Nanowrimo: Day 4

On my own secret envy of robots, animated pedagogical agents, and my MacBook Air.

Yesterday morning I went running. As I mentioned earlier, I love running particularly running distance. There’s something indescribably amazing about when you hit that magical point where your body is on auto pilot and your mind is completely clear. Running distance is intensely painful, intensely boring, and when you’re in the thick of training for an event people are pretty much convinced you’ve got some sort of bizarre clandestine relationship because all your free time is occupied and you suddenly now can’t stay out past 8 p.m.

The author Shauna Niequist spoke at a conference I attended last week that to really know yourself you needed to be as mindful of yourself as you are a person you’re first beginning to be romantically interested in. I think it’s a genius metaphor as it’s so true.

In many ways training for a distance event is the perfect situation for this newfound self romance to flourish. Distance running really is a bit like having a crush on yourself….being mindful of your own body like it’s this wonderful new world that you can’t help but be dazzled by.

When training, you suddenly notice all the strange nuances of your own body. Meals once mindlessly eaten become somewhat obsessive concoctions of protein and carbs and electrolytes so that you can make your body the best it possibly can be. You do things like yoga and get massages and take long baths because you suddenly realize how important things like legs actually are. In addition there’s a whole mental side of getting to know yourself as you learn to silence the negative naysayers that tell you distance is too far, you are too weak, there are better things to give your life to than hours spent essentially running alone.

You learn, when you are training, to listen like a mystic to the voices constantly buzzing through your head then dismiss 99.8% of them, only heeding the fraction that may actually be from muscles in crises, core temperature escalating too quick, or lungs processing just a shade too fast for your efforts. These are the voices that you listen for with a laser focus but the others…so much false urgency ready to try and call you back—tie you down.

hard work…

“Nothing good comes easily. You have to lose things you thought you loved, give up things you thought you needed. You have to get over yourself, beyond your past, out from under the weight of your future. The good stuff never comes when things are easy. It comes when things are all heavily weighted down like moving trucks. It comes when you think it never will, like a shimmering Las Vegas rising up out of the dry desert, sparkling and humming with energy, a blessing that rose up out of a bone-dry, dusty curse.”—Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines

Yep. I’m tracking…out from under the weight of the future seems to reverberate through my own head. This is heavy work I’m doing, growing myself. And it’s also heavy future work I’m doing, dabbling in theories and systems that will indeed someday change things for the better. But it’s good work too. And ever onward I shall go…