The grassy slopes of Citadel Hill still dominate the heart of old Halifax. The hill is a glacial deposit left by unimaginably thick ice sheets that pushed through here thousands of years ago. Like many drumlins, the hill is shaped somewhat like a teardrop. Towards the northwest, there is a road that gently descends the length of the teardrop’s tail to its tip, where it meets the intersection of Ahern Av. and Rainnie Dr. The road is a favourite of runners looking to strengthen their quads with some hill work. It’s not quite long enough for effective hill repeats – it’s not even 200m to the top – but it still serves as a nice challenge, rewarding breath-heavy runners with views of the harbour and an expansive feeling of towering over the city.
For me, though, this road is less interesting as a place to run (I shun city streets for wooded trails whenever possible) and more interesting as a place where runners seem to ascend into the sky along the knife edge of the world. To see what I mean, you need to walk north along Ahern. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch sight of a lone runner toiling up the road as billows of fog swirl like dragon’s breath in the nothingness behind. Even on a sunny day, the sight of a runner on that road always stirs my spirit. With no land and no buildings visible behind, she looks like the loneliest and bravest person in the world.
This loneliness – the solitary runner moving like a shadow against the sky – is part of the romance of running. I’m reminded here of a passage from Alan Sillitoe’s story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” where the main character, identified only vaguely as Smith, describes his own keen sense of loneliness:
When on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o’clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door… I feel like the first and last man on the world, both at once, if you can believe what I’m trying to say.
And that’s what a runner on Citadel Hill look like to me: the first and last person on earth. Her silhouette evokes a mixture of possibility and sadness – the bitter-sweet contradiction of solitude.
On my own solitary runs through the forests of the Shubenacadie, I expand into this loneliness. There, I’m not boxed in by expectations or responsibilities, so once I’ve outrun the superficial worries of the day, I’m free to explore the open ground (inside and out) that reveals itself only in isolation. On the trail, there is little that I need to respond to, little that calls forth the tight masks we put on and take off in social encounters. There is room to move, to breathe, to transform.
Although I’m often alone on the trail, I know I’m not alone in seeking the boons of solitude through running. I’ve talked to runners who view their running as a contemplative practice – a chance to schedule time away from the daily grind in order to pursue meaningful and pleasurable thoughts that would otherwise remain unexplored, buried under layers of everyday concerns. I’ve talked with other runners who view their running as a kind of therapy – something about being alone and moving rhythmically through space returns them to emotional equilibrium. And I’ve talked with runners who view getting out onto the trails as a chance to commune with nature, a chance to escape the narrow logic of asphalt and concrete grids, the reduced geometry of rectangular buildings and squared angles, the constant bombardment of information and marketing: text and imagery that over-stimulate only a tiny portion of the soul.
I too have felt the contemplative and therapeutic possibilities of running, but it’s the idea of communing with nature that has captivated me recently. Taken literally, the verb commune refers to the act of talking intimately with someone. The image that first comes to my mind is of lovers seated facing each other – eyes locked, hands intertwined, soft words exchanged in hushed tones. Communing is a special kind of communication that engages more of someone’s being than a passing hello on the street or even an evening debrief of the day’s events between spouses. Communing denotes a heightened state of mindful awareness in which a more robust and satisfying exchange can occur between self and other. Communing opens you up to the subjectivity of the other – maybe it even overcomes the loneliness of selfhood for a moment.
So what’s all that fancy talk got to do with running in nature? What does it mean to commune with nature? I can assure you that it doesn’t mean that I sit facing a tree with my hands intertwined in its roots, cooing soft words to the squirrels as they chatter angrily and drop acorns on my head. What I mean by communing with nature is, first, simply becoming more aware and mindful of the forest as I move through it: noticing the sparkle of sun on the lake beyond the bright birches, the first ladyslipper to bloom between kilometres 6 and 7, the “here, sweety” song of a chickadee on the make.
From within this mindful state, I look and feel for my intimate connections to the natural world – the nonverbal ways in which we communicate. It might be helpful here to know that the words commune and communicate both come from the same Latin root communis, which means “common.” Communing, then, is just this search for commonalities – and when it comes to nature, it means rediscovering our connections with the larger world.
