Running and Being: The Total Experience By Dr. George Sheehan

By Dr. George Sheehan

1. living

No athlete ever lived, or saint or poet for that matter, who was content with what he did yesterday; or would even bother thinking about it. Their pure concern is the present. Why should we common folk be different?

You win, the experts agree, if the game is played in your rhythm. You lose if it isn’t. But how many of us know that the same thing is happening in our lives every day? How many of us see that we are letting someone else set the rhythm of our lives,
The artist, especially the poet, has always known this to be wrong. He knows that time shortens and lengthens, without regard to the minute hand. Knows also there is an ebb and flow to the day that escapes the clock, but not us. And realizes that this rhythm, this tempo, is something peculiar to each individual, as personal and unchanging as his fingerprints. The artists know this.

Japanese philosopher Suzuki: “I am an artist at living, and my work of art is my life.”

Life, except for a favored few, like poets and children and athletes and saints, is pretty much of a bore. Given the choice, most of us would give up the reality of today for the memory of yesterday or the fantasy of tomorrow. We desire to live anywhere but in the present.
“The trouble with this country,” the late John Berryman once told fellow poet James Dickey, “is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.”
Courage, if we go back to its Latin root, means that the seat of the intelligence is in the heart. That the heart determines a man’s action, rather than his reason or his instincts. And if the heart has its reasons the mind does not know, it also has reasons the body does not know.
The heart is where faith lies. Where we find the supreme act of courage, the courage to be. To take arms against oneself and become one’s own perfection.
“Courage,” according to Paul Tillich, “is the universal and essential self-affirmation of one’s being.” It therefore includes the unavoidable sacrifice of elements that are part of us but prevent us from reaching our actual fulfillment.
In everyday language, this means that if the most essential part of our being is to prevail against the less essential, we may have to give up pleasure, happiness and even life itself. Courage, then, has nothing to do with a single act of bravery. Courage is how one lives, not one specific incident.
We are, in fact, always being called upon to be whoever we are, hero or coward. The challenge is always there. But it is not the reckless pursuit of catastrophe, it is the acceptance and perfection of the persons we are meant to be. In that perennial process so frequently fatiguing, often depressing and occasionally painful, courage is the bridge between our minds and our bodies.

Only character can fix my will to the idea that anything less than my best is unworthy of me and the game and the people I play it with. Only character can take defense and make it worth every iota of my mental and physical energy. Only character can make me function when my existence seems to be, as Emerson said, a defensive war.

2. Discovering

Because like all human beings I have no privacy. Who I am is visible for all to see.

Youth rebels, but rebels into other conformities. Running let me start from scratch. It stripped off those layers of programmed activity and thinking.
Running was discovery, a return to the past, a proof that life did come full cycle and the child was father to the man. Because the person I found, the self I discovered, was the person I was in my youth.
Yet educators, psychologists, theologians, social scientists and philosophers continue to lump us under that great umbrella, Man. Man, they tell us, using “we” and “our” and “us” and other collective words indiscriminately, should, would, will, ought or must do this or that.
Sheldon finally made this constitutional psychology a legitimate science. He saw that we were made up of different ratios of the three primary layers of tissue in the embryo: the ectoderm (skin and nervous tissue), the endoderm (intestines), the mesoderm (bone and muscle). Depending on the ratio and the predominating tissue, he was able to predict physical abilities, reaction to stress, aesthetic preferences, personality, temperament, and appropriate lifestyle.

And to accept Sheldon is to accept yourself and your own peculiarities and to learn to live with the peculiarities and to learn to live with the peculiarities of others. To see yourself as normal and lovable no matter how odd you appear. And to see others as normal and lovable also, however difficult that is to comprehend.

Mankind, said Sheldon, is divided into three races. But these races have nothing to do with color or geography or blood types. There is the athletic race, the muscular mesomorphs (the doers); the relaxed and amiable race of endormorphs (the talkers); and the thin, small-boned race of ectomorphs (the thinkers).
The mesomorph reacts to stress by going into action. He is best described by words like dominant, cheerful, energetic, confident, competitive, assertive, optimistic, reckless, and adventurous.
The leisurely endomorph, on the other hand, reacts to stress by socializing. He is more likely to be described as calm, placid, generous, affectionate, tolerant, forgiving, sympathetic, and kind.
The ectomorph is none of these things. He is detached, ambivalent, reticent, suspicious, cautious, awkward, and reflective. He finds ideas much more interesting than people. And he reacts to stress by withdrawal.

Thoreau, he has found no companion so companionable as solitude.

My life is authentic only when I feel, think and do what I and only I must feel, think and do.
I have given up many things in this becoming process. None was a sacrifice. When something clearly became nonessential, there was no problem in doing without. And when something clearly became essential, there was no problem accepting it and whatever went with it.
But once it is understood, the runner can surrender to his self, this law. And become, in the Puritan sense, the “free man,” the man who is attached only to the good.
In this surrender, the runner does not deny his body. He accepts it. He does not subdue it, or subjugate it, or mortify it. He perfects it, maximizes it, magnifies it. He does not suppress his instincts; he heeds them. And goes beyond this animal in him toward what Ortega called his veracity, his own truth.
The finished product is therefore a lifetime work. This giving up, this letting go, the detachment from attachments, is an uneven process. You should give up only what no longer has any attraction to you, or interferes with something greatly desired. That was Gandhi’s rule. He advised people to keep doing whatever gave them inner help and comfort.
He actually responds to the season, moving through cycle and cycle, toward less and less until body and mind and soul fuse, and all is one.
I see this simplicity as my perfection. In the eyes of observers, however, it appears completely different. My success in removing myself from things and people, from ordinary ambition and desires, is seen as lack of caring, proof of uninvolvement, and failure to contribute.

