Finding Reasons to Run: National Running Day

Why do you run?

Having completed my first half marathon, my first marathon, and my second, I’ve found that running takes on a new quality. Today, on National Running Day, I've been giving some thought to why I run. It's been on my mind, now that all those magic “firsts” gone.

Yesterday, a friend of mine asked: “Now that I’ve done all those firsts, I need to find new motivation. Why should I run the next marathon, or half marathon?"
 
Do people really run so they can eat donuts or drink beer? The enjoyment of good food and drink is probably one reason, but it’s not enough to keep one going through long, sweaty summer miles and frigid, slippery runs at zero dark-thirty in winter. 
Thinking about why to run is the same as thinking about why to do anything in our lives. We have our basket of days; we know they are finite in number. What meaning will we give to those days?

The best reasons to run are reasons that give meaning to the effort. People run to transform themselves, become better, less anxious, less depressed, physically and mentally stronger so they can have the necessary strength to accomplish other goals. People run to enjoy themselves, to socialize, regenerate, push the mental “reset button” by getting away from the busy-ness of life. People run to build self-confidence, setting smaller goals that lead to larger accomplishments.

“People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life — and for me, for writing as whole. I believe many runners would agree.”

— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

For myself, being fully alive is the best reason to run. Pushing past my insecurities, my self-doubts, making peace with my limitations are all things I can do through running. And that practice, of stretching to be most fully alive, of methodically, routinely pushing through my discomfort, is excellent practice for every other difficulty, and in building a life full of meaning one is bound to encounter plenty of difficulty.

Building Circles of Support: Resilience, Love and Community

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Humans are born and genetically designed to be in relation to one another. No one is an island unto themselves.

Finding love and getting into relation, however, can be a problem. First, because Western culture discourages dependence on others. Second, because our own fears and weaknesses drive us to separate from those we need most.

Building circles of support are essential to human thriving. How can we build community in the face of these challenges?

Finding your tribe

American culture has atomized us, doing us a great disservice when it comes to how we handle difficulty. By focusing on consumption, the Western model assumes we make "rational choices" in our own interests, and that those interests compete with everyone else's. This hyper-individualistic boot-strappiness comes at a great price to our mental health, and it's something we need to un-learn in order to thrive.

This is perhaps most true for new parents, who feel both the strongest need for community and the greatest social pressure to go it alone. Writer and mother Tarja Parssinen echoed this in her recent Salon article about how American individualism is destroying families.  "I lived alone for almost a decade," she said, "but I never actually felt alone until I had children."

My friend and my daughter at the San Francisco La Leche League conference

Knowing how isolated I felt after my first child was born, with my second I was determined to pay greater attention to my own need for community. So, just a couple of months after my daughter was born, I sought out an opportunity to attend a conference for La Leche League leaders in San Francisco. I was blessed that my best friend was also a leader and attended the conference too; she helped immensely with my daughter, and provided a much needed social outlet. But I had to push past the social stigma of traveling with a young child, and I had to ask for her help, and in order to be able to ask I had to recognize that my need for social interaction and community was as important to me as food. We aren't meant to do difficult things alone.

Building resilience to social anxiety

Adding to the cultural signals we get to bear our burdens alone is often social anxiety. For myself, I have found that one of the weaknesses left over from my childhood is a fear of being rejected. As a mostly extroverted person, social interaction is a daily need, so rejection and isolation can feel like holding my breath underwater.

How does one build the resilience needed to embrace and strengthen this vulnerable part of ourselves? Oddly enough, it’s been through my running that I’ve been confronted with this weakness and been given opportunities to understand how the fear moves through me, so that I can make peace with it.

Running friends can make all the difference!

When I started running again, I discovered the great joy of running socially with others. Long runs are less of a chore when one can chat through the miles, and my new running connections propelled me on, providing acceptance and encouragement. Runners are some of the best people I know; because running is an individual sport, whatever pace you run you will likely find someone to share it. However, it can also lead to anxiety when you’re doing it with someone who is a bit faster or stronger than you.