You might be wondering, though, what exactly I mean by communicating with nature. After all, nature doesn’t use symbolic language (at least that we can understand) and it doesn’t really take much notice of us, except for the small animals who run away. On one level, what I mean by communication is simply taking notice of the exchanges that are always going on: the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide as we breathe, the exchange of force as our running shoes push against the ground and the ground pushes back, the exchange of hot and cold and moisture between our bodies and the air, and so forth.
As I run, I try to recognize all the physical conditions necessary for my running to occur: air, ground, friction, gravity, light, warmth, and so on. Without these conditions, there would be no running. And – if you’ll forgive yet another venture into etymology – the word condition, which I’m here using to mean “anything on which something else depends; that without which something else cannot occur or exist,” comes from the Latin com- “together” + dicere “say” – conditions, then, are elements that speak together or commune in order to produce a result. The way I see it, when “I” run, it’s not just about some lonely guy going out for an early-morning jog. No way. Running is much more than that – running is air, ground, friction, gravity, light, warmth, and me all saying “run” together – and each stride through the forest awakens new voices into the commune.
It’s a bit paradoxical, but the loneliness of the solitary long distance runner has, for me at least, led me into a deeper sense of connection with the larger world. In fact, I find I feel much lonelier when engaged in the superficial social exchanges that dominate most working days. In the forest, though, that feeling of being an independent person engaged with other independent people dissolves along the edges when I feel with each breath and each stride the host of conditions on which my running – and my existence – depends.
For me, then, communing with nature means becoming aware of conditionality, of the way that any action or thing is a saying-together of everything else. It means listening to me and everything else commune each other into existence at every moment. It means feeling my wovenness, my embeddedness, my common connection with the world around and through me – it means glimpsing the kind of consciousness that can hold all these threads together at once.
The sight of the lonely runner ascending Citadel Hill is no less stirring for me, even if I don’t think she is ever really alone. As she teeters on what looks like the edge of the earth, I rest assured in the feeling that she can never really fall into the abyss beyond because there is no space outside this world – she is held safe within the intimate communion of a conditional universe.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
The Madness of PB Pursuit
[Note: I wrote this little piece back in August 2006. My post from yesterday put me in mind of it because it also deals with the idea of dependence. FYI: I set my current 5k PB at Lunenburg in 2008.]
I recently broke my 5km PB at a race in Digby, Nova Scotia. There, on the shores of the best scallop fishing grounds in the world, I bettered a personal record that had dogged me for over a year. But the experience was not altogether positive. As I crossed the finish line and glanced up at the clock, I didn’t feel elated as one might expect; instead, I simply felt relieved. Is this the price of running for PBs?
To most runners, a year is not such a long time to carry the same PB. I’ve talked to runners who haven’t smashed a PB in years – and it doesn’t bother them one bit. But I’m a new runner – just a rookie – and (realistically or not) I expect to improve a little with each race.
You see, my first ever 5k (June 2005) turned out to be my fastest 5k until Digby (August 2006). Race after race, I just couldn’t seem to match my first effort. Sometimes it was weather – never-ending East-coast wind and rain; sometimes it was terrain – steep hills are practically unavoidable here in Nova Scotia; and sometimes it was my own silly fault – shoelaces coming undone or a few too many pints the night before! But blaming those conditions felt a bit too easy. I worried that I had peaked in my first race – that I, like some forgettable 80s pop act, was a “one-hit wonder.”
In my frustration, I did what any stupid rookie would do: I trained harder. It’s no surprise that somewhere on the track that I was using for punishing interval sessions, I dropped and lost the simple joy of running and racing. In fact, during races, I spent more time looking at my watch than at the road. And the result was frustrating – I would burn hot and fizzle fast. My legs just couldn’t do what I was screaming at them to do.
So I gave up.
No, I didn’t give up running altogether; instead, I gave up my driving obsession with PBs. For a month before Digby, I trained easier, went to the track less. I ran most runs comfortably and sought out beautiful lakeside and oceanside trails. I rediscovered the joy of breath after breath, stride after stride goalless running.
And guess what? I finally broke my PB… by 11 seconds. And I didn’t look at my watch once during the race!
Now, I can’t say here that I suddenly became some kind of Zenned-out guru runner floating on clouds of bliss. Like I said at the start of this piece, my sense of relief crowded out the simple joy I might otherwise have felt after the race. PBs still mattered a lot to me. Nor can I say that the best way to a PB is to train less – it was most likely a combination of hard and easy training that precipitated that run. And to mar any clear lessons further, the PB could simply have been the result of a lucky combination of conditions: the day was cool but not cold, the wind was absent, and the course was net downhill.
