Here we go again

Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms

Back when I used to run regularly, and far, I routinely exited Prospect Park in Brooklyn on Saturday mornings at 8 or 9, having just finished my weekly 13-mile run. I spent a lot of time in the park back then. One year, I basically only trained in that one spot, doing loops and loops to achieve the required mileage.

(When I say required, I obviously mean, by me.)

Those mornings, I would watch people starting their runs just as I was finishing up. They ran slowly, tentatively, as if just testing it out. Reading their gait, and by virtue of spending every spare minute in the park and never seeing them at any other time, I am fairly certain most of those people only ran on Saturday mornings.

I envied them. I remember thinking, more than once: I wish a short run once a week was enough for me. But I also knew that it wasn’t. And so on I went.

This is where I write something trite about a training schedule being a person’s own decision, and the importance of owning our choices. Which obviously is true. But at this stage that is almost beside the point. I miss distance running. I miss the calm that settles in after an hour or so, the cadence, the rhythm, the slowing of thoughts. I miss the feeling I used to get towards the end of the run, when I knew I had only 4-5 miles left, and I wanted it to be over, but it also felt like running was all my body was ever meant to do.

I miss all of it. Except for the busted knees and the aching hips and the sciatica and the overactive sweat glands.

The point I really want to make is that the process of transformation — which is really all training is — is a discipline that requires a goal and an honest assessment of capacity and need. I learned this from distance running but also, and probably more efficiently, I learned it from yoga.

The father of modern yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar, famously said (and I paraphrase), if there is a disagreement between your brain and your body, the body wins. Every. Single. Time.

Because even when we want to transform, even when we develop a clear goal for the transformation we seek, if our bodies do not have the capacity, we will never reach it. We will reach something else: presence and self-awareness. And that is plenty. We need to not only own the path towards transformation, but also learn to enjoy the process itself.

I want to be able to run 6 miles again on the regular. Not for any particular reason other than that, I just want to. I don’t know yet if my body agrees. This morning I ran 2.5 miles. It was enough. And I absolutely loved it.