Once, while out for a group run I met some new friends who were part of an established group. They warmly welcomed me and as we ran, I found the pace challenging but manageable. Later in the run though I struggled to keep up with them. That's when my internal monologue started.

My inner voice said it’s much easier for them, look at them chatting while I lag behind and struggle! I began to be critical of myself and the more critical I was the more it sapped my energy and I began to drop back. I noticed then that as I lagged, they didn’t look back or slow down but kept going and even speeded up a bit, lost in conversation and enjoying the run. This fueled my anxiety, and I began to think they were happy to be rid of me, that I was an anchor slowing them down and it would be best if I just stopped and let them run on ahead while I had some water and felt sorry for myself. But another part of me wanted to press on and try to catch up, and so I continued, struggling with feeling rejected and alone and then finding other things to worry about, like the aggressive black birds on the path (which are less likely to attack a group) or the humidity.

I see and acknowledge that for me, this is a part of the mental challenge of running distances, and it’s a great opportunity to build my own social resilience. Fear of rejection, feeling isolated is exhausting and saps my energy. In the past, it’s led me to only want to run alone, so that there is one less thing for my head to deal with besides the trail, the conditions and my body’s fatigue. But that robs me of vital social opportunities and the support they bring. The best course is for me to be present for my anxiety, find ways to see and accept it and then release it. As I’ve run more, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of this opportunity to see this tender spot in my psyche, acknowledge it and push past it. It is through this repetitive encounter, acceptance and gently pushing on that I exercise this muscle and make friends with my own vulnerability.

Most often, people get wrapped up in their own stuff and simply don’t notice what is going on around them with others. Even more, we often don’t notice what is going on within ourselves. I believe it is the blindness of what’s going on within ourselves that is the greater obstacle to being able to love and connect. It is our own self-blindness that creates the hell of isolation.

When we can acknowledge and assert our need for social connection, we can have those needs met. When we can acknowledge, sit with and practice moving through our fears, we can build the resilience necessary to persist in building those connections. Both of these, recognizing the validity of our needs and the things that get in our own way, can help us find the love, support and connection that bring joy to life, and make it worth the struggle.

Four more holes

I was talking with a friend of mine today about the frustration of being stuck. What do you do? "I'm really not good at moving my ideas past 'stuck,'" he said.

“I feel like other people just choose and then work. I have a river of ideas that I wade in daily. They come rushing at me, swirl and burble around my legs, then go rushing on.
Other people swim down that stream (or are torn from their footing and are swept).
And I just observe and marvel at the beauty of the torrent and wish and lust and never let the water carry me.
I don’t know how to let go of the ground.”

That's the question, in't it? And I thought about my grandfather.

When he was a young man, he played the cello with a symphony orchestra. When he was older, he got a job as a tool and die worker. I always thought it was such a study in contrasts: this man who had played music directed by Shostakovitch, who had this deep love for his craft, had also spent many years happily drilling holes in sheet metal.

And more than that, he talked about them as though they were basically the same thing.

He didn't elevate one over the other. His approach to playing cello was that it was just something you did, it was a job (although it was a really nice one). Sometimes you played the cello in a big room with lots of people. Sometimes you drilled holes in sheet metal.

Creativity and craft is like that. People who are good at their craft don't love it all the time. Sometimes they don't even like it. But they do it; they do it day after day, even when it's not glamorous. Especially when it's not. And I think that being ok with that is one of the essential keys to being really good at anything.

As long as your dream gig is rainbows and unicorns, it will remain unapproachable. Maybe if you looked at it more like it was drilling holes in sheet metal, you'd get over your fantasies about it and realize that it's precisely when it feels like another day drilling holes in sheet metal that you're succeeding at it.

So I told my friend this:

“Every single fabulous motherfucker I’ve ever read from Bukowski to Leonard Cohen says doing their art is horrible and hard and they suck at it and it’s a long slog and takes too long and it’s drilling holes in fucking sheet metal.”

"But why shouldn’t my work be hard?," Cohen said.

“Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with my payload.”

— Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen, photo by gaët

You can quit tomorrow.

Today, drill four more holes. Grandpa would approve.