So what is a poor rookie to think?
Actually, I’m of two minds about PBs now. On the one hand, nothing motivates my will to train more than trying to score a PB at an important race. On the track, when my lungs are searing in their own blood, my quads turning into sludge, and my bowels filling with lactic acid, sometimes the only thought keeping me from quitting, the only thought chasing me around the track for one more repeat is the desire for a PB. In fact, PBs provide a kind of end goal that seems to give meaning to all the weeks of hard training leading up to a race. I run because I want to improve my times. Makes sense. Otherwise, running might simply become an aerobic form of sadism! The quest for PBs keeps us runners noble and sane (we hope).
On the other hand, PBs are a bit of a sham. The assumption underlying my PB mania is that any two races of the same distance are comparable. I assume that the time I run in, say, the Lunenburg World Heritage 5k is meaningfully comparable to the time I run in the Digby Scallop Festival 5k. They are, after all, both advertised as 5km road races.
But the similarities between the two courses pretty much end at advertised length. Both have hills, but Digby is more forgiving because it has a long, gentle downhill to ease the pain of the one major uphill on the double-loop course. Lunenburg wrenches you up and plummets you down as you pass over the ends of the drumlin on which the town is built. No wonder I ran a better time at Digby!
The problem with comparing race times is that you can never separate the times from the particular conditions of race day – we run enmeshed within the racing environment. For example, the second 5k I ever raced was in Enfield, Nova Scotia. I was feeling good, my training indicated that I was running faster than ever, but the day was pure misery: cold driving winds swirled along the unsheltered road – rain was soaking racers to the bone and running shoes to the sole even before the gun went off. No wonder I ran a better time at Digby!
Running performance is so dependent on conditions, and conditions are so fleeting and particular, that it is impossible to compare race times without ignoring all the unique external factors that shaped each race. Relative to the conditions, my Enfield time may actually have been better than my Digby time. In fact, at Enfield, I finished ahead of a few runners who normally beat me, some of whom beat me at the Digby race. But Digby is my PB simply because the numbers on the finish-line clock were lower.
Unless you want to race only on treadmills in climate-controlled rooms, you’re stuck with a series of times that don’t stack up flush against each other. Since race times lose much of their meaning when abstracted from race conditions, using PBs as inspiration for training seems silly – and potentially frustrating. Too much of a PB performance is beyond control – you can train weeks for a goal race, only to run slowly because of cruddy conditions. In the end, how proud can I feel of a race time that is as much due to the course terrain and the weather as my own training and race strategy?
After Digby, I’ve tempered my obsession with PBs, but I haven’t let go of it entirely. I still think pursuing PBs is a fun way of giving my training direction. Deep-winter treadmill runs would surely break me if I didn’t once in a while slip into a daydream about surging past the line in personal record time. PB pursuit seems healthy to me, as long as I remain aware of the dependence of race times on race conditions. That way, I won’t get too frustrated after a slower race and, even more importantly, won’t get too proud after a fast one.
After all, there’s more to this running gig than simply shaving seconds off of past performances… right?
I recently broke my 5km PB at a race in Digby, Nova Scotia. There, on the shores of the best scallop fishing grounds in the world, I bettered a personal record that had dogged me for over a year. But the experience was not altogether positive. As I crossed the finish line and glanced up at the clock, I didn’t feel elated as one might expect; instead, I simply felt relieved. Is this the price of running for PBs?
To most runners, a year is not such a long time to carry the same PB. I’ve talked to runners who haven’t smashed a PB in years – and it doesn’t bother them one bit. But I’m a new runner – just a rookie – and (realistically or not) I expect to improve a little with each race.
You see, my first ever 5k (June 2005) turned out to be my fastest 5k until Digby (August 2006). Race after race, I just couldn’t seem to match my first effort. Sometimes it was weather – never-ending East-coast wind and rain; sometimes it was terrain – steep hills are practically unavoidable here in Nova Scotia; and sometimes it was my own silly fault – shoelaces coming undone or a few too many pints the night before! But blaming those conditions felt a bit too easy. I worried that I had peaked in my first race – that I, like some forgettable 80s pop act, was a “one-hit wonder.”
