If you’re going to run, run like you’re sailing the seas chasing mischief and wild things. If you’re going to run, run like you’re on the brink of discovery of inspiration and poetic dissonance; that one musical cord that remains unresolved.
There’s no other way to run but go all the way. Get lost in the transcending feeling of leaping through moments in time. Catch a glimpse of the rising sun as it glides up and out of the friendly, waving grasses and make sure to recognize the family of deer bounding through the hilly regions down below the cliff drop. As time creeps by more slowly and you begin to get into that natural groove, the running groove we were all born to will ourselves to experience, admire the quieter things. Even smaller is the hum of small bugs and insects in the grasses. Your breath has a beat just like the ache and fear in the soles of your feet during the miles when you think everything will fall apart with one negative thought or loss of focus.
The meditation of running along a dirty road without a watch or some technology that takes us so far away from the present is an experience not unlike transcendence. Just glide along with a naked back and a full heart and keep your head facing down at the trail. Get to know the soil, roots, and the parts of the earth you never seem to notice from day to day. Get to know the way your feet root to the ground and rip up from the earth like bubble gum clinging to a rolling bike tire. You don’t love running but you want to. There’s a certain balance, like the saying not too tight, not too loose. You want to give into the fatigue and small parts of your body that cry in order to break loose from the stringent moment. Cling tight to the goal: finishing the run. If you just bare it long enough to forego the negativity and will yourself to muster up some faith, you can lose yourself in a balance between joy and risk, glory and pain, and sky and earth. Your moving feet carry you until you're gliding like a swirling mixture of dust and sand. There’s a beauty to floating across the earth in a runner’s high, a moment in time where you forget your body and surge onwards in pure joy, glory, and sky.
When caught up in such a romance of bustling feet and mindfulness, you transcend your surroundings and escape to a runner’s paradise. You may have been there before, but you can never completely figure it out because it comes in waves; in and out and in and out as your body bobs up and down from earth to sky. Sometimes you fall into the heaviness of staggering fatigue and your hopeless thoughts only to bounce back up to the pattern of breath and foot over foot, at mindful ease again. But that’s life, right?
Struggle doesn’t share the last piece of cake with anyone but Surrender. There is no better feeling than riding the flame of fire with just a bottle of sunscreen.
Some say the fastest and most gifted runners are the Tarahumara (pronounced Tara-oo-mara) who live in the Copper Canyons of Mexico, a dangerous region of steep canyons and brittle hot sand and sky. The Tarahumara Indians have adapted to their treacherous, dry environment by honing the ability to endure hundreds of miles on jogging foot without rest or injury.
The elders often remind their people that they are born as Running People:
“You’re alive because your father can run down a deer. He’s alive because his father could outrun an Apache war pony. That’s how fast we are when we’re weighed down by our fleshiness. Imagine how you’ll fly once you shuck it.”
We survived because we ran.
To learn to love running is to learn to love life; to love the journey over the end. We were born to will ourselves to defy laziness and seek enlightenment through the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, quickly. It is our inherited natural instinct to run from danger, into a loved one’s arms, or from sheer excitement.
In the end, you somehow lose yourself in the feeling running creates, in the euphoric battle of mind and body. The time on the watch doesn’t matter in the end if you can will yourself along like minnows do against a current. Learn to be comfortable in the uncomfortable, and settle into the feeling of not knowing what might happen next or how you might feel. Once you set your mind free from worry on the trail or on the road, you can see so clearly that nothing is unattainable.
“When you have the running spirit, you look forward to life. I firmly believe that I wouldn’t have lived as long or as happily as I have without running.” -Max Popper in The Essential Runners
*inspired by the book Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall, and most of all- by experience*
