This throwback merits a brief explanation.
Some decades ago, I sensed a crisis of mid-life. Due to exigent – learned a new word today – circumstances, suddenly realized when I finally hit terra firma after many, many months of, umm, let’s call it ‘time-out’, I had stopped running. Stopped. Just like that.
Slept for ten years. Coincidentally, the ten worst years of my life.
And it was time to get going again. Somewhere around here, there’s a photo of me bushwacking, then mowing a cross-country trail hither and yon, around the pond and all over the farm. And apparently I told the story to an old buddy.
Think as good men there is much more to our game than strong lungs and the right twitch fibers. We lose the wind through our hair, those of us who can still move fast enough to blow our hair, those of us who still have hair, but there are the memories.
Okay, I have forgotten many specifics of those days perhaps, but I am the same man.
Find I can close my eyes and pretend to be running and suddenly I am running. Not really, but my heart rate quickens and my breathing becomes deeper. I feel warmer. Heated. Then suddenly a calm comes over me as I give myself up to those tens of thousands of happy miles I ran all those years. I feel a centering and then I usually come right out of this little trance totally relaxed and much less depressed. An out-of-body running experience.
Have actually managed not to gain weight on this program. Actually down nine pounds.
What I miss most about physically running is not the exercise, the races, the lifestyle, the camaraderie, the glamour and prestige, the pain and the injuries, certainly not the magazines, what I miss most about running is the sensations that would bombard my sensory receptors in fragile, atavistically-accented primal ways unlike anything that comes to mind, except for sex and a well-crafted sentence.
Do I miss running? I don’t know. I do know, I find myself thinking about it a lot.
I put new laces in my shoes.
I am POST-RUNNER. The Tarahumara-ramalama Indians call me Limps-With-Wolves. There is still the strong heart, the will to explore new trails, the willingness to test the limits of my ability, I just no longer feel running is the best form for me to express those qualities, that quality, that led me to running in the first place.
I ran to be free.
Running was always a tool. We met because of running, and for that alone, and much else, I am justifiably grateful.
God bless Walt Stack and Mavis Lindgren, God luv’em, because I do, but I am neither crazy nor indestructible, although there is still some question. I remain hopeful about my cosmic elasticity.
I ran to be free.
I walk today for the same reason.
And I still go long on Sundays.