3. understanding

I am who I am and can be nothing but that. “Do not mistake me for someone else,” said Nietzsche. Do not mistake me for a listener or citizen or friend. And when I get that look in my eye that says I’m going “away,” do me a favor. Let me go.

The little I need, I need very much. The little I want, I want very much.
My breakfast is simple. But it must be perfect. And so it goes from shoes to yogurt, everything has to be just right or the day becomes dark and dreary. And not only for me, but for the people around me.
When I am with people I am always saying too much or too little. Those who saw themselves early as different and, at first, disastrously so.
There is no joy in ideas. Joy comes at the peak of an experience and then always as a surprise.
I cannot have joy on demand. At best, I go where I have felt it before. And that is mostly on the river road, moving at a pace I could hold forever and my mind running free. So that I am in this alternation of effort and relaxation, of systole and diastole. And then I have that fusion where it all is play and I am capable of anything. I become a child.
- I’ve found steady state cardio to be a cheat code for unlocking creativity, deep thinking and providing clarity.

It will not surprise you that the thinkers believe that our true journey is back to our childhood. One mystic wrote that man’s perfection and bliss lay in the transformation of the bodily life to joyful play.
Some of you may wonder that a life can be felt so completely in the absence of other people. I wonder at that myself. It goes against everything I have been taught. Everything that went into the preservation of our culture.
But I am who I am and can be nothing but that. “Do not mistake me for someone else,” said Nietzsche. Do not mistake me for a listener or citizen or friend. And when I get that look in my eye that says I’m going “away,” do me a favor. Let me go.
Running has changed all that. Given a new perspective to that inner landscape. I accept my ups and downs, my ins and outs, my uncertain being and becoming. I do my best. I remain patient and enjoy. And most of all I make no judgments except about effort. There I demand the most and more.
Lives are changed by dos, not don’ts.
And if one is to stop drinking permanently, one must be actively involved in becoming what one is.
Can tomorrow be the first day of the rest of our life? And can that life be completely different from the mess it is today?

Uncovering Your Nature

The first thing to do, it seems to me, is to retrace your steps. To go back to that period of your life when you were operating as a successful human being (although you most likely weren’t aware of it).
To go back to those times when your soul, your self, was not what you possessed or your social standing or other people’s opinion but a totality of body, mind and spirit. And that totality interacting freely with your total environment.
If you are seeking the solutions for the Great Whys of your creation, you will have to start with the Little Hows of your day-to-day living. If you are looking for the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you’d best begin with the Little Answers about your body. If you would become either saint or metaphysician, you must first become an athlete.
Or read the works of the saints who lived the questions and waited for the answers in the hereafter. The common denominator of these people is asceticism, which comes from the Greek ascesis, meaning rigorous training, self-discipline and self-restraint.
Motion and meditation are apparently a unity. “Sit as little as possible,” wrote Nietzsche.
Nutrition is still a very controversial subject, but few will argue that we get into more difficulty eating than fasting,

“I myself am my only obstacle to perfection,” wrote Kierkegaard.

The athlete has always known that. The athlete and the child at play have that same perception. That all things are possible and that I alone am master of my fate.
Having earned our daily bread, we can turn to our daily play. Having paid our dues for survival, we can pay attention to the more serious business of living. Having taken care of our bank accounts, we are now ready to take care of our bodies and the minds that go with them.
The athlete cannot fake it. He is a highly visible example of man maximizing himself. Or failing in the attempt. In this age of the phony and the upward failure, the athlete remains an example of excellence, grace and purity. Or at the least an honest effort to achieve those attributes.
The athlete already knows that. So he makes the best of it. Seeks fitness through positive goals rather than negative restrictions. The athlete doesn’t stop smoking and start training. He starts training and finds he has stopped smoking. The athlete doesn’t go on a diet and start training. He starts training and finds he is eating the right things at the right time. In just such a way other things fall into place.

Where fitness ends, self-discovery starts.

The athlete who is in complete command of the skills of his sport comes to understand the person he is through his attachment to his particular sport and his response to the stresses and strains that arise within it. He finds out what he is made of. What his true personality is.
The formula for greatness, wrote Nietzsche, is amor fati, the love of fate, the desire that nothing be different, not forward, not backward, not for all eternity. And not merely to bear what is necessary, but to love it as well.
Keats saw the world as a “Vale of Soulmaking,” but said we humans are not souls until we acquire identities; till each is personally himself.
The only man who truly lives, Ortega stated, is the one who follows his inner voice, which says, “You are able to be whatever you want; but only if you choose this or that specific pattern will you be what you have to be.”
Nietzsche had some suggestions on what we should do to avert such a catastrophe. Attend, he said, to the little things. Take care with your nutrition. Watch your diet. Be careful about where you live and the air you breathe. Do not commit a blunder at any price in the choice of your recreation. Develop an instinct for self-defense. Make your life a matter of play.
Our salvation, then, is in the day-to-day living of what is surely the athletic life, the life committed to fitness, the life of one who knows the importance of attention to the little things, to the supposedly minor details of everyday living.
The athlete is aware of all the points Nietzsche makes. Knows the response to training and diet and relaxation. The effect of tension and other people, of energy wasted on situations and relationships that make him merely a reactor. And the athlete knows more than most how one can find himself in play, and can accept himself for who he was, is and will be.
Man was not made to remain at rest. Inactivity is completely unnatural to the body. What follows is a breakdown of the equilibrium. When the beneficial effects of activity on the heart and circulation and indeed on all the body’s systems are absent, everything measurable begins to go awry.