The light that got lost

John's funeral was today. It was hard to let go of my friend, and I definitely feel as though there is a big hole where his presence used to be, as though something important was lost.

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water.” - Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit, in a Field Guide to Getting Lost, says light at the blue end of the spectrum gets most “lost”, most scattered. But “the light that gets lost gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.”

I was thinking of this as I recalled the holes left in my and my friends’ lives with the passing of our friend this past week. All of us feel it acutely, we realize something is missing, in ourselves, in our friendships, in our workplace. It’s hard to say how these holes will change us, what has been lost.

But I also noticed some new things. At the funeral I heard “I didn’t know Steve was such a good speaker.” I heard “I didn’t know John was such a doting father, that he and Steve’s daughter were so close.” I heard “I didn’t know Steve’s wife was so wonderful.” It was as if by John’s absence we were able to finally see some of these things, make these connections. I thought about how the loss of John gave us some beautiful things to discover just as Solnit’s blue light gives us the beauty of the world.

Women, Lands' End and Election 2016

I suspect someone(s) at Lands' End really didn't think this one through.

Lands' End, neglecting to internalize one of the key takeaways of female empowerment that "You can be anything! But you can't be everything." pulled its Gloria Steinem interview from its ad campaign and catalog in response to public criticism and a boycott. Which has led to public criticism and a boycott.

This article by Ad Age is two years old, but it's a good overview of the issues companies face when trying to incorporate female empowerment or feminism in their brand messaging. As Lands' End is discovering, you have to know your customers; if 26% of Americans think "feminist" is an insult, featuring their patron saint in an ad campaign is bound to bring down the thunder. And yet we are in a period with more single, wage-earning, empowered women than ever before, in an election season that is turning out to be all about women (hello Hillary, Bernie, Melania).

Lands' End will have to do some masterful tap dancing to extricate itself from this combination of bandwagon boorishness, poor planning, worse timing, and thoughtless response. It may already be too late. However, there's a remarkable opportunity here for their competitors. As other clothing retailers step in, it will be interesting to see what they add to the powerful conversations taking place during this election season about feminism and female empowerment.

It looks as though the Lands' End faux pas may just have solidified women's empowerment as the number one issue this election season (it was already trending that way anyway). Should be interesting to see where it goes from here.

How to save your own life

Published in Elephant Journal

“The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.

- Erica Jong

A friend once told me:

half the people in our running group were going through divorce, confronting change and loss. Another third were working through broken bodies and sickness, Confronting mortality.

The rest were just regular crazy. I think I'm a bit of each.

In running, I become a student of me and my limits. In running, I become a student of the universe and its limitlessness. In running, I learn the distinction between the two is everything and nothing.

Running doesn't give joy. It allows the space to give joy to yourself.

Running won't save you. It allows the space to save yourself.

So, to save your own life: Go for a long run.

Run beyond the thunderstorm. Run beyond your tears. Outlast your phone battery. Outlast fear of being alone in the woods.

Run along the river, run in the woods. Run with crickets and egrets and dark green. Run until you are so tired you can at last be still, and listen to what the river has to tell you about living a life.

Rush and bubble and gush, joy in full force, become a tributary and flow into the river. Flow around the obstacles. Let the wind move you, the sun warm you, make you glitter and shine.

Converge with other tributaries, flow and surge. When spread too thin in the shallows, slow down.

Pool and puddle and pause, become a source for deep-rooted trees and lush stories, and for people and places that don't know they need you. Then reflect back that beauty for others to enjoy.

Run along, and when you are tired from running then flow. Unseen forces are moving you, even when you seem to be still.

Bear witness to joy, to stillness, bear witness to yourself. Go for a long run, and save your own life.

What is The Thing For Which You Struggle?

Honoring the Struggle that Requires Everything

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Memorial Day is a day of remembrance for those who died in the fight for our good and lasting freedoms. It’s for those who literally gave it their all, whose struggle required everything of them. Some of these knew they were going to die, and did it anyway. Some endured great pain, and did it anyway.

For the fearful, the pained, those knowingly going to die, the struggle was about more than themselves.

