The Mind Isn't that Big a Deal

I saw two bald eagles on my run today!

I’m still on a Murakami kick. I’ll get over it at some point – move on to something else. But for now I have to be where I am: on a Murakami kick.

Murakami’s running book is also important to my training buddy Alex. He read it long before I did, although I’ve been the one nattering on and on about it during our runs lately. I think he feels a special kinship with Murakami because he also balances a writing and running life and lives with the resonances between the two.

For Alex, the big lesson from Murakami is persisting through the period where doing is accompanied by (and obscured by) all sorts of thinking and feeling – until the thinking fades into the background and just the doing fills the frame of awareness. For example, last Wednesday, when we had that storm that dumped 35cm of snow (which made doing a workout outside impractical), we cranked out 2x3 miles @ 6min/mile on the treadmill. Alex found this rough – not because of the pace (his engine is much stronger than that) but because his mind wouldn’t stay level. The monotony of dreadmill running wormed its way in and played havoc with his thoughts and emotions. As a result, he bailed after 2 miles on the second interval. After that, he went home and had to shovel the driveway. The snow was that really heavy wet stuff and he was already bagged from the workout. He told me that for the first bit, he was just cursing and thrashing around in his mind, pissed off that he had to shovel, feeling beaten and drained. But he said he eventually just fell into it – gave up feeling sorry and just shovelled the driveway in all his weariness. As he put it – there was only “do”.

Perhaps this is a little taste of what Murakami experienced in his 60-mile run in Japan:

I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling. The mind wasn’t so important. Of course, as a novelist I know that my mind is critical to doing my job. Take away the mind, and I’ll never write an original story again. Still, at this point it didn’t feel like my mind was important. The mind just wasn’t that big a deal.

This is one of the gifts of endurance and rhythmic repetition – you get to feel that awareness is not the sole property of that interior monologue  voice – that awareness is this much more spacious thing – and that you can step away from the incessant thinking a bit and just do without a whole lot of mental struggle. The mind isn’t that big a deal.

So when Alex and I ran 25k out the Waverly Road on Sunday, he was able to put some of this kind of (non?)thinking into practice. He’d never run 25k before (and why would a former 1500m guy bother?), so there was an element of the unknown setting out, but after about 9k he turned to me and told me that he’d stopped struggling. We’d locked in a 4:20/k pace and were just flowing along like snowmelt. And it was great – a really joyful run.

I don’t want to make too much out of this. All I’m really saying is that any kind of endurance practice can teach you something about the topography of the mind. There’s that condensed stream of words (and accompanying emotions) that we need to get by, but it’s not the whole show – and because that stream of consciousness is only marginally useful in running, you can detach from it a bit and have a look around at what else is in there – and catch some of the external scenery as well.

Here’s Murakami again:

... as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.

Not everyone looks for this kind of big-sky mind in running, but I’m like Murakami. I’m working with thoughts and words most of the time, so running is a chance for me to step away from that – to step away from having to produce and shape and mine that vein of mental activity for some kind of living. Running is just running (well, on the good runs – they don’t always go so well!) – I don’t use it; I just do it (apologies to Nike). And when I’m not hurt or overly fatigued, it’s just great.

Many thanks to Murakami for his wonderful little book on running.

As the Tibetans say, “Mind is like the sky.”