Creativity depends on action. Trust no thought arrived at sitting down.

5. becoming

My fitness program was never a fitness program. It was a campaign, a revolution, a conversion. I was determined to find myself. And, in the process, found my body and the soul that went with it.

We usually act when something can be proven. But we act with equal frequency when it cannot.
People just do not do things because they are good for them. And are even less inclined to do so when they enjoy doing the opposite. People accept the rational, practical, physiological only when it dawns on them that life any other way is a waste. Only then will they agree to a program that to them is a mindless, inconvenient and boring use of their time.

“You have one life to live. How do you want to live it?”

For me, medicine was an illusion that had failed. I was seeking a new world, where I could live and create my own drama, and not play with the meaning of life. I found it in running.
John Sansom, has come up with a new solution to the physical-fitness problem. Religion. He suggests that we need more than a commitment to physical fitness for its own sake. We have to act on our religious beliefs (or a belief in a practically achievable Utopia) that regard bodily fitness as an essential part of lifestyle directed toward a single all-important goal.
Every man is religious. Every man is already acting out his compelling beliefs. Religion is not something you belong to, or accept, or think. It is something you do. And you do it every waking minute of every day.
Religion is the way you manifest whatever is urgent and imperative in your relationship to yourself and your universe, to your fellow man and to your Creator. Every act is a religious act.
In the perfection of my body lies my own perfection.
Fitness is my life; it is indispensable. I have no alternative, no choice but to act out this inner drive that seems entirely right for me.
“Can running, or any strenuous form of play, improve my life?” This allows an answer. An answer that is clearly affirmative, if only because running concentrates on positives rather than negatives, emphasizes doing rather than no doing, and above all makes the person responsible for what he is doing.
“The next major advance in the health of the American people,” said Dr. John Knowles of the Rockefeller Foundation, “will result only from what the individual is willing to do for himself.”
In this continuing dialogue between me, the runner, and my body, I become more and more health-minded. I become eager for more training, more discipline, more self-control, seeking inside of me the person George Leonard called the ultimate athlete. All the while knowing, as Leonard suggests, that I am playing the ultimate game, which is life. And in life, you remember, it is not how long you lived, but how you played the game.

“I know only two things,” a student said to Rollo May. “One, I will be dead someday; two, I am not dead now. The only question is what I shall do between those points.”

Jogging or whatever our sport is, then, is the way we move from actuality toward our potential, toward becoming all we can be. At the same time it will fill us with uneasiness, with what Gabriel Marcel called inquietude, the recognition that there is work to be done to fulfill our lives.
And it allows us to see, as Theodore Roszak suggested, that our most solemn, and pressing, and primary problem is not “original sin” but “original splendor,” knowledge of our potential godlikeness. “We grow sick,” Roszak wrote, “with the guilt of having lived below our authentic level.”

6. playing

Run only if you must. If running is an imperative that comes from inside you and not from your doctor. Otherwise, heed the inner calling to your own Play. Listen if you can to the person you were and are and can be. Then do what you do best and feel best at. Something you would do for nothing. Something that gives you security and self-acceptance and a feeling of completion; even moments when you are fused with your universe and your Creator. When you find it, build your life around it.

You can have peace without the world, if you opt for death. Or the world without peace if you decide for doing and having and achieving. Only in play can you have both. In play, you realize simultaneously the supreme importance and utter insignificance of what you are doing. And accept the paradox of pursuing what is at once essential and inconsequential.
Play, then, is the answer to the puzzle of our existence.
These are truly times of peace the world cannot give. It may be that the hereafter will have them in constant supply. I hope so. But while we are in the here and now, play is the place to find them. The place where we are constantly being and becoming ourselves.

If you are doing something you would do for nothing, then you are on your way to salvation. And if you could drop it in a minute and forget the outcome, you are even further along. And if, while you are doing it, you are transported into another existence, there is no need for you to worry about the future.

Throughout history a certain kind of man has wanted to test himself against the most demanding experience in his culture.
“I write, because the thoughts inside have to be put in more visible form. I run because it’s inside pushing to get out.”
Dick Cavett, a dedicated snorkeler, report, “Snorkeling is a rebirth. You just hang there in liquid space like an irresponsible fetus. For me it combines the best features of sport, sleep and religion.”

The first and basic commandment for health and longevity is the following: Pursue your own perfection.

I am ready to start a new religion, the first law of which is “Play regularly.”

