60 minutes on the North Field.
I was thinking a bit about training today, leafing through a book or two, and I was reminded of the following story a wise man once told me. Not that's it's super-relevant. But it's a good story. Also, Kangway's mysterious illness probably primed my memory.
There was a man who for many months had ailed from an unknown disease. He had seen many doctors, none of whom could heal him. Then he began visiting traditional healers and trying new-age therapies, but nothing worked. At last he heard of a specialist who might be able to treat him.When the specialist met the sick man, he sat him down on his examination bench, talked to him for a few minutes, and immediately diagnosed his illness. The doctor explained the man's illness to him, told him how to treat it, and wrote his instructions down on a piece of paper.
Although other doctors and healers had claimed they understood his illness before, the man was sure that this time he had finally found someone who knew the true solution. So he grabbed the doctor's instructions tightly and returned joyfully to his home. He built a small shrine to the doctor in front of his house. He decorated it with flowers, and placed an offering of fruit on its small altar. He walked around the shrine 100 times, bowed low to the ground three times, took out the doctor's orders from his pocket and began chanting, "One pill in the morning, one pill in the afternoon, one pill in the evening. One pill in the morning, one pill in the afternoon, one pill in the evening..."
1 comment:
meh. i don't understand your story. i guess too many years away from tech has turned me into a dumbass...
also, i do try to chill the hell out and enjoy running and appreciate making some progress... but patience is not a virtue that i've ever had, and its frustrating to be trodding around the same circles, making steady but ever so slow, slow progress, just to claw one's way back to a level i've already been.
having this injury and having these health problems and being limited to a very controlled and sensible training plan has actually shown me what i most value about running. true, i'm one of the more exacting and neurotic ones... but at the same time, running is where i find freedom and discovery and the expanding of the edges of my known world. how far does this road go? how steep can i climb? what does it feel like to run for 2 hours, or 17 miles? how fast can i get from this crack in the road to that lamp post? how many miles can i run in 7 days?
every step down a trail i've never been before, every minute longer than i've ever run, every loop run faster than i've gone before, is like this cool new thing that is fulfilling in some way that's totally independent of everything else. i remember that a lot of what motivated me to run past that first year, despite the fact that my racing wouldn't count for a team anymore, and the the fact that even if it did, i pretty much sucked with respect to SCIAC anyways... was because of this. in running i found out new things about the world and about myself, and it just so happened that becoming faster was a side effect of that.
then the 'wanting to be faster' part kinda took over, and i became excessively tormented and neurotic, then injured... and now it's kind of like i'm in this no-man's land. since the year off, everything i've been doing training wise kinda feels unsatisfying. it's almost always slower, shorter and more tiring to boot. i so very much want to discover new ground again... but there are days when that seems ridiculous since my body won't even cover the old ground anymore... and then i feel discouraged and discontent. it kinda comes and goes.
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