Run With Mu

The second week of more intensive training leading up to the Palo Duro Canyon 50 Mile in October, a good week with more steady progression. I should be up to 6 hours on Saturday and 4 on Sunday (my peak) by mid-September, about a month before Palo Duro. I’ve bought two mini Coleman coolers that I use as a portable aid station – one filled with drinks, the other with towels, gels and other dry goods. Now I can drive wherever I want, park the car, and run variously timed out-and-backs to my “aid station” (the hatch back of my car). It makes for more varied routes and terrain and relieves the monotony a bit.

I’ve volunteered to act as zazen monitor for the Thursday night sit, which will be held at a local Episcopal church as soon as our sangha negotiates sharing the space with the church … it’s in a more accessible zip code than our zendo for some sangha members (including me) and may attract some new members, or at least a few curiosity seekers. My duties: watch the clock, ring the bell at the end of each of the three 25-minute sessions, and lead the chanting before we dismiss. I think I can handle it. So, Monday Night at the Zendo will become Thursday Night at the Other Zendo.

Monday, 8/3: Yoga 40 minutes a.m.
Tuesday, 8/4: Yoga 40 minutes a.m. 30 minute tempo run @ 8:00 pace; 42 minutes total.
Wednesday, 8/5: 1 hour 30 minutes through neighborhood, a.m.
Thursday, 8/6: Yoga 40 minutes, a.m. Hill repeats: 6 x ¼ mile @ 6% incline and 8:20 pace, 50 minutes total.
Friday, 8/7: Yoga 40 minutes, a.m.
Saturday, 8/8: 4 hours 30 minutes cross country/trails/roads, a.m.
Sunday, 8/9: 2 hours, a.m. 30 minutes restorative yoga, p.m.

Wanting the run to go faster,
The pain to be over –
I vow to let it all happen
One step at a time,
One breath at a time.

Runners and joggers are, me included, a generally impatient lot. Hey, we like to run – if we wanted things to move slower, wouldn’t we be walking or sitting instead? It’s one of the most persistent koans I face as a runner and practicing Zen Buddhist: reconciling the seeming dichotomy of running, an activity of speed and motion supposedly done to get somewhere, and sitting in zazen, an activity of stillness and silence with no real goal at all.

But both running and Zen are bridged by a single activity: the breath. It’s through the breath we find the oxygen necessary to run and to sit, and through the awareness of our breath that we follow our effort during both. If we lose awareness of the breath in zazen, we risk losing focus and clarity in our practice. If we lose awareness of the breath while we run, we risk losing track of the intensity of our effort and can either blow up before reaching the finish line, or go too slowly and not make our goal. Through awareness of the breath, running and sitting are one.

When I sit, I often become aware of how difficult it is to relinquish even the slightest illusion of control – how much I want to be the master of my own breathing, rather than trust my body to handle things on its own. It is so difficult to simply let my diaphragm rise and fall by itself … that quiet act of surrender, of letting things simply take their course, is something we are constantly, exhaustively struggling against. My prayer is to stop struggling.

This morning as I ran, I noticed when I let my breath come and go entirely on its own, my running felt more natural, but my pace slowed somewhat. To go faster is unnatural and requires more voluntary control, more forcing. There are times and places for that. But enjoying a cooler breeze and lighter air in my face today, I surrendered to my breath, seemed to feel my pace slow a bit … and still managed to finish within seconds of my time for the same course the previous week. I’ve observed there is a kind of magic in simply letting things happen. Patience is, in the hands of the truly patient, a positive sort of alchemy.

But, as we’re always told, patience doesn’t come easily. I’ve been sitting with my current assigned koan for quite awhile now, and for a long time without experiencing anything resembling “progress.” It’s during periods like this that Zen practice starts to feel a little silly. Why am I sitting on this cushion? What’s this koan all about? Shouldn’t something be happening? Shouldn’t I be wiser than I was a few months ago? I feel the same way with my running at times — in fact, I’m been in a sort of training rut for the past few weeks. Shouldn’t I be faster, stronger, and more efficient after all this work? What gives? Why run, anyway? The dead spaces in running, and in practice, tend to make our minds secrete even more white noise than usual.

The weather can be an excellent koan of its own. Cooler, somewhat drier air slipped into my neighborhood recently in the wake of a violent storm. It happened after weeks of my slogging through sopping humidity, when my pace and progress staggered and slowed and I had begun to seriously question what I was doing. And yet, with one change of the wind, my pace quickened again and I realized my crisis of confidence was all in my head, a mental construction built on the fragile foundation of the hot, humid weather – and, like the weather, prone to collapse as soon as a cooling breeze bumped against it. That storm front was a dramatic object lesson in the misguided appetite of our minds to busily feed in any available garbage heap.

