Just a mile or two into my first training day, and I’d already decided what my thought for the week should be: running is a secret garden.
Oh yeah? What does that mean then?
Before I get there, I should apologise to people who may have been following this running blog for a while, because I have a feeling I’ve talked about this one before. Possibly more than once. But I’d forgotten it, and this morning, somewhere round 6am on an unlit, puddled lane in Berkshire, I remembered it again.
I remembered it because a sharp wind was blowing hard through my teeshirt, the rain had begun to tip down, and I’d just crashed through a deep, unseen puddle that filled my trainers with cold, mucky water. I remembered it because shortly after this, I passed a man walking his dog who gazed at me in shock and wonder and fear, like he’d been confronted by some diabolical apparition. I remembered it because none of these things mattered any longer. Running is misunderstood because it’s judged and discussed and derided and admired in one universe, while taking place in another.
Every running morning in winter, I open the back door, poke my head into the cold, black world, and wish I was dead. Ten minutes later, the criteria I’d used to summon my demise no longer exist. I’ve left them far behind in some inferior world: a place where this rain and this wind and that puddle are nasty enemies. In the running world, they are simply textures and incidental music and souvenirs.
There’s no reason why apparition-man and his dog should know this. Apart from Saturday nights in the Red Lion, he probably never ventures beyond what hippies used to call his own head-space. He assumes that this wretched pre-dawn jogger is part of the same world he’s in; the one where you need to wrap yourself in vest and shirt1 and shirt2 and jumper and overcoat and scarf and woolly hat and gloves and umbrella. Well, instead of the javelin-like stare, he should be wondering why his dog isn’t similarly attired. He thinks the dog is on his side too, but a runner knows the truth. Now, I have about as much interest in dogs as dogs have in algebra, but even I can see that this one was pining for a sprint through the puddles. Wasn’t he?
Woof woof…
Where’s this leading? It’s leading here >>>> A ponder on the subject of motivation…
Runners who bemoan those phases when they lack the appetite for it are missing some useful truths. The weather’s too cold or too hot or too wet or too windy, they say. Often, they’re encouraged with something like: “Just get out there and run. Remember, it’s never as bad as it looks.”
The bad news is that usually it is as grim as it looks, and often even worse. The good news is that it’s just a temporary state, a necessary evil, like the hassle of the airport before we go off on holiday.
When I go out for a run, I’m really just heading for somewhere else. I’m on my way to find a sort of secret universe, like those hidden gardens that thrilled us as kids, beyond whose walls lies a more personal, more cerebral and less troubled world. It can still be tough there, and it may even be still raining, but there’s some kind of magic at work that is able to conjure inspiration and bliss from a freezing rain-storm.
When you feel anxiety or dread about running in adverse weather, think about it this way. Five or ten minutes in, and you’ll begin to smell that perfumed opening. The rain and the cold and the dark are just a fragile shell around something unique and fabulous. Get out there and bust through it.
