Photo by Nathalie Désirée Mottet on Unsplash
That’s not me in the photo obviously, but you get the idea.
Running during lockdown – running away from home, if you will – has made me realise just all the things other than training that I love about the sport: the non-competitive, non-performance-enhancement side. To me they’re just as important as the stuff you can measure with a stopwatch or a weighing scales or a scorecard.
I run to be free, to be creative, to play, to have fun. I run for fitness, for strength, for my mood, for my mental well-being, for the joy it brings me. I run to explore, to travel, to be in nature, to be a flâneur. I run for self-fulfilment, for self-transcendence, and a lot of other things that can’t be measured or even expressed other than by running. To me running isn’t a science, to be measured by times and speeds and performance and metrics and results and data, with the implicit assumption of science being that you should always be ‘improving’, with improvement only ever meaning going faster and faster.
No, I’m not interested in that as much, nor should I be. I’m more interested in the space around the results and the measurable. And right now I’m grateful for every chance I get to experience all of that, to escape isolation and the possibilities and rumours that we may never live like before again. Every chance to run away from home.
I first felt like a sport could be an art when snowboarding, where you’re free to carve lines across powdery white canvasses, the combination of choosing your own path and adrenaline and pristine natural surroundings truly adding up to more than the sum of its parts.
During the first lockdown I carved lines around the city, weaving through streets with broad brush strokes as I painted my own routes, deciding what I’m creating only as I reach the end of one street, turning with only a moment’s consideration onto another. There is, perhaps, a case to be made for recording your work, for saving an end product with your GPS tracking app, though to me it’s more like live music: it lives only in time, not space, and when the seconds pass as you play, the run disappears as if a vapour trail behind you, leaving only a memory, a feeling. And maybe something more.
And right now I’m running for strength, for my immune system. As well as the vitamin D and the fresh air, this self-expression of freedom is vital for your well-being. Physical and mental, but there’s more to life than just the physical and mental. Call it spiritual or call it something else, it’s the stuff we can’t see, or even feel. I like the word ‘creative’ actually – creating something that wasn’t there before. As well as physical and mental health, we need a sense of purpose and of meaning. We wither and die without it – but we can create it ourselves.
The rumours of a full lockdown have ebbed and flowed over the past few weeks, and those moments of apprehension put you face to face with the prospect of full isolation in your home. Running in these times is a vital release of energy. There’s a strange energy in the air, you can either sit back and let it infect you, or you can create and release you own.
We can’t pretend it’s not happening. The only thing you can do is face it head on. After surviving a concentration camp during World War Two, Viktor Frankl wrote the book on finding meaning in difficult times: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Maybe I’m running to change myself.
I like to practice mindful running, and I find it has the best effects on my mood, or even how I feel physically after. It takes a bit of practice, but focusing on what seem like the hard parts can make them a whole lot easier. Stiff legs, sore chest and so on. Focus on them for a while and you might find they disappear once your mind wanders off.
I admit I enjoy seeing where my mind wanders just as much being mindful. Focus on what you’re doing and your mind will wander of its own accord. That’s how you learn – focused work followed by breaks. Just bring your focus back when you can. Short bursts are enough, your brain is like an iceberg, and the majority of its work is done below the tip of your consciousness. You’ll learn more about what’s going on in the world from going for a run or a walk for an hour and really paying attention to what you see around you than you will from spending an hour on twitter, or even in a classroom. That could be what keeps me hooked. Maybe I’m learning something.
“He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how’. It can be difficult to maintain a sense of purpose or meaning when we’re under house arrest. Nothing is open, we can’t visit people, so many normal parts of our routine – and the people of our routine are just as important – are gone. Sometimes lately I’ve wondered what the point of doing anything is when you can’t do… well, anything?
So now, more than ever, running has taken on so much more for me than being just training for some hypothetical competition. For now it’s about the fun of it, the creativity, the feeling of being alive, of improving and of setbacks and stopping to just look around at what I see. And if it’s painful, maybe that’s good too. You’re still alive. To run now is to pause and watch the crowds enjoying the sunshine; to look at the people looking at the deer; to feel the sun on your arms and on your face and on your legs. There’s meaning to be found in every moment of a run, if you pay attention to it. Focus on your running, and then see where it takes you, internally as well as externally. m
Eventually you come down from the runner’s high, though it’s like any meaningful work – once it’s done, you can’t take it back. It’s a part of you now.