The worst piece of advice I ever got about running was “Keep your eyes on the horizon.”
It has taking me two years to figure out that this is bad advice. Very bad advice. I now blame it for much of my procrastination and existential dread of exercise. Now I’m thinking it may also have caused procrastination and existential dread of life.
The horizon is always receding. You never reach a horizon. Horizons are unattainable, limitless, and infinitely far away. Why would I rush out in the morning to run toward something I can never attain?
So recently I started focusing on the two or three feet in front of me, only glancing up to look for obstacles–passing cars, barking dogs, babies being pushed in strollers. I always say hello to dogs, babies, and other strangers.
It makes the time go faster and the distances grow shorter. I can manage the two or three feet in front of me. I can turn if I want. And no matter which way I turn, the horizon is always there anyway.
It’s Day 5 of Gray and Gloomy here in the ‘Lou, and the wind is picking up and the rain is falling and the temperature is falling, so my thoughts turn internal.
Not that that should be news to anyone. I am inwardly focused to a fault, and yet curiously concerned with the image I project to the world. Maybe that’s the bane of all inwardly focused people. We focus inwardly because we internalize what we think the world is thinking about us, which of course is never accurate–either the world’s perception or our own perception of the world’s perception.
But I digress.
When I included “Move” on my list of verbs to focus on in 2018, I was thinking “Exercise,” but I didn’t want to say “Exercise” because that’s such a cliche and so narrow. “Move” is better because it can include all sorts of progress and change and is really easy to do. It could just be get off the couch and do something, like clean the basement–which literally moves things but also causes your emotions to move as you realize your kids don’t care about the stuff they used to care so much about, and that so little of the stuff you once thought important is useful.
However, when I wrote it I really was thinking “Exercise,” because it’s been a tough few months for me and exercise–which I am somewhat obsessed with because, again, internalization of outside perceptions. Here is how it has gone:
Early November: An unusually warm and windy day. I went for a run. The street cleaners were out picking up leaves and mulching them on site. Running west from Kingshighway on Murdoch, I saw a huge cloud of leaf dust hovering around the orange mulching truck at the top of the hill. I quick shifted and ran further north to Devonshire, but not, as it turned out, far enough. By the time I got home I was hacking, and that hack turned into sneezing and wheezing that lasted for days.
In early December, finally recovered from that, I had my best exercise week in ages. I lifted weights, I rode the bike three days, I went to Pilates, I went to two classes at the Y. Then, sometime over the weekend, I lifted a 50-pound bag of kitty litter out of the trunk of the car the wrong way and twisted my back. The pain increased until I finally went to Urgent Care after passing out in the middle of the night. The Urgent Care people were less interested in my back than in the passing out. Aneurysm? Heart attack? Stroke? The list of potential catastrophes I thought myself too young for grew as I waited for test results, all negative. It was just a kitty-litter-related back sprain.
It took weeks for that to clear up, and in fact it still sticks a little when I sneeze or cough or move the wrong way, but it’s mostly gone. But then I got a cold. And then it went away. Mostly. And then it came back. One night it was keeping me awake and I felt so bad I went to Walgreen’s at 3 a.m. for Extra Strength Nyquil. And it’s still lingering, the sniffling and the draining and the yuck.
Where is this going, this tale of vanity and mortality awareness?
Well, I’m not sure, but it seems as good a time as any to experiment with placing a video on my page: Mississippi Fred McDowell performing a song about humility and mortality awareness that I grew up with as a Rolling Stones song, “You Gotta Move”:
Limestone retaining walls add to the Parkway’s charm and mystique.
I’ve done my share of complaining about my hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri, since I moved away at 18, but there has always been one thing that redeemed it. Today, I’m adding another.
Designed in 1918, the city’s Parkway–a 26-mile stretch of greenspace and curving boulevard connecting Krug Park on the north side to Hyde Park on the south–has retained its dignity and utility for nearly a century. It is a place of beauty, mystery, and grace. You’re never sure what’s around the next bend, and it’s always a surprise–trees, a creek, a gently rising swell of green. Driving or biking it is still a thrill.
The house I grew up in backs up to the Parkway. It was part of our backyard growing up and the heart of every season, especially summer and winter. A few tenths of a mile south of our house was a railroad berm, and when I was six or seven, not long after we moved in, I would excitedly watch the train run by in the evening from our back porch.
Sculptures add a sense of motion and whimsy.
By the time I was 12 or so, the train had stopped running, and the track, now abandoned, became overgrown. The wooded sides of the berm on the south side flanking Agency Road was good for beer-can hunting and bushwhacking and imagining the lives that had gone before. The tracks disappeared while I was away at college, the trees largely cleared away, the berm graded , and a biking trail installed.
This morning I ran part of that trail, and I began to see St. Joseph as beautiful again. The sun hadn’t yet risen completely. The backs of houses I could see on the south side of the trail, houses that look sad and rundown to me from the street, looked resilient and stately perched on their generous lawns. I was surprised how far south Fairview Golf Course on the north side of the trail ran, and how far east. It seemed to go almost to the Belt Highway, about a mile and a half from where I had gotten on the trail. The smell of lilacs and trees and new fence mingled in the air. Squirrels and bunnies scurried. Everything was green.
