mindset

I’ve never been much of a music connoisseur, preferring NPR news programming to iTunes on the road or in the house. When I started running six weeks ago, I tried to play music but found the tempos incongruous with my epically slow pace. Either the beat was way too fast for my dinosaur plod or the slow music was slowing me down so much that I might as well be walking. I found a happy middle ground a couple of weeks ago. As my runs got longer, I started listening to the audiobook version of True Grit that I had gotten through audible and forgotten about. It was perfect for running, the plot was engaging enough to keep me distracted from the increasingly endless seeming intervals, Mattie’s incisive observations of the adults around her left a smile on my face every few minutes and in general I found my runs sped by faster with the book in my ears.

Two mornings ago, as I left on my run, the Audible app crashed and I was unable to get it to find my place in the book as I was walking out the door. I had a terrible run, trying to listen to Indigo Girls but feeling every step. It may have been that I was dehydrated and slightly sleep deprived, but by the end of the run I began to believe it was because I was no longer sufficiently distracted from the pain of my increasing time and mileage. This morning, I forgot to try and fix the problem until I was already out the door, but I was in no mood for any of the music I could think to accompany me. So I did something I am usually loathe to do; I ran in silence.

Long ago, when savvy music lovers were making the precarious transition from walkmans to discmans and I still considered myself a runner, I remember a particularly purist coach talking about the terrible habit of running with music. He claimed that the varying beats messed up one’s pace, and nobody listened to what their body was saying when they were listening to someone else singing through their (ear-sized, foam covered) earphones. Young and eager to please, I took him to heart. The fact that nobody could figure out how to run with a discman without it skipping helped me follow his purist mindset a little more easily, in those days.

Today, running in silence for the first time since I started this gambit, I began to wonder if there was something to his expositions on tuning into the mind and body instead of out. I found myself intensely focused on myself for the first part of that run, in particular, how I was unsure if my body was going to make it through said run in one piece without crashing. For about a third of the course, I was doubtful and negative, interpreting every little ache and pain as the beginnings of good reason to stop. And then beating myself up for the specter of failure rearing its grotesque head at the thought. Going under the railroad bridge brought my head around, and I realized what was happening. I began to wonder if what is need at this point isn’t necessarily an absence of distraction, but a focus and discipline of the mind. What I may need now is the strength to silence the negative voices and focus instead of the pleasures of the run; the sun on my cheeks and shoulders, a cool breeze kicked up suddenly, the emerald green fields of Como park stretching out below my feet, the slick of sweat on skin, Ersta’s eager nose in my hand at just the moment I’d forgotten she was there at my knee. Or focus on other things entirely, the bigger narratives, like the sermons of a devote of the road runner’s life ringing back clearly from decades ago, or a packing list for my largely unplanned trip commencing in the morning, or intentions for the rest of the day rolling out before me. Perhaps it is not the running itself I am squandering by listening to a book or a tune, but an opportunity to discipline not only the body, but the capricious mind as well.