On Running

They say that distance running is all mental. It's not true of course. Chess, perhaps, is all mental. Running is physical. It takes takes bone, muscle, joints, lungs ... and when you run you feel them all.
I ran my third 5k of the summer this morning, adding Villa Park alongside Saddleback and Anaheim. It seems that there's something of a 5k circuit out here and you could run a race every weekend if you wanted to. When I first started running someone told me that you get hooked, and I can now verify that it's true. I like getting up early in the morning and doing stretches. I like hearing hundreds of feet thumping the pavement all around me, and I like passing people. I like finishing and getting a medal.
That's not the race, though.
The race is you and your body. The race is that point where your body doesn't want to go further, but you push on; the race is the point where you are on the verge of giving up, but your body keeps going. The mental and the physical merge. There is a point where it hurts. You are lungs, you are legs, you are running. Your brain -- it's a physical thing, too -- pushes past feedback of pain and impulses to quit. But it's not your brain that's running. Something else drives you further along.
You don't have to be running. You could be still in bed, or surfing the Internet. You could be anywhere.
But you're here, you're running. At some point you will stop, but you haven't stopped yet. You're stretching, you're pushing. And if it's true that we each have a soul, then it must be the part that says "YES" when both mind and body shout "no no no." If it's true, then at the toughest parts of the race, when you walk the line between surrender and victory, when you must embody your intention moment to moment, then if it's true that we each have a soul, at that point, you become soul incarnate. You are gasps, you are strides, you are synapses. You are running.
Running, of course, is not the only time this sort of thing happens, but it has a way of abstracting it and making it easier to understand. The exhaustion I feel when I'm running is similar to how I sometimes feel when I'm writing, but it's easier to push onward when it's my whole body in motion rather than a pencil in a notebook. Running helps me to remember to embody my intentions and live them out. The race is seeing how far you can get, in spite of obstacles and your own resistance.
I met my goal of hitting around 21 minutes today. At the first race of the summer I came it at about 25 minutes, so it's a pretty big improvement. I knew I could get there, I just had to remember to push myself further.