Looking south down part of the trail and “our” creek. Our backyard is behind the far trees on the right side.
I have no plans to live in St. Joseph again–I mean, no plans, ever–but I was happy to see that the old town can still do some things right–things that add beauty and value to an otherwise struggling outpost of the Old West.
In my opinion, it’s better to do something than nothing.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t take naps, or watch TV, or just goof off. I think it means you can do those things as long as you are conscious of doing those things and view them as either rewards for something you’ve already done, or as mental preparation for what you’ll do next.
In other words, “doing” does not require filling very moment of your life with busyness. Or business. Quite the contrary. Because when your life is nothing but “doing,” you are losing time for thought on reflection. Similarly, “something” does not have to be something that earns money, or accomplishes a goal, or ticks an item off your bucket list.
This is what I’ve learned after starting to build my own business. Non-billable time is not wasted time. Projects that don’t pay anything, or that don’t pay much, are important. All the other things I have in my life–family, reading, music, memoir–are part of the work I do that one day will be profitable, if not self-sustaining.
Courtney Barnett’s first full-length album is called Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit. Like all of her songs, there is wisdom in that. Just sitting can be doing something. As long as it’s not all that you do.
In life and running, you must have a plan: a clear-cut guide to exactly how you will get where you are going, exactly how long it will take, and exactly how you will know when you have arrived.
You must hold this plan firmly in your mind at all times before you start to implement it. You must be firmly convinced you will not waver from it, no matter what happens between now and the start of your plan. You must do this because you are a Responsible Adult who has Big Responsibilities and you have not gotten to be this kind of person by being a Lollygagging Cakesniffer.
Then, as soon as you start to implement your plan, you must blow it all to hell.
You must do this because that is really what being a Responsible Adult is about. It’s not about starting at Neosho, going west to Jamieson, turning south to Willmore Park, running through the park (the path that winds around the pond, not the one that goes by the big old tree, because that one has a hellacaious hill, whereas on the other path all you have to do is dodge duck droppings and angry geese the size of armadillos …), east to Hampton, and north back to Neosho.
No.
Being a Responsible Adult is about standing in front of your house on Neosho after you have developed your brilliant plan, looking west, and thinking, “Forget that. East.”
Because you know that as a Responsible Adult, you will be able to handle whatever uprooted chunks of sidewalk, ill-timed traffic signals, or reeking piles of dog doo stand in your way. It’s the Lollygagging Cakesniffers who never change course, or their minds, or their hearts.
And if there’s one thing you, as a Responsible Adult, do not want to be in life, it’s a Lollygagging Cakesniffer.
“What is the ugliest part of your body?” Frank Zappa once asked. “I think it’s your MIND,” he answered, after considering your nose and your toes as possibilities.
That is certainly true when it comes to exercise. All of the other reasons/excuses/rationalizations for not doing it are ancillary to the work of the true enemy, your MIND.
So much of exercise is psychological, and this is especially true of running. I sometimes say that running is the ultimate proof of “if you think you can and if you think you can’t, you’re right.” It’s mind over matter. It’s thinking, “I can’t go on,” and “I don’t want to go on,” and “I just want to walk,” and “I want to be in bed,” and running anyway. Overcoming your mind is the hardest part of the whole process, and it is a process: getting out of bed, getting dressed, getting gear together, getting out the door.
But when I’m actually doing it, instead of thinking about doing it or all the reasons that I can’t do it, my mind is my greatest ally. Focusing on pace has helped with that. So has imagining climbing a flight of stairs when going up hill, or spotting a landmark ahead and thinking, “I just have to make it to the fire hydrant. OK, now I just have to make it to that mailbox …” The little victories add up.
Some weeks are good for exercise, and some weeks are not good, but the good weeks always feel better than the bad weeks. On the good weeks, everything is clearer, and I don’t have the nagging feeling that I should be doing something. On the bad weeks my mind becomes ugly again and everything else is muddled, too.
But every day, the one thought that keeps me going is this: Even the most out-of-shape person out running is out running! I think they have the most beautiful minds of all.
For the first year that I ran, I rarely thought about pace. Survival was my first concern, then speed–breaking the 10-minute-mile barrier. But I didn’t know how to think about controlling the movement of my feet to attain that goal.
Then, last week, a running partner told me something that makes so much sense it’s embarrassing that it hadn’t occurred to me before. To go slower, keep your feet under your body. To go faster, let your feet extend beyond your body. Think about and feel where your feet are in relation to your core and consciously make adjustments from there.
The result, of course, is smaller or wider steps, which means more or less ground covered, which means a faster pace–without killing yourself by making your legs actually move faster. They just move a little further with each step.
The impact of such a modest adjustment, and my consciousness of it, started be thinking about similar modifications I could make to cover more ground in my life. Rather than straining to run faster, I could just be more mindful of what is happening right under my feet. Where do I stand? How does it feel? Is it time to stretch, or time to tread lightly?
I never thought I would be a runner. I ran cross country for about two weeks in high school, but I dropped that when my hating it conveniently coincided with severe pain in my left knee, which turned out to be the result of several osteochondromas (non-malignant bone tumors) rubbing against the muscles and tendons. (more…)
