If life’s a garden, you want bees zipping among every plant, cross-pollinating your hobbies, interests, work, and daily experiences. Because the best lessons are often picked up in one area of life and applied elsewhere.
Here are takeaways from running:
- There’s a universal sequence for developing skills: Line. Speed. Beauty. Just as an artist must learn to draw clean lines slowly and deliberately at first, your body will beg you to focus on form above all. Once you have the form right, you can move swiftly. And when you can do both, you can move beautifully. Line. Speed. Beauty.
- If you listen to a song at the start of your run and again at the end, the song will feel much slower, like it’s dragging. Time shifts. A reminder that our perception of time is a sensory experience, prone to manipulation.
- Gorgeous legs.
- Sometimes your mind needs to be “re-minded.” That is, reminded that it’s in your body, under your control. Running does that. Major decision looming? Run. Pissed about something? Run. Anxious? Run. You can outrun a lot of mental treadmilling.
- Despite your full effort, some days lean one way or another for no reason. You’ll have good runs and bad runs. Another reminder that perfection is an illusion. Regardless, you can always open your front door, separate yourself as far as you can from where you start, then return a new person.
- Different kinds of running unlock distinct feelings. Easy, long runs provide a soothing euphoria. Sprints make you feel like an animal with serious claws. We are just chemicals.
- Pain in your knees, Achilles, or the bottom of your foot (like plantar fasciitis) often shows up when you start running. Paradoxically, sometimes these can be healed by more running. If you’re overweight, carrying the extra load is punishing. This isn’t medical advice (injuries are injuries), but sometimes you have to run through the weakness to come out stronger.
- Running (and exercise in general) has a way of vaporizing pretense. Alone with yourself, you have conversations you’ve been avoiding. You keep running, and then boom, you’re into parts of your brain that only come online with a strong pump of blood and oxygen.
“He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.”
~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Book)
