July Hibernation

[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 ]