Run With Mu

Continuing with this somewhat impromptu series on Running with Mu (last installment and links to earlier ones here), let’s start to put a little structure around all this meditating, yoga, and running.

For the first week, no running – you just meditated (zazen) for 5-25 minutes or so each day, combined with some helpful runner-oriented yoga 4-5 times/week to increase flexibility, strength, restore tired muscles, and enhance body-mind awareness. It’s telling that in much of classic Zen literature, “body” and “mind” are not separated, but are described as one thing: “body-mind.” Your body is your brain; your brain is your body. No “body,” no “mind”; just body-mind. If it doesn’t make much sense to you now, it should after spending some quality time running with Mu.

For the second week, you added 3-5 minutes of kinhin to your daily zazen as a way to increase body-mind and motion awareness — all of the little things that have to happen just to propel you forward, and what changes in and around you as a result. Then, you ran – just a little, and without a watch, Garmin, or iPod. But you don’t want to run every day the second week … just once every other day, and just until you feel pleasantly tired. No specific minutes or miles. And no speed workouts please!

On your days away from running, pay attention to how you feel about taking a day off: do you feel anxious, or guilty? After many months (or even years) of running nearly every single day and even running through injuries, we can often feel some anxiety or guilt on days we don’t run … and we really shouldn’t. Running should never feel like an obligation, or a chore. As you’ve hopefully started to realize even by only the second week, being able to run is a gift, and we should always treat it that way. So, for the second week, don’t give yourself a gift every day, or your gift will begin to feel more like a burden.

By now the more competitive runners, even the vegetarian ones, might be asking, “Where’s the beef?” All of this meditating and the no stopwatch routine and all of the other kinder/gentler/fuzzier stuff is okay for a week or two, but dude: what about training? Real training? Can you run with Mu and still train to compete?

Absolutely! Running with Mu is about finding your way to a healthier relationship with your running, not retiring from racing. If you like to race, that’s great. By finding a healthier relationship to your running, you can also take a more balanced approach to your racing, and without sacrificing personal performance goals. But walk before you run, and run with Mu before you race with Mu. It took a long time for you to get frustrated about your running, and it’s going to take a little time to get back. We’re just in the second week! Patience, Grasshopper.

Okay, okay, we’ll speed things up a bit: continue the zazen/kinhin/technology-free ”recovery run” 4-5 days per week routine for the first month of running with Mu. Enjoy your sitting, your kinhin, and your running. Enjoy the freedom from the scheduled miles per week/minutes per mile treadmill.

Starting with the 5th week, we’ll try some different, more focused runs, including pace runs. But instead of timing ourselves with a watch, we’ll experiment and make ourselves aware of 4-5 distinctly different personal “gears,” from slowest to fastest, that we can learn to call on whenever we need them … not by the numbers, but by feel. Pace runs again! That’s a little beefier, right?

More on this next week.