Recent studies in both England and Ireland have shown that hard physical work did not change the coronary-risk factors or heart disease in more than 30,000 men. However, in the same group, hard physical activity during leisure time was accompanied by a significant reduction is risk factors and heart attacks. Not by hard work, but by swimming and running and heavy gardening and by tennis and squash and handball and other forms of play, these men achieved health and long lives.
So it is not effort that reduces heart attacks and degenerative disease. If it were only effort, then effort on the job would do the trick. So it is not running, but running that is play, that is necessary. Exercise that is work is worthless. But exercise that is play will give you health and long life.
- Alia Crum’s House keeper study.. it’s your perception of the experience hence why view everything as play and fun

Exercise that is not play accentuates rather than heals the split between body and spirit. Exercise that is drudgery, labor, something done only for the final result is a waste of time.
heed the inner calling to your own play. Listen if you can to the person you were and are and can be. Then do what you do best and feel best at. Something you would do for nothing. Something that gives you security and self-acceptance and a feeling of completion; even moments when you are fused with your universe and your Creator. When you find it, build your life around it.
“Therein lies perfection,” said Marcus Aurelius, “to live out each day as one’s last.” That is why I run and will always run. I have built my day and my life around it. There is no better test for play than the desire to be doing it when you die.
The intellectuals who look at sport start with the assumption that it must serve something that is not sport. They see its useful functions of discharging surplus energy and providing relaxation, training for fitness and compensation for other deficiencies. What they don’t see is that play is a primary category of life that resists all analysis.
Play, then, is a non rational activity. A supralogical non rational activity in which the beauty of the human body in motion can reach its zenith.

The game would be for everyone. And the arena would be the world.

The problem of God has moved from the ancient question “Does God exist?” past the medieval inquiry “What are his attributes?” to our present dilemma “Why did He create the world?” Our difficulty now is the inability to explain the existence of the world and therefore ourselves. We are unable to define our purpose, to show how we serve, to demonstrate our usefulness.
The best answer, it seems to me, is to consider Calvin’s thought that the world is “theatrum gloria Dei.” We are here, then, to glorify God. And that we do this by glorifying the God who is Himself a player. Who created in joy, in play, in sport. We are in this world to give glory to God and rejoice in our own and God’s existence. And we do this in play.
Children, who are athletes and poets and saints and scientists all in one, do this naturally. They seldom question themselves about purpose. Rarely wonder whether or not they are useful. Practically never consider service and respectability. These latest arrivals from Paradise are nevertheless examples of pure unity of heart and soul and brain united with a body that is almost always in action. And that action is play.

Children grown wise and knowing that the answer to the question “What are we doing here?” is “I am.”

You may notice that play can be painful and strenuous and dangerous. It can demand endurance and suffering and perseverance. It can ask the most that a person can give. It presupposes an absence of greed and vanity and the appetites that remind us we are mortal. Play, you see, can be more difficult than work, and no easy task for an adult. It is, however, worth every effort.
Oscar lives in another time frame, where he can wait and wait and wait some more;
It was, as Santayana said of athletics, “a great and continuous endeavor, a representation of all the primitive virtues and the fundamental gifts of man.” It was also a work of art.
Santayana further defined art as having a contemplative side, which he described as pure intuition of essence. I am not sure what he meant by that, although I suspect it has to do with knowing the inner meaning of what you are doing.

That we really know a lot about art. Primarily because we know what we like and what brings us joy. Pure joy, said Santayana, when blind is called pleasure, when centered on some sensible object is called beauty, and when diffused over the thought of a benevolent future is called happiness.

7. learning

The Greeks had no word for “art” or “artist.” That they never separated, any more than I did, the useful from the beautiful. For them, either a thing was useful and therefore beautiful or it was sacred and therefore beautiful.

Poetry and painting and music are, according to Blake, “three powers in man of conversing with Paradise.”
At five, I had the intuitive, instinctive faith that my cosmos, my family and the world were good and true and beautiful. That somehow I had always been and always would be. And I knew in a way of a five-year-old that I had worth and dignity and individuality.
We lost them when we substituted watching for doing. When we saw the lack of perfection as a reason not to participate. When we became specialists and learned to ignore what was the province of other people.
The consumer is passivity objectified. Where the five-year-old finds the day too short, the consumer finds the day too long. I had lost the absorption of the five-year-old and gained boredom. I had lost my self-respect and gained self-doubt. Being middle-class, I had neither the need to use myself physically to survive, which poverty imposes, nor the absolute freedom to complete myself physically that wealth allows the aristocrat.
The five-year-old is just such an aristocrat. He seeks his own truth, his own perfection, his own excellence without care for the expense.
But the five-year-old is more than an aristocrat; he is the worker Thoreau commended. He is the artist the Greeks saw no need to define. He is the athlete we all wish to be. And the saint we will never be. Every five-year-old is a success, just as every consumer is a failure.
The Greek word schole means leisure. Without it, I will never in this life or the next know who I am and who I could become. Without leisure, I will not be perfected.
Sport, more often than not, shows us the elements of what is first-rate. It does this because it is the long-sought moral equivalent of war, not as an outlet of aggression and violence, but as an arena where man finds the best that is in him, a theater that reveals courage and endurance and dedication to a purpose, our love for our fellows and levels of energies we never knew we possessed. And where we see, if only for moments, man as he is supposed to be.

“We are not,” said Pascal. “We hope to be.”

Education is the way we start toward that fulfillment. By taking what we are told, what we hear and what we read and then experiencing it. By testing it through our body and mind and soul and by thus filtering out our own truth, our own reality.
The educated man who does not move through the countryside with his own thoughts as his companions is in danger of never making the real discovery. Who he is.
Intelligence is never mentioned in the Bible.

You must always be on the alert to find the giants, the writers, the thinkers, the saints, the athletes who speak to you. Those who reflect your instincts, your temperament, your body, your mind, your tastes.

I am here to tell you that in your success will be the seeds of your failure.
Success is the certain knowledge that you have become yourself, the person you were meant to be from all time.