Remembering those who struggled and lost everything is important not just because freedom isn’t free. Remembering them and their struggle is essential because we all struggle and fight in life, some of us more than others, and the knowledge that this struggle might require everything of us is part of making it real and present for each of us.

But it’s also essential because the lesson of these victorious dead is to make that struggle count for something greater than simply removing pain or discomfort. Those who gave everything to make their time on this planet count for something greater can teach us valuable lessons about the best life, about struggling for something worth the struggle. That includes the struggle against war and violence.

That said, in my view Memorial Day isn’t about glorifying war or armed conflict. I believe that is too narrow a view.

Memorial Day is about courage in the face of violence and death (which requires being present), and about thinking beyond ourselves, to make our inevitable life struggles count for much more than ourselves and our immediate families. That struggle even unto death might be the struggle of a soldier. It is also the struggle and courage of the peaceful protester, the civil disobedient, the evangelist who continues to speak his truth. It is the struggle of the field nurse who brings broken soldiers back to health, time and again despite its apparent futility, to give back hope.

To me, Memorial Day is a day to decorate the graves of these people too. Because if all we valorize and decorate are the graves of those who died fighting in armed conflicts, I believe we are selling our humanity short. Courage is courage, both on and off the battlefield.

Human rights activist Stephane Hessel, who was a concentration camp survivor and a redactor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, wrote in his tract Indignez Vous!

We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence—choose the hope of nonviolence. That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: that is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate… To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts, TO CREATE IS TO RESIST. TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.

Looking beyond war, behind the war machine to truly honor those who gave their lives courageously for the great gift of freedom we enjoy requires, in my view, understanding their struggle and courage in this context. And it demands that we also view Memorial Day as a day to honor those for whom the struggle and sacrifice was in the service of nonviolent protest, in the service of love and peace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

I believe that the more we honor and seek to emulate these struggles-in-the-face-of-death for something greater, the better our communities, cities, and country will be, and the better we ourselves will become.

The coupling of coincidence and choice

There is no calculus.

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we’re meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day…Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together. The pattern of our lives come from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while, like dancers. They come together in these moments that are the coupling of unseen forces, a generative warmth, a secret romance between the unknowns that are also our parents. — Rebecca Solnit

When I started my marathon journey blog, I wrote early on about an observation by Eric Meyer, whose young daughter had passed away. He remarked that after such catastrophes sometimes couples split up, but there is no formula or calculus to know which couples will make it and which won’t. “It isn’t strength that keeps a couple together in the face of crisis. It’s having the luck to remain compatible under the most extreme pressures,” he said. “Like any complex interaction between two complex systems, the outcome is fundamentally unpredictable.” It has to do with the series of moments of coincidence that make up the couple’s history and experience.

Not all the accidents in our lives that provide the things that fall together to make us are secret romances and warmth. Some of the accidents are catastrophes, misfortunes, and several are moments of decision, a moment to change everything and end a marriage, quit one’s job, or move across country. Those moments of decision are patterns and have a regularity, but they are also the results of all the things that barely happened to put us there, at that moment of decision. As Meyer and Solnit note, even these dramatic accidents are not alone sufficient to move a life in one way or another. There is always agency, always a series of moments of decision that give movement to those inexplicable coincidences.

During the process of my separation and divorce a supportive friend once told me her marriage was in shambles and she had been thinking of leaving for a long time, but either she didn’t have the courage or hadn’t yet arrived at the moment of decision to leave. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t arrived there yet, because she was truly miserable. But the inexplicabilities of her life’s coincidences had taken her to a place that was not her moment of decision. For couples who do split up, the series of accidents and whether and when they lead to a split or not are ultimately unpredictable; frequently friends remark with surprise because the couple in question was one they thought would always hold together.

There is often nothing grand or dramatic or even particularly clear about the arrival of that moment in a marriage; it most often doesn’t arrive with fanfare or drama. Sometimes it arrives because of the accidents of catastrophes and misfortunes and other dramatic moments, but whether or not such catastrophes lead to a moment of decision and what direction that decision takes are fundamentally unpredictable. Rather, they contribute to the coupling of unseen forces of things that did not drift apart, but moved together for a while until that moment of decision was taken up.

