When your eyes blink open you can’t see yourself. Before sleep, a cripple, you are told that you will wake up in a different body. To not be alarmed, and to ease into your changes. Whatever you do, don’t rise, take it slow. But you wake and you can’t believe anything is different. That is until you bring your blue hand in front of your face. Now, for the first time in I don’t know how long, you feel your legs. And before you know it, you are running. For the sheer glee of it, the warnings gone in the rush of movement, as you dash off, away, letting your new legs take you in what can only be described as a runner’s high.
I didn’t expect to like "Avatar." But that scene in which the actor Sam Worthington first is transformed from cripple to avatar stays with me. When I saw it at the theater, it sent shivers up my spine. Yes, I thought, they got it. That’s what it feels like. Through the magic of Hollywood, my thirty-plus years of running for my life was boiled down to one unforgettable twenty-second scene. At that moment, director James Cameron has you. Here is your hero, Jake Sully, the Avatar, running for his life.
I return to this often so that it seems like a tic. The business about not running in headphones. Where I run, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park – in all kinds of weather: cold, heat, rain, snow – since 1976, if I could count the number of times I have run on treadmills it wouldn’t be any more than a few dozen – there are birds in all seasons. My favorites are the cardinals, but to see them you have to pay attention.
It’s their cheep you hear first, when they are in a pair. To see that flash of red in the gray urban bush trumps whatever I would hear in headphones. I can also almost sense the red tail hawks, too. As they circle high above me, watching. At times like this, I really think I could fly. Like a country song.
I promised practical suggestions in this post. And marathon trainers, have patience. Next week, I will be starting with Running for Your Life: Week One, leading to RFYL: Week Ten (The posts will not conform to real time; for example, expect Week One and Week Two next Tuesday and Thursday), which takes us to the Oct. 10 Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Remember, too, go elsewhere for a nuts-and-bolts training manual: a 100-day program for success. Rather I see this as part-memoir, inspirational guide AND training log.
And when it comes to motivation, practical suggestions involve mental commitment. The stories I tell are rooted in the hope that I can reach someone, as I said in my first post, in hospital, or facing a personal crisis, and find some strength here to lace up your new running shoes and get out the door. It’s not that I won’t address questions about stretching, rest days, interval training. And if you have questions, please include them in the comment section. I will be happy to address your own specific concerns about a running regimen, or persistent leg or knee pain. But I’m a writer first, and believe that motivation comes from within.
Earlier this year, M and I went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson show at the Modern Museum of Art. In one photo, elderly Chinese men pose like water birds in a marsh. In the accompanying magazine article, Western readers are introduced to the practice of Chinese boxing. In the script I see, the words tai chi don’t even appear. Rather, the magazine copy says groups of Chinese box without hitting each other every morning.
Tai chi has helped me stay motivated. For two months in the mid-1980s, I took a tai chi class. Although I don’t do the short form – what Cartier-Bresson saw – anymore, from those days and years afterward of tai chi training, I can intuit when my body and mind are moving out of alignment during a run. When it comes to mental preparation, I can’t say enough about tai chi as a discipline that can form the foundation upon which you can soon find yourself running for your life.
Staying motivated is about rewards, too. Non-runners often tell me the runners they see in public are a miserable-looking, unsmiling lot. The runners I know are not in clubs, doing a 5K after work, then going to a pub for some beers. In Prospect Park, Brooklyn, runners are typically alone. And yes, usually with a sour look on their face.
There are times I look like that, but mostly not. To me, that is the secret of staying motivated. To bring to the road what the Buddhists call the beginner's mind, an attitude of openness and eagerness. I remember days in Windsor, Canada’s Motor City, training for the Windsor-Detroit Marathon. For my twenty-miler, I ran the leafy streets, long stretches of Riverside Drive to Tecumseh, the namesake of the great native warrior instrumental in the surrender of Fort Detroit, during the War of 1812, almost two hundred years ago. Bend in the river, meditative quiet. As I gaze across the St. Clair River to Belle Isle, I think about my rewards at home: A quart of cold water, a beer on ice, and while I’m drinking the beer, a whirly dance to the sounds of Stevie Wonder, “I Wish” from Songs in the Key Life, the volume thrown up on my stereo.
When it comes to the mind, there are other rewards, of course. New research shows people with weakly pumping hearts have decreased brain volume – a marker of brain aging – compared with those with more vigorous hearts. * After thirty-plus years of running, my resting pulse is 46 beats per minute. Elsewhere, a study by scientists at the University of Illinois found that three, vigorous 40-minute walks a week over six months will improve memory and reasoning. ** Call it, running for your brain.
There is nothing that says a runner in headphones would not – with only slightly breaking stride – pick up from the ground a gently loved lady bug stuffed toy that had fallen out of the hands of toddler sitting with her mom on the summer grass. But it’s likely you wouldn’t hear her soft voice of gratitude, “Thank you, sir.”
* Time magazine, Aug. 16, 2010
** Newsweek, June 28-July 5, 2010
Next: Running Without Headphones
