Running Humbly

A memory fell into mind during my run today – like an old pressed flower falling from between the pages of a book pulled off the shelf by chance. It came, of all places, from my last year of high school, the one year I ran track. The memory goes like this: I was running the third leg of the 4x400m relay in the County meet. When I received the baton (I can’t remember who from – seems the flower has lost a petal or two), we were in third place. I took off, hungry to overtake the guys in front. With each stride, I was able to cut the distance, and by the time I rounded the final turn, I was only a couple of metres behind. My legs were practically numb, filled to the brim with lactic acid, but I pushed on, buoyed by the roar of the crowd. In the final 100m, I caught and passed the guy in second. It was exhilarating.

In a more heroic story, I would have caught the guy in first. Alas, it didn’t happen. I handed off the baton to our anchor, but he was unable to catch the team in front. We finished second. But, boy, it’s hard to express how sweet that feeling was of bridging a big gap, of reeling a guy in and leaving him to flop like a fish in the dry dust. Awesome.

“Reeling him in” – what a perfect metaphor for the act of catching and passing a runner. I’m not much of an angler, but I’ve caught a few fish – I’ve felt the sudden tug, seen beads of water spring off a line gone taut, the red bobber disappear under the calm surface of a cove. I’ve thrilled with the challenge of landing a fish amid the whirring whine of playing line and the methodical clicking of the reel.

In both running and fishing, the act of reeling narrows your attention to a knife edge, and the desire to catch consumes your entire being. Mind and body act in unison with a frightening singularity of purpose. I imagine hunting is somewhat the same.

I’m not sure how far you can stretch the “reeling in” metaphor before the connection between vehicle and tenor (the two parts of a metaphor) snaps like a wishbone, but it seems as if we human beings are well-suited to competition, both on the track and in the eat or be eaten game of nature red in tooth and claw. There is pleasure in the chase, satisfaction in the kill.

On the track those many years ago, I keenly felt that satisfaction. It’s a heady feeling – one of the great pleasures of sport. I felt it many times competing in volleyball (where “kill” is the appropriately used term for ramming the ball onto the opposing team’s floor to score a point) and in soccer. But at the tender and immature age of a high schooler, when I was still in the midst of discovering just who the hell I was, this feeling of satisfaction inevitably got warped into pride, a feeling of superiority. After all, when you compete and win, it feels like a very direct validation of the worth and value of yourself over and above others.

But is this feeling of superiority inevitably bound up in the feeling of satisfaction that comes at the successful termination of a chase? I’m not sure that it is. For example, the oft-told story about First Nations hunting culture is that the satisfaction a hunter feels after a successful hunt flows from a sense of humility and gratitude, not of superiority – the animal has generously and willingly given itself, so there’s no place for feelings of pride, especially given that future game may shun boastful hunters. It’s impossible to control the outcome of a day’s hunting, and a single success does not wipe out the memory of many failures.

Now, I’m not sure how accurate that little anecdote is, but it does express an important idea, I think: competition is a chancy affair – winning and losing (living and dying) are precarious things. Perhaps in sport it’s absurd to think of a vanquished competitor as willingly losing (like the Native hunter’s dying deer), but that doesn’t mean superiority is an appropriate or even reasonable response to winning.

The catch is dependence. In fact, dependence is always the catch when it comes to the self’s attempt to scratch out its independence in this world. Winning (like catching fish or hunting game) always depends on many many factors beyond individual control, factors you likely aren’t ever aware of: from weather to footware to what the other guy’s mom said that morning to what’s in your belly.

I have no idea what factors came together that day on the track years ago – no idea what the conditions were that allowed me to reel that guy in. But I bet it was more than “I was better than that guy.” To reduce any situation to that level of simplicity is just foolish. What I should’ve felt was gratitude that things went the way they did; they could’ve easily gone differently. My feeling of superiority was absurd – like one member of a team taking all the credit for a win.

Humility and an insight into dependence go hand-in-hand, I think. It’s one of those things I’ve learned the hard way over the years. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes there’s nothing you could’ve done to change the outcome one way or another. It all depends – so there’s no use getting all hung up on winning and on craving feelings of superiority.

Running has been a real help in making life a bit easier on me in this regard – it has taught me just how much I tend to rely (indirectly and unconsciously) on feelings of superiority to buoy my sense of self-worth… and how counterproductive that is. Even in absurd ways, I often crave some sense of superiority. For example, it used to be that on easy runs and recovery runs, I would abandon my slow pace if a runner was in front of me or catching me up from behind. It was so stupid. On almost every run, I would inevitably end up running too fast, either unable to allow another runner to reel me in or caught up in the desire to reel another runner in. It didn’t matter that while I was doing a slow recovery run, the other runner might’ve been doing some hard threshold work – I still needed to be ahead.

I’d never thought of myself as type-A, but running showed me that part of me certainly was. However, like all nasty bits of self-knowledge that don’t square with my ideal picture of myself, I unconsciously denied the truth failed run after failed run. The compelling thing about running, though, is that the truth often manifests itself physically over time. In this case, my arrogance led to overtraining which contributed to poor racing and eventually to injury. In the long run, I had to face my problem of overtraining – I had to figure out why I was running too fast when I should’ve been running slowly in order to recover from hard workouts. The irony was that my desire to be faster than everyone on the road was having the opposite result – I was getting slower because I kept getting hurt.

It’s been a long battle, but I’ve made some good progress. Like today, during my 8km recovery run, I met a runner who was running faster than I was. Watching the cloth of his shirt ripple across his back with each arm swing somehow triggered the memory of my 4x400 antics of yore. But I didn’t change my pace to reel him in. I wanted to. Man, I wanted to wheel and eat that guy alive. But I didn’t. I stuck to my run and made my peace with it.

Not perfect – but it’s a start.

The funny thing about all this is that I’m not even that fast. That’s another nice thing about running’s ability to foster humility: there’s always someone faster. If your only running focus were beating other guys, you’d go crazy very quickly. With running, there’s no way to hide from the truth of race times – you can’t fake the numbers, so you can’t really lie to yourself about runners with faster numbers. I’ve discovered that any pretensions and self-deceptions get eaten up quickly on the road. The hot asphalt can be painfully purifying.

I’m finding, then, that as I mature, I run with more humility. This humility, however, does nothing to diminish the satisfaction of reeling a runner in – it just clears away some of the crap from the experience. In fact, when I finally passed the last guy in front of me during the Valley Harvest Half Marathon this year, I didn’t feel superior to him; rather, I felt grateful that he’d gone out so bravely (or rashly) so that I could have the added pleasure of reeling him in and winning the race. It made it sweeter than if I’d led the whole way. But I try to keep in mind that on a different day, the race could’ve turned out differently.

Ironically, I suspect that my ongoing battle with foolish pride helped me to run faster that day by keeping my training in check. What this means is that if I’m to keep winning, I’ll need all the humility I can get my greedy little hands on. Humility gets results.

Wait. Did I just miss the point?