In my frustration, I did what any stupid rookie would do: I trained harder. It’s no surprise that somewhere on the track that I was using for punishing interval sessions, I dropped and lost the simple joy of running and racing. In fact, during races, I spent more time looking at my watch than at the road. And the result was frustrating – I would burn hot and fizzle fast. My legs just couldn’t do what I was screaming at them to do.
So I gave up.
No, I didn’t give up running altogether; instead, I gave up my driving obsession with PBs. For a month before Digby, I trained easier, went to the track less. I ran most runs comfortably and sought out beautiful lakeside and oceanside trails. I rediscovered the joy of breath after breath, stride after stride goalless running.
And guess what? I finally broke my PB… by 11 seconds. And I didn’t look at my watch once during the race!
Now, I can’t say here that I suddenly became some kind of Zenned-out guru runner floating on clouds of bliss. Like I said at the start of this piece, my sense of relief crowded out the simple joy I might otherwise have felt after the race. PBs still mattered a lot to me. Nor can I say that the best way to a PB is to train less – it was most likely a combination of hard and easy training that precipitated that run. And to mar any clear lessons further, the PB could simply have been the result of a lucky combination of conditions: the day was cool but not cold, the wind was absent, and the course was net downhill.
So what is a poor rookie to think?
Actually, I’m of two minds about PBs now. On the one hand, nothing motivates my will to train more than trying to score a PB at an important race. On the track, when my lungs are searing in their own blood, my quads turning into sludge, and my bowels filling with lactic acid, sometimes the only thought keeping me from quitting, the only thought chasing me around the track for one more repeat is the desire for a PB. In fact, PBs provide a kind of end goal that seems to give meaning to all the weeks of hard training leading up to a race. I run because I want to improve my times. Makes sense. Otherwise, running might simply become an aerobic form of sadism! The quest for PBs keeps us runners noble and sane (we hope).
On the other hand, PBs are a bit of a sham. The assumption underlying my PB mania is that any two races of the same distance are comparable. I assume that the time I run in, say, the Lunenburg World Heritage 5k is meaningfully comparable to the time I run in the Digby Scallop Festival 5k. They are, after all, both advertised as 5km road races.
But the similarities between the two courses pretty much end at advertised length. Both have hills, but Digby is more forgiving because it has a long, gentle downhill to ease the pain of the one major uphill on the double-loop course. Lunenburg wrenches you up and plummets you down as you pass over the ends of the drumlin on which the town is built. No wonder I ran a better time at Digby!
The problem with comparing race times is that you can never separate the times from the particular conditions of race day – we run enmeshed within the racing environment. For example, the second 5k I ever raced was in Enfield, Nova Scotia. I was feeling good, my training indicated that I was running faster than ever, but the day was pure misery: cold driving winds swirled along the unsheltered road – rain was soaking racers to the bone and running shoes to the sole even before the gun went off. No wonder I ran a better time at Digby!
Running performance is so dependent on conditions, and conditions are so fleeting and particular, that it is impossible to compare race times without ignoring all the unique external factors that shaped each race. Relative to the conditions, my Enfield time may actually have been better than my Digby time. In fact, at Enfield, I finished ahead of a few runners who normally beat me, some of whom beat me at the Digby race. But Digby is my PB simply because the numbers on the finish-line clock were lower.
Unless you want to race only on treadmills in climate-controlled rooms, you’re stuck with a series of times that don’t stack up flush against each other. Since race times lose much of their meaning when abstracted from race conditions, using PBs as inspiration for training seems silly – and potentially frustrating. Too much of a PB performance is beyond control – you can train weeks for a goal race, only to run slowly because of cruddy conditions. In the end, how proud can I feel of a race time that is as much due to the course terrain and the weather as my own training and race strategy?
After Digby, I’ve tempered my obsession with PBs, but I haven’t let go of it entirely. I still think pursuing PBs is a fun way of giving my training direction. Deep-winter treadmill runs would surely break me if I didn’t once in a while slip into a daydream about surging past the line in personal record time. PB pursuit seems healthy to me, as long as I remain aware of the dependence of race times on race conditions. That way, I won’t get too frustrated after a slower race and, even more importantly, won’t get too proud after a fast one.
After all, there’s more to this running gig than simply shaving seconds off of past performances… right?
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
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?
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?
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