8. excelling

At my age, I am no longer intimidated by the opinion of others. I no longer respond when told what book to read, what movie to see, what side to take in the Middle East, or why I need an antiperspirant. And I have had it up to here with being told I shouldn’t enjoy the things I do enjoy.

Boredom, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder. “There is no such thing as an uninteresting subject,” said Chesterton. “The only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
When a musician tells me Beethoven’s Opus 132 is not simply an hour of music but of universal truth, is in fact a flood of beauty and wisdom, I envy him. I don’t label him a nut.
know more but to be more. And evolving in love toward the perfection of man and the universe. The Omega Point.
Teilhard’s “continually accelerating vortex of self-totalization.”
every athlete who has put on a track shoe, indeed all those who have tried to become the best they could be, keep telling us this. We have yet to see the true marvels of mankind and the universe.
“Man is so made,” wrote La Fontaine, “that whenever anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.”
Becoming all you are was the Lombardi credo. Religion is not something you believe, it is something you do.
Death, wrote Leslie Dewart, is the termination of the possibilities open to human nature and life. For Lombardi, those possibilities had to be tried and improved and worked on every waking moment. Let death and heaven and hell take care of themselves.
The message of Bethlehem was not simply that all men were created equal, but that all men were created unique. And they would succeed or fail in the way they fulfilled the possibilities of this uniqueness—the one authentic life each one should lead.

9. running

Every mile I run is my first. Every hour on the roads a new beginning. Every day I put on my running clothes, I am born again. Seeing things as if for the first time, seeing the familiar as unfamiliar, the common as uncommon. Doing what Goethe said was the hardest thing of all, seeing with my own eyes that which is spread before me. Bringing to that running, that play, the attitude of the child, the perception of a poet. Being a beginner with a beginner’s mind, a beginner’s heart, a beginner’s body.

And habit kills awareness and separates us from ourselves.
Take an hour away from what Shelley called a life of error, ignorance and strife, and introduce love and beauty and delight. Those good things began in my beginning. When I was not afraid to respond to my feeling. Before I was taught not to cry. Before I learned that humor had a time and a place and deep emotions had best be concealed, that passion be left unfelt.
When I run, I go back to those better days. Now no emotion is foreign to me. I express myself totally. My body and heart and mind interact and open me to the infinite possibilities only a beginner can envision. And I relive that moment in the beginning of things.
Most people believe that running is running, regardless of when it is done. But I know this is not so. There is a time, as Ecclesiastes wrote, for every purpose under heaven.
The fight, then, is never with age; it is with boredom, with routine, with the danger of not living at all.

If you would not age, you must make everything you do touched with play, play of the body, of thought, of emotions. If you do, you will belong to that special class of people who find joy and happiness in every act, in every moment.

Is running an art and the runner an artist? The best answer is that of Picasso. When asked, “What is art?” he replied, “What is not?”
But rather to encourage them to seek their own art, to become their own artists. To listen for that inner voice calling them to their own way of being in this world. To what they must be.
The distance runner has found his play. And with it he purifies his body. He does not, as the early Fathers suggested, kill his body because it kills him. He accepts it and perfects it and then seeks out suffering, and finds beyond the suffering the whole man. Not at first, of course. At first he explores the possibilities of letting the suffering pass. Of trying every diversion to remove the pain. But in the end, he grasps it and holds it and welcomes it.

10. training

Life is the great experiment. Each of us is an experiment of one—observer and subject—making choices, living with them, recording the effects.

But that doing must be total. We must live on the alert and perform at capacity. “From my point of view,” Ortega declared, “it is immoral for a being not to make the most intense effort every instant of his life.”
Over the years I have come to believe in two rules about training. The first: It is better to be undertrained than overtrained. The second: If things are going badly, I am undoubtedly overtrained and need less work rather than more.

12. racing

Anger against them will only dissipate my energy; it will not increase it. I know this to be true, because I have experienced it.

I am first what I am in practice, and only after that what I am in a race.

Who, then, is the enemy? I have found my enemy and he is me.

In practicing, it is true psych up or psych out. There, doubled and trebled, are all the difficulties I face in a race. There I must deal with doubt and discomfort and fear. Not once, but continually. There I reach the barrier where pain is at its worst. Not once, but repeatedly. There I must overcome the desire to quit, to break off, to leave until tomorrow. And do this daily.

I am first what I am in practice, and only after that what I am in a race.
So I subscribe to Ken Doherty’s holistic approach. The former Penn coach always espoused the idea of a total body-mind-spirit reaction. It takes extra energy, he stated, to maintain a passive expression when you’re hurting inside. Don’t do it, he said. Be yourself. Accept the pain, show it and then you will be able to use it in a positive way. You will be able to relax.
But with the finish in sight, all that changes. Now I am the equal of anyone. I am world-class. I am unbeatable. Gray-haired and balding and starting to wrinkle, but world-class. Gasping and wheezing and groaning, but unbeatable.
“If I had known you wanted it that bad, Doc, I wouldn’t have tried to catch you.” Wanting-it-that-bad comes from training. I was trained by a coach of the Herb Elliot (“The only tactics I admire are those of door-die”) school. He taught me to run one way. Give everything. Hold nothing back. The race you can walk away from was not worth running. It became easier to run myself into oblivion than face him after a race.

13. winning

I was moving in a sea of lactic acid, lifting legs that no longer understood what made them move. My breathing came in short, inadequate gasps, but my body no longer cared. I had broken through a barrier just as surely as I broke through the tape at the finish.

