Monday October 25, 2004 Why I Run

Monday October 25, 2004 Why I Run

This morning was the second straight day I resumed my morning run, though in more recent years, it has come to resemble a jog rather than a run. Besides swimming, running is the most demanding enterprise to which you can subject your body. I tried bicycling and you can work up a sweat, but it would take me a great deal more time and distance to do so than running. The act of running has become somewhat of a religious experience for me. To do it well, you must clear your mind completely of thought once you've reached this state of quiescent thought you give your mind over to the repetitiveness of your body and its forward progress, one foot touching the earth, pushing with just the right amount of force to catapult the body forward until the other foot repeats the motion. In a finely tuned athlete the motion appears effortless and the body hardly seems to touch the ground with each foot fall. Watching this runner from the side as he runs along a fence of about his height, you will see the runner's head trace a straight line along the length of the fence. There is no wasted motion propelling the body up, only well-directed energy moving the body forward.

When I start each run, this is my holy grail reaching a state of grace that allows me to achieve this level of perfection. But alas, I am not the image of this graceful being but rather a quasimoto by comparison. I lack the sense of precise timing to achieve the regularity of movement one foot hitting at an interval and at a distance exactly the same as the other. Still I take great pleasure in making the effort. And running has become a form of pleasure for me. The body seems to long for the surge of adrenalin that courses through your physical structure moving blood at the very extremities of your feet and fingers along the superhighway of arteries to that marvelous muscle of the heart. It glories in the sound of feet slapping concrete and macadam with a rhythmic beat hough in my case offbeat.

Physical exertion has become a metaphor of the eternal struggle that we all endure. All of us struggle to get through the day, coping with one crisis after another. It is little wonder that a good number of us choose to hide from the harsh reality of this struggle. When I was growing up I was taught by my family and the world around me that a man has got to do what a man has got to do. For me I have to run. I have to continue to test my ability to do this very essential part of being alive. I like to think of the modern world as the manufactured version of the Serengeti. Like the lush African Savannah, the modern world is teaming with life. Just as on the Serengeti there are predators and prey and you have to know which one you are, sometimes the former, sometimes the latter. The natural instinct to fight or flee has to be well calibrated.

I find the act of running every day engenders in you an instinct for surviving all the day-to-day crises that confront you. Your ability to size up situations as diverse as merging onto the freeway or reading the body language in a business meeting is enhanced as a result of that daily physical exertion. Running nurtures and cultivates those natural instincts that all of us had and used extensively when we were among the wildlife on the Serengeti. Athletes have this sense, which comes from a competitor's need to read the playing field and instinctively adjust to its ever-changing environment. But the sedentary life of sitting in front of computers all day and driving back and forth every where we need to go tends to dull these instincts, to allow them to loose their edge.

What I've learned tells me that I'm at my best when I'm near the edge of what I think I can do. In running, it's pushing myself to beat my time yesterday by a minute and repeating the process the next day. Eventually, I'll reach a limit of what I'm physically capable of doing, but there will come a day when there is a great tail wind, and the stars are all aligned, and my body draws on some inner strength I had no idea it had and I manage to soundly beat my personal best. On those days, I feel as if I could run on without ever stopping. After one of these runs I've experienced a sense of inner bliss that is very similar to being in a state of grace and you get the feeling that anything is possible.