During the twelve, twenty-four, or more hours it can take to finish an ultra marathon depending on the distance involved, I often pass through several violent storm fronts before reaching the finish line. But these fronts have nothing to do with the weather. They’re emotional thunderheads that can go from endorphin-induced euphoria to painful gloom and back again, over and over, sometimes in less than a mile — a continually unwinding melodrama being improvised in the off–Broadway of my own mind. I often imagine my mind’s landscape during an ultra as one of those fast-motion movies of the sky: clouds continually forming, boiling, and burning away as they race by.

That image was dramatically revealed to me in my first ultra, a 50-mile trail race. Struggling midway through the race through rain and calf-deep mud, I climbed to the top of a small rise and teetered there, exhausted, as my mind raged at my folly and insisted that I quit. Listening to that voice, feeling my quivering legs fill with lead, I stared numbly ahead at the thin river of mud that used to be a trail, stretching seemingly into infinity across a flat, featureless plain. The sky lowered, a monstrous grey weight. There were no cars, airplanes, or other runners – even the scattered shapes of wheeling birds were soundless. Feeling like a character in a Beckett novel, I hovered, tiny and breaking, in that vast silence.

But as I stared into that endless sky, despairing, I realized it contained so much: so many clouds, birds, storms, shifting winds, the sun, moon, and stars, all appearing, disappearing, reappearing. If the sky could hold all of that at once, just let it come and go, perhaps I could hold all of my nagging voices, my shifting emotions, and let them come and go.

I squished painfully forward, continuing down the trail with new determination and insight to the eventual finish.

The similarities I have experienced between an ultra marathon and a week-long Zen sesshin, or meditation retreat — another intense emotional and physical laboratory – are exciting and eye-opening. To complete an ultra or a sesshin, patience through emotional and physical awareness must become largely instinctive through repetition, or your emotions can easily trick you into believing you are them. You must be able to contain everything and let it go at the same time, constantly observing yourself fill and empty, over and over.

Of course, there are times when it’s simply too painful to run or sit. But physical injuries that limit our usual activities can be especially helpful teachers of patience. Recovering successfully from an injury is often just a matter of doing nothing – which, for most runners, is much easier said than done. Runners are typically take-charge personalities, accustomed to doing things a certain way right now and getting the expected result. When faced with an injury, it’s the rare runner who wants to simply rest and let it heal. After all, won’t it heal quicker if I actually do something about it?

There are whole catalogs of special rollers, massagers, socks, boots, and stretching devices marketed to runners looking to make their injuries heal faster, to get the waiting over with as soon as possible. And yet, based on my experience, the one thing that often truly brings the quickest and most lasting result is rest. But it’s a lesson I have to repeat again and again. So many runners come back too quickly from an injury, unwilling to sit idle another day – only to reinjure themselves and restart their cycle of suffering back at square one.

Sometimes a very serious running injury or unexpected personal crisis presents itself as yet another, tougher learning opportunity: to go beyond mere patience and embrace acceptance. Patience is hard, but patience is still waiting for something better. There is still a shadow of false hope in patience. When we rip a tendon or suffer a severe stress fracture on the eve of a goal race we’ve been training for over many months, when the serious illness or death of a loved one takes us into that place beyond our ability to control, acceptance is the toughest koan of all. Our minds whirl with regret, with worry, with a thousand imagined possibilities, but the reality of the serious injury or crisis points in only one direction, and we find ourselves afraid to go there. Sometimes, it’s the only place left to go.

During the last minutes of the last sit of the last day of an intensive seven-day sesshin, increasingly numb with fatigue and pain in my legs and back and desperately wanting it all to be over, I suddenly heard my father’s voice, as clearly as if he were sitting on the cushion next to mine: “Hey, Ed?” He had died just over a year ago. In that moment, I realized how I had hid my grief over his death from myself and others for so long – and how the sesshin, similar to an ultra marathon, had slowly stripped all of my hiding places bare. Through forcing myself to confront that vast emptiness and dwell in it for hours each day, I was finally able to sit with my father and hear him — in some ways, for the very first time.

For runners and others seeking to dwell in patience and acceptance, Nothing is the often unwanted place where we must begin. It takes Nothing for Something to be allowed to happen — a space to be filled, an empty trail to run, a torn meniscus to heal, a passing life to be remembered, a stillness to shout into and echo its own response. So here’s to the waiting rooms, dry spells, frayed tendons, seven-day sesshins and long lines of this world, the Big Nothings that can easily delude us in thinking we’re in permanent limbo, when in reality the karmic seeds have already been sown — and somewhere underground, the pods are already slowly cracking open with surprising gifts, pushing their way to the surface.

We can’t always see what we’re waiting on. But it’s coming, regardless. Train through the dog days of August, rest that right calf, sit on your cushion with your boredom and itching nose, wait for that phone call from an estranged friend, watch as your savings leak away in the wake of a punctured economy. And, in the emptiness that opens, find room to celebrate the life so quick to leave us all. Let the alchemy of our practice work its slow magic within you. Breathe with every step, and know it.