I am living the life my youth had promised me. Living at the top of my powers.
But motivation, it seems to me, rarely stands up to pain. No matter how determined you are, that determination is conceived in a pain-free atmosphere. It has no relation to the real world that comes into being shortly after starting the second mile.
Still, if motivation enhances performance, task aversion, the psychological response to the discomforts of lactic-acid accumulation, the anticipation of future agonies certainly diminishes it. Where motivation paints the future in unnaturally rosy hues, task aversion pictures it in somber grays and funereal blacks.
By the time they came back at me, I was beyond catching because I was beyond pain. I was moving in a sea of lactic acid, lifting legs that no longer understood what made them move. My breathing came in short, inadequate gasps, but my body no longer cared. I had broken through a barrier just as surely as I broke through the tape at the finish. (Seeing athletes break through this barrier is one of the most beautiful things you’ll see in sport)
Man’s limits are not simply in his cells or even in his brain. You can measure lactic acid and stimulate brain areas with an electrode and make a person’s arms and legs move. But there is no place in the brain where stimulation will cause a person to decide. No substance in his blood that will cause him to believe.
That choice, that act of faith, is made in the mind. And in answering the great question “Will you or won’t you have it so?” we find the energy that conquers fatigue and conquers ourselves as well.
Some think guts is sprinting at the end of a race. But guts is what got you there to begin with. Guts start in the back hills with six miles still to go and you’re thinking of how you can get out of this race without anyone noticing. Guts begin when you still have forty minutes of torture left and you’re already hurting more than you ever remember. Fortunately, guts seem to increase with age, rather than decrease. I may not want to wrestle with the Devil, but I am willing to wrestle with myself. And while I am beating myself, I usually beat others as well.

14. losing

I recalled Nikos Kazantzakis, in Report to Greco, asking his grandfather’s ghost for a command. His grandfather answered, “Reach what you can, my child.” But Kazantzakis refused that command and asked for a more difficult, “more Cretan” command. The ghost then thundered, “Reach for what you cannot.”
If you want to be all you can be, you have to expect a failure from time to time. Finding the limits of your ability will.
Which is why you can never tell from the gate who is a failure and who is a success; who is simply out there grooving and who is reaching what he cannot. Who is a twenty-miler and who is a marathoner. Only God and the runner know that.
Where can pain be found on demand? Where can we meet guilt head-on and cleanse ourselves? Where can we experience death and then return? The best answer, it seems to me, is sport. Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours.
Where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on the acre. Where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park.
Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint, and a common man become an uncommon hero. Where the past and the future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world, where all conflicts are transcended as we finally become our own potential.
Writing of a lifelong friend who had died, Einstein said, “He now has gone a little ahead of me. This is of little significance. For us believing physicists, the separation of the past, present and future has only the meaning of an illusion.”
That initiation, meeting the terrible fatigue and exhaustion and suffering demanded in sports, can lead a man, thought James, to a profounder way of handling the gift of existence.
Many of us don’t realize that gift of existence until it is already taken from us. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, who had suffered a severe coronary attack and almost died, spoke of his life thereafter as his postmortem life. “Everything,” Maslow wrote, “gets doubly precious. You get stabbed by the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends. Every single moment of every day is transformed.”
Every moment of every day has been transformed for eight-year-old Jenny Bagwell, who received a kidney transplant from her mother. “Jenny,” says her mother, “sees the flowers open their throats to sing in the morning. . . . She talks to the stars.”
Everything is vanity and chasing the wind, said Ecclesiastes. Driving race cars, running governments, amassing wealth, building cities: all this is vanity and chasing the wind. But, said Ecclesiastes in an about-face, whatever you put your hand to, do it with all your might. He answers to life: It is not the inconsequential things that you do but how you do them that magnifies the Lord.

15. suffering

Running became a self-renewing compulsion. The more I ran, the more I wanted to run. One reason was the energy. “Become first a good animal,” Emerson said. I did. I came to know my body and enjoy it.

“The nobler thing tastes better. The strenuous life is the one we seek.”
He thought the decisive thing about us was not intelligence, strength or wealth. Those are things we carry, he said. The real question posed to us is the effort we are willing to make. And that available effort is always, he kept saying, much more than we suspect. We live far below the energy we have and therefore must learn how to tap these reservoirs of power.
For this, he said, we need a “dynamogenic agent,” a “moral equivalent of war.” Like war, this would provide a theater of heroism, an arena where one could demonstrate courage and fortitude, a setting where one could be the best one would ever be.

And then you must learn it is not only possible but necessary. And that there are ways to make what is possible and necessary, however difficult it appears, a source of joy and happiness.

