The final taper week brings a stillness … there are usually only two final runs in the week before the race, both of them very short. In that rediscovered stillness there is a refreshing of the body, a quiet gathering of energy and purpose. There is more time for sitting, time for a couple of extra chants after meditation is ended … time to remember the canyon where I will be running this Saturday and have run three years previously, time to anticipate the sun breaking past the canyon walls and revealing Nature’s many-colored mural across the ancient, corrugated surfaces of rock and clay, the hymning of unseen coyotes on the rim. Time for remembering what moving for 50 miles feels like and understanding that the beauty of ultra marathoning, as someone else has said, is its complete lack of utility:
“It makes no sense in a world of space ships and supercomputers to run vast distances on foot. There is no money in it and no fame, frequently not even the approval of peers. But as poets, apostles and philosophers have insisted from the dawn of time, there is more to life than logic and common sense. The ultra runners know this instinctively … They understand, perhaps better than anyone, that the doors to the spirit will swing open with physical effort. In running such long and taxing distances they answer a call from the deepest realms of their being — a call that asks who they are.” — David Blaikie
Who am I? I confront that question in the stillness of sitting, in the motion of running, on the streets of cities, by the cliffs of canyons, on a linty cloth-covered cushion in a corner of my house, at my desk as I write this, and I know the answer is always right here. It is my task, regardless of the miles travelled, to always be here, too.
