road or on the treadmill or the beach, you begin to recognise and understand some truths about yourself. You begin to see what you are really capable of. Yes, there is an amazing physical side to this, as you extend yourself ever further and faster to points you previously believed impossible, but perhaps more astonishing is the mental, spiritual aspect. Truths you suspected but never dared to voice become increasingly obvious, ramming themselves in your face with increasing fervor. These are sometimes unpleasant, and nearly always difficult to deal with.

Running demands you be honest with yourself. Even when you make yourself accountable to others, by (for example) declaring your running goals and intentions here on RC, at the end of the day you are only ever truly accountable to yourself, and we are of course our own harshest critic and judge. You know innately that when you fail to get out of bed for that early long run that is so essential if you are to meet your publicly-stated goal (whatever that may be), that at the end of the day the only person who is seriously going to loudly accuse and reprimand is yourself. Everyone else knows and understands where you are and what you are going through. And only the cruelest hypocrite would publicly declare what you have already told yourself a thousand times – that you have let yourself down…badly… again.

Yet, you also know that it’s all a nonsense. It really – in the bigger picture – doesn’t matter a toss whether you run the Baldric-on-Sea Half Marathon in three weeks time or not, let alone whether you got up at 5 a.m. on some anonymous Sunday morning to run 20 foggy miles for no readily apparent reason, other than that you mentioned to someone (who has probably long forgotten) that you were ever even going to do it. It simply doesn’t register even the tiniest blip on the Richter scale of cosmic importance.

But if you are like me, you also know that the running isn’t entirely what it’s all about. There’s a much deeper dimension to what we do. A kind of manic meditation goes on during our rapid perambulations where you can marry the need for physical activity with a simultaneous desire for solitude and introspection. Occasionally this is significant and meaningful, but for much of the time it’s a struggle, an impossibility to feel at peace with what we do, or the means to fulfill the desperate need we have for mental quietude which somehow manages only to elude us.

Perhaps because of that, running becomes a very strange addiction. The cause and cure are always there – freely available. With hardly any cost and no social stigma (or very little), there is really no impediment to us feeding our addiction and getting that latest adrenalin/endorphin hit any time we want. Yet there are those times – such as the period I’m going through now – when we just skirt around the issue, knowing that it’s the deeper aspect of running that taunts us. You have to face the fact that running is not only the answer, but also the question. And it’s the question, as Morpheus said in The Matrix, that drives us mad. For me, the question unravels like a particularly elegant but complex and sophisticated gearbox – if you dare to unbolt it, you just know that you’re never going to get the beast back together. For me (and I’m always daring to unbolt the bastard, hence this diatribe) it begins “Why running?” My doctor, my physio and even my marathon-running podiatrist have all suggested better, easier and less damaging ways of maintaining my fitness than running. And it makes sense to do something different, but I’m hooked. The thought of replacing it with anything else now is appalling to me. And so then follows a long and complicated series of questions which regardless of the route taken and the duration involved, always ends up somewhere in the vicinity of “self-discovery” and Zen-like mysticism.

Huh?

Zen. Now there’s a term. And I don’t just mean it in the sense that “Geez, my bike’s running well”. But hang on, I’m a simple bloke, this isn’t going to get complicated…

As pretentious as it may sound, running has caused me to re-evaluate my life and my purpose in it. I’ve questioned life itself, my beliefs and actions, and investigated spiritual and metaphysical aspects of existence that I would otherwise not have delved into. I suspect the centering nature of running – the physical/mental unity we experience as we run – is at least a catalyst if not the cause of this soul-searching. If meditation is the cessation of thought other than a total awareness of yourself and your body, then running is a brilliant form of it. Every article I’ve read where elite distance athletes are asked what they think about when running say the same thing – they think only about their body – their breathing, their pain levels and rhythym. This is what meditation is about, so it should come as no real surprise that one is led to the deeper questions. I confess that I pursue this course with great reluctance. I am primarily a materialistic, Western-style capitalist caught with my spiritual pants down. Running is the spotlight that has me mesmerised on the metaphysical highway to understanding, and I believe I am a seriously ill-equipped bunny to deal with it.

