Run! Write! Make!

Growing up, I was not an athletic kid.  I was a tiny, scrawny, little white girl.  I could not hit a ball, I could not run very far, I never lasted very long in dodgeball.  I played no sports.  My closest brush with athleticism was in high school marching band, where I learned to march backwards while holding crash cymbals steady for a snare drummer to play.  (Don’t laugh.  Those cymbals are heavy and we did it in the New Mexico heat.  In hideous cream and brown polyester uniforms and plastic egg-shell hats.)

I will be 36 later this year and the desire to keep my body fit and healthy presses on me.  Simultaneously, the effort to keep my body fit and healthy seems to rise exponentially.  I’m not interested in joining any sports, and my options are limited there anyway.  I’m not interested in anything that requires an investment of equipment or a membership pressure.  I have found, however, that I really love to run.  I feel good when I run.  Unfortunately, the first thing to go when my schedule gets busy is my daily run.  So I tend to run in fits and starts.  Running regularly for a few weeks or months, and then not at all for months.  Sometimes I’m derailed by the general mayhem of family life.  Once I was knocked off track by the flu.  

A few weeks ago at the library, I found a copy of Haruki Murakami’s memoir-ish book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.  I’d not read any of his work before, but was led to him in my quest to read through some magical realism this summer.  I haven’t read any more magical realism since I suffered through Love in the Time of Cholera (I’ll save my ennui with that one for another post perhaps), but Murakami’s personal tale of writing and running gave me a swift kick in the butt on two counts.  

For Murakami, running and writing work together.  He does not write when he runs or even particularly think about ideas.  But it seems that running gives him an absence of thought and an ability to focus that increases his ability to focus on writing.  By training to run (and he is a serious runner of marathons and triathalons) he is a more focused writer when he is writing.

In spite of the particularly harsh and dry summer we are experiencing here in the Coastal Bend of Texas, I have been running five or six days a week for the past two weeks.  Since I haven’t run for months, I’m back to doing interval work to build up my stamina.  I’m up to half-running, half-walking a little more than two miles a day and it feels great.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever build up to a marathon, but if I could continuously run a few miles a day, without being sidetracked for months at a time, I’d feel very proud. 

Running is hard and it is hot and I get sweaty and dirty and funky.  But I’ve been injury-free so far, and working my body just feels so good.  I am more physically tired, but it is a satisfying tired.  Now that I’ve settled into a running rhythm, and my body is getting stronger and I am less worried about injuring myself, my mind is free to wander as I run.  Mostly it wanders into empty spaces.  Thoughts do come to me as I go, worries sometimes plague me.  But in running, I find that I can embrace meditative thought more effectively than I’ve ever been able to in other ways.  The thoughts and worries don’t linger.  They float by me like clouds, and I am able to consider them dispassionately, letting them pass without clinging to them.  At other times my mind wanders to the beat, counting the steps, predicting my tempo, comparing the beat of my heart to the thump of my shoes.  

And I’m learning (or rather reminded), slowly, that I need balance in my life.  Everything feels better when I’m running.  Everything feels better when I’m writing.  Everything feels better when I’m crafting.  But all three of those things have to work together somehow.  When one of those things drops out of my life for a while, the other two tend to disappear as well.  

Besides blogging a little bit more often again, I can’t say that I’m actually writing again.  But I’m getting closer.  I’m working the balance.  The writing notebook is on the desk again.  A few ideas have been scribbled in it, and the more I run, the more the ideas come to me.  The more ideas for writing I get, the more crafty ideas I get and the more enthusiastic I get about running each morning.  

I’m chasing my activities around in a circle.  I just have to keep them all moving in a positive direction, moving with balance in mind.