My training for the LA Marathon coming up in six weeks continues to go really well. Deep joy of joys, this week also brings new shoes: a pair of Adidas Supernova 10’s that feel like the equivalent to Mercury’s wings! These will be the shoes that carry me for my next marathon ☺.This last weekend, our long run in the Team in Training group was 16 miles—it’s a good distance. However, what really illustrated to me that my commitment level is at a new high was the seven extremely wet and glorious miles I ran yesterday. I was laughing out loud as I splashed along the banks of the LA river in Long Beach, feeling exhilarated, strong, and very much in love with life.
When my running lifts me even higher than I could have imagined, I sometimes think back to my pre-running days. I used to be a 60-a-day smoker and the only running I was doing was seeking to avoid the police during some of the more colorful periods of my life.
The human body amazes me in the way it can adapt to the destructive things we can subject it to. Smoking, fast food, drugs, and excessive alcohol use, for example (I’ve done them all). Of course, as it seeks to function with all this toxicity, it needs to reassign energy resources. Functioning with a severely compromised liver, smoke-filled lungs, and/or clogged arteries, takes more energy—picture the additional pressure required to push the same amount of water through a clogged pipe, than a clear one.
Certainly, this means there is less energy for physical exertion. But there are also fewer available “energetic funds” to be allocated for creative thinking and problem solving or deep feelings of joy and inspiration. Our spirit becomes muffled.