Although not hostile, I am critical of religion and mysticism, but nor am I without an undeniable catalogue of definite spiritual experiences. In this post-postmodern world I concede that neither my rationalism nor my various spiritual journeys have come even close to providing answers, and yet I find it difficult to listen to and accept others’ point of view on such things (which is perhaps the postmodern curse). And so I retreat into my world of running with its sweaty, panting solitude, but it is also here that I encounter that which challenges me most – the entrancing glimpse of promises of answers to questions not properly formed or understood, but which I know to be of importance if not actually of ultimate significance.

And so I am left bereft, with nothing but empty words and at times an even emptier running log, wondering why I run but also knowing that there is nothing else that comes close to fulfilling me on so many levels. It is easy to dismiss running as a purely physical activity, but for me it goes deeper whether I want it to or not. I don’t pretend to understand it, and I have this abiding nightmarish horror that one day I will run into a Zen-master somewhere who will laugh and point out the obvious truth that leaves me on a requisite 30-year path to enlightenment in some squalid Burmese monastery; but if nothing else I have discovered this much…as a runner, you set yourself a goal. You achieve it, and you set yourself another. You achieve that one too, so you set yourself yet another goal. You achieve that one too, and you ask yourself, “Whoa! Is this all that it’s about, setting and achieving goals?” And you head off down a side road of dark beer and bacon sandwiches, and then you read esoteric books and immerse yourself in meditation and metaphysical motorcycle maintenance.

And it never really resolves itself. Like the treadmill, it just keeps going round and around. But as long as you keep running, it’s OK. The meditative state is sufficient of itself. It’s when you step off of the treadmill that the endorphins stop happening, the bacon sarnies turn to flab and the dark beer takes on even darker undertones of intent.

In some respects I hate all this pretentious esoteric metaphysical bullshit. Unsurprisingly I have no answers, only more questions. Why I write this stuff, heaven only knows, but somehow it’s part of the wider issue and it feels good to get it out of my head and maybe into someone else’s. I don’t know why but I feel compelled to both run and to write about my running, so here it is. Strange though it may seem, it may be the closest I ever get to accurately expressing the spiritual side of my being; and whilst it is true that it comes at a time when I am far from being at peace with the world and my place in it, it is even so a very honest experience, and perhaps that is really what it is all about after all.

[ to be continued ]

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Many years ago, when I was young and unemployed, I occasionally went to the only all-night bar in the city where I lived. I liked it because I’d invariably meet some sad middle-aged bloke going through a divorce or some other form of mid-life crisis who’d buy me drinks all night long just to have someone to talk to. In hindsight it’s rather shallow and both sides of the equation are pretty sad, but at the time it seemed a win/win situation for all concerned, so I did it. And what struck me at the time was that despite the shallowness of it all, it still made me feel rather special. All I did was listen and drink beer… but it made two lonely guys feel good.

Now fast forward. A few years ago, a young man known to me shot himself in front of his class at the local high school. Later, I heard another young man speak at my local church about that situation. He’d been called in to help counsel the kids who had witnessed the suicide. This guy who was called in to help was petrified; had no qualifications or experience (who does?) and didn’t know what to do in that situation, but the authorities were desperate for local people who could relate to the kids so he went. And not knowing what to do, he just listened, and let the kids pour out what was on their minds and in their hearts. Later he was praised to the max for being an effective counselor “who related to the kids and actually helped them”. A clearly more dramatic, but not dissimilar experience to my own in the pub at 3 a.m. so many years before, listening to blokes talk about their problems. And so again I learned the value of talking, and listening, and when to do one or the other. And so now, after all that, I guess all I’m doing is the one, and not the other. So, thanks for listening… and keep running; it’s still the answer. And if you ever figure out the question, please post it here on RC.


Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.
By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

- Tao Te Ching (500 BC)

[El Gordo]

Thank you.

Great post. One of the best things I've read about this business for quite some time.

At the moment I seem to be panting right behind you on Desolation Row, MLCM.

Time for bed right now, but let me read it again tomorrow. And then again the day after....


Thanks again.