Like other incredible events, the exquisite candid and fashion photographs of Frank Horvat often came about because of a coupling of unseen forces, patterns of moments that suddenly coalesced and made manifest a particular moment in time. Horvat’s trick was to carry a camera at all times, so he could increase his chances of capturing such inexplicable coincidences. Building a writing practice or a new career or a new love are all a coupling of coincidence and choice, combined with a decision to carry that camera.

We Americans in particular have a love-hate relationship with the deus ex machina of the story. Like the ancient Greek critics, we prefer for events to unfold neatly based on the statistical evidence available and the finite list of players on the stage, but we also love the flair of the dramatic outlier, the hero of the story taking the momentus choice that pulls everything together because of his grand act of courage, pulling the baby from the burning building at the last moment. We love to point to the singular moment, the momentus decision. The combination of predictability and momentus choice lets us swing between predictability and heroism; I think we crave both the tragic and heroic story. Unfortunately, I think building a writing practice, career, or love is neither. Ultimately, building love or a writing practice or a new career are more like a series of inexplicabilities combined with a series of small moments of decision. That means heroic acts of determination increase the odds of success, and events provide the necessary but not sufficient coincidence, but the outcome is fundamentally out of our control. What remains for us is whether or not we carry the camera.

The next marathon

Marathons are like potato chips, someone said: you can't just do one. It's been true for me; since completing my first marathon last September my mind has been full of planning for my next, and my next after that. To that end, I've managed to successfully maintain a running base through the winter and am heading to Nashville this weekend for a half marathon, which is a stepping stone to my next full marathon (hopefully in June). But that's not the only marathon in my life.

The next big, scary marathon is building my writing practice. Writing is hard, exquisite, terrifying, thrilling for me. I love writing, it's an expansive space I can share and a straitjacket demanding precision and clarity. Most of all, it's a practice that requires building just as a marathon is building miles and having good runs and bad. So, just like I did when I began my marathon journey last year, I've decided to join a group to help develop that practice for myself, Jeff Goins' 500 Words 31 day practice challenge. This blog will be a place where I share my best ideas and writing, a chronicle of my next marathon and a challenge to myself to start where I am in my work and fall down and get up and work again. If you are working to build a practice as a writer, I invite you to check out Jeff's page and consider taking up the challenge yourself. If you do, let me know; I'd love to hear from you.

Did it! Or, the importance of getting lost

I am a marathoner. It feels so good to be able to say that. They say it will change you (it does), it is an emotionally charged event (it was) and that there's never a good time to do one anyway so you might as well start right now, where you are. So I did. And here we are. Thank you for sharing it with me!

The day was almost perfect in terms of weather; only the last few miles running into a strong wind gave a significant challenge. I fueled well (thank you, Fox Valley Marathon for your excellent course support), and several times was able to just stretch out and lose myself in the midst of some of the midwest's most beautiful scenery. I saw blue heron, snowy egrets, kayaks and canoes, and ran through some stunning wooded areas along the Fox River. This is one of the things people like best about the Fox Valley Marathon (plus, it's relatively flat). It was a "top ten" good day, and my finish time was under 5:30, which was my goal.

Out there, I "lost myself" in that positive sense we think of forgetting your troubles, being present where you are, just enjoying things as they come.

This week, I have felt like I am "losing myself" again, only this time it's in the other sense. The post-marathon week has been, for a variety of reasons, emotionally draining, exhausting, just plain hard. My sense of feeling unmoored this week is in stark contrast to the joy and exhilaration of losing myself in the woods on marathon Sunday. One felt like being a leaf floating on a river; the other like a pebble tossed by the waves.

In both cases I am at a loss for words to describe that "losing myself" feeling. But maybe that's the point. The universe is calling me to lose myself, in both senses of the word, for a while. It's unfamiliar territory.

So, go back to the main lessons I learned from this journey: when you're facing something like that, find some friends or a support network, start where you are, and persist. So that's what I'll do.

Onward.