Sweat and effort and human nature strained to its utmost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, he wrote, are the sort of thing that inspires us. “Man must be stretched,” he wrote. “If not in one way, then another.”
This type of discipline, he thought, would allow us to live to our maximum. And find in ourselves unexpected heights of fortitude and heroism and the capability to endure suffering and hardship. To discover, if you will, the person we are. Reaching peaks we previously thought unattainable.
To lead life well and attend to the major things, we must, he said, make as much of our daily activity as possible simply habit. Otherwise we will consume both energy and time making decisions.
Begin, said James, with firm resolve. Start with high hopes and a strong and decisive initiative. Do not permit exceptions, he warned. Unraveling a string is easier than winding it up. Practice must become an inviolate hour.
Next, seize every opportunity to act in the direction of this habit. Further, do not talk about what you are going to do; do it. And finally, he said, keep the faculty of effort alive by a little gratuitous exercise each day.
The journey from Hopkinton to Boston, like the journey from Troy to Ithaca, reveals what happens to a man when he faces up to himself and the world around him. And why he succeeds or fails.
The finish of any marathon can be that kind of emotional experience. Somewhere along the way the runner has been challenged. He has met pain fairly and overcome it. He has had a real deliverance. And at the end of that ordeal, both runner and spectator are aware that something very special has happened. Sometimes this awareness is expressed in ways that neither runner nor spectator will ever forget. For me that occurred in Boston.
but in a marathon he becomes a tiger. He will go to the end of his physiology to find who he is and what he can do. Put himself deeper and deeper into a cauldron of pain. What is necessary becomes possible, however absurd the effort may be.
Maturity is an uneven, discouraging process. Becoming who you are is not done on schedule. There are years when nothing seems to happen.
Those hills and the miles beyond will challenge everything he holds dear, his value system, his lifestyle. They will ask nothing less than his view of the universe.
To reach this mystical place, time must be ignored. He must act as Zorba said he always did: “As though I were immortal.”

“There are thresholds which thought alone can never permit us to cross,” wrote Gabriel Marcel. “An experience is needed.”

“Instead of hiding our most amazing, mysterious and inexplicable experiences,” she writes, “we must learn to articulate and share them.”
The other Boston is an inner event. It concerns itself with what these thousands of runners are looking for. The search, whether they know it or not, for one’s “true gravity.”
I have on occasions in practice been lost in thought, oblivious of my surroundings but oblivious, too, of the running, so that I could not recall how I got to where I was. But this was entirely different. I was entirely occupied with this magic thing I was doing. I was one with what I was doing.

16. meditating

In this ease of movement, this harmony, this rhythmic breathing of life into life, I am able to let my mind wander. I absent myself from road and wind and the warm sun. I am free to mediate, to measure the importance of things.

“Since pain and boredom are the chief enemies of human happiness,” wrote Schopenhauer, “Nature has provided a protection against both. We can ward off pain by cheerfulness; and boredom by intelligence.”
We are rarely if ever bored but feel pain at ranges imperceptible to most people. I feel pain as a dog hears sound.
On the other hand, I like being alone. I enjoy my own company. I am satisfied running the roads far from any other human being. For me loneliness is the desirable state. Solitary confinement, a touch of heaven. I am never bored.
I am built to be alone. I am an intellectual, which I suppose is what Schopenhauer meant when he wrote “intelligence.” But being an intellectual has really nothing to do with intelligence; it simply describes the way I think.
Either everyone is normal or no one is.
Emerson was on to this. “A man’s growth, is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.” Jung made much the same observation. He was saddened, he said, by the friends he had to abandon, but there was nothing else to be done.
Perhaps Jung felt the same. “I need people to a higher degree than others,” he said, “and at the same time much less.”
The distance runner, I have said, does badly as a lover and almost as poorly as a friend. It is the price I must pay for my stream of consciousness, my river of ideas. It is my payment for the growth that goes on in my brain, for the knowledge I have yet to attain. I cannot attend to anything that would obstruct that flow or keep me from those goals.
On the road I become a philosopher and follow the philosopher’s tradition. I affirm my own existence and no one else’s. I am occupied with my own inner life. I am constructing a system that will justify my own way of being in the world. And discovering, as Emerson said, that there are thoughts in my brain that have no other watchman or lover or defender than me.
nor do I have time for hate. Hate, you see, takes the same attention and time as love, and even more energy. When you hate, energy flows out of you toward the hated person, the hated cause, the hated country. Nothing burns one up faster than hate and anger and revenge. There is no quicker way to be drained of emotion and energy.
Galileo I say to myself, “It is so nevertheless, whether I say it or not.”
The first half hour of my run is for my body. The last half hour, for my soul. In the beginning the road is a miracle of solitude and escape. In the end it is a miracle of discovery and joy.
But those are the insights of a free mind. Thomas Merton, another solitary, understood that. The beginning of freedom, he wrote, is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body, we are entangled in our mind.
And we discover that the closer we become to just being, the closer we come to understanding “I am who I am.”
This is probably not true about everyone, but the runner would agree. He possesses himself in solitude and silence and suffering. He is gradually stripped of desires and attachment to things. As I run, I get closer and closer to requiring nothing more than life supports, air and water and the use of the planet. I surrender to something greater than my will.
I take the universe around me and wrap myself in it and become one with it, moving at a pace that makes me part of it.
Just the previous day personal immortality had changed for me from a childhood belief and an undergraduate theory to actual fact. It had become a reality. On my afternoon run I had suddenly overreached the confines of time and space. I had become the perfect runner moving easily and surely and effortlessly toward infinity. My ten years of almost daily running had brought me to an area of consciousness, a level of being that I never knew existed.
Running that day became for me, as I’m sure it has for others, a mystical experience. A proof of the existence of God. Something happened and then, in the words of a recent letter writer to Harper’s, “One simply knows, and believes, and can never forget.”
What route you take depends on yourself. I cannot bring visions of immortality to a nonrunner by dragging him along on my afternoon runs. What you do must absorb you utterly and intensely; and to do that it must be your game, your sport, your play. “How we play,” writes George Leonard, “signifies nothing less than our way of being in the world.”
For the dancer, the dance brings this feeling for life, this intimation of immortality. (“When a jump works,” says Jacques d’Amboise, “it feels like forever. I’m riding on top of time.”)
One must go through discipline to get to freedom. Be assured it does not occur to beginners. Only when how you do a thing surpasses the thing you are doing can you break through the barriers to these levels of consciousness, your own inner depths.

But then when they ask you the real question that is bothering everyone in this age, “Is this all there is?” you can answer, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

17. growing

And what I must deal with is not luck or chance, but choice. It is choice that is omnipresent in life, not chance. What I can see and feel and almost taste is choice. Choosing my self, my values, my universe. Choosing my own drama, my own life, my own heroism. Seeking through imagination and reason and intuition that unique something that I, and no other, am here to do.
Like all pilgrimages, this one is filled with stops and starts, with peaks and valleys, with pains and pleasures. There are periods of depression and elation, times when I overflow with joy at this conjunction of action and contemplation. Other times when I am so tired I must stop and walk. But in that hour I know certainty. I know there is an answer to my odd union of animal and angel, my mysterious mixture of body and consciousness, my perplexing amalgam of material and spirit. And if for now that answer is only for the moment and only for me in my lowest common denominator, me the runner, it is still enough.

Sin is the failure to reach your potential. The answer to life is more life. You must seek the limits of the possible and then go beyond. Guilt is the unlived life.

Depressions are part of life. The runner, he says, must expect them, even welcome them. They are just as normal, just as inevitable and just as necessary as the happy times.
I turned to a friend next to me and said, “George, right now I could pull the sword out of the stone.”
“I know it is poetry,” Emily had said, “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” My ways may be different, but they are just as physical, just as uncontrollable. When I am in the presence of poetry and genius and the real world we came from, I know
Rodin, for instance. He once told Rilke that he had read The Imitation of Christ and that in the third chapter wherever the text had the word “God” he had substituted “sculpture.” It read just as well, he said.
But her answer here was to become as good at her game as God was. To approach his perfection by perfecting her imperfections.

18. seeing

We were not created to be spectators. Not made to be on-lookers. Not born to be bystanders. You and I cannot view life as a theatergoer would, pleased or displeased by what unfolds. You, as well as I, are producer, playwright, and actor making, creating and living the drama on stage. Life must be lived. Acted out. The play we are in is our own.

We watch others so that their skill becomes our skill, their wisdom becomes our wisdom, their faith becomes our faith. But eventually we must go it alone. Find our own skill, our own wisdom, our own faith. Otherwise we will die without having learned who we are or what we can accomplish. And we will die without having an inkling of the meaning of it all.
For now, at least, I am a child at play, at home in a home made for me.
I am fighting God. Fighting the limitations He gave me. Fighting the pain. Fighting the unfairness. Fighting all the evil in me and the world. And I will not give in. I will conquer this hill, and I will conquer it alone.
The world belongs to those who laugh and cry. Laughter is the beginning of wisdom, the first evidence of the divine sense of humor. Those who know laughter have learned the secret of living. Have discovered that life is a wonderful game.
Crying starts when we see things as they really are. When we realize with William Blake that everything that lives is holy. When everything is seen to be infinite and we are part of the infinity. Tears come when we are filled with joy of that vision. When we finally and irrevocably say yes to life. When we reach past reason and logic and know that the test of what we do and how we do it is delight.

“Anything can make us look,” wrote Archibald MacLeish. “Only art makes us see.”

Only someone who has wept in joy and truth and beauty, who has had the vision, can make us weep also. Only those who have gone through the cleansing and purification in a long apprenticeship of discipline and effort can speak to our innermost hearts.
Well, I don’t know about you, but when I have a problem, I run with it. And so on this clear October day, I am heading north toward the Hook on the ocean road. Ready to live the questions. Trying to find answers. Searching for a new response to the human condition. For insights I am sure will not come through my senses or rational mind.
The running alone occupies me. Fills my awareness. I am a steady flow. I am pure involvement. Total concentration. I am comfortable, calm, relaxed, full of running. I could run like this forever. And during all this I narrow my consciousness to the immediate moment. I am moving from time measured to where time stands still. I am giving up past and future for this now.
And I run with no threat of failure. In fact, with no threat of success. There can be no consequences to make me worry or doubt. I am secure whatever happens. And in that security I reach a wholeness that I find nowhere else.
The talk was more than a talk. It was a love affair. I spoke to each face in turn. And saw in each reflection of my feeling for them. I told them of the beauties of our bodies, and how we needed play. I told them we were all to be heroes in some way and if we were heroic enough we would see God.
Life, I saw again, was a problem that will never be solved. At no time is this more evident than when we are close to the solution. No time more evident than when we succeed. When we have come far, but not far enough.
What do I do now? More of the same, only better. Run another and learn that much more about myself and the world and Who made me. Run another and another. Bathe myself in pain and fatigue. Reach for energies I have yet to use. Run another and another and another. Make my truth out of that experience, out of what happens.

What do I do now? No matter what I have done, there is still more to do. No matter how well it has been done, it can still be done better. No matter how fast the race, it can still be run faster. Everything I do must be aimed at that, aimed at being a masterpiece.

Each day I live. There can be no other way. I thought then of the ancient Egyptians who believed there was a judgment after death and the initial step was to weigh the heart. It seems so true. The heart is the measure of our energy, our courage, our intuition, our love. It is the measure of our days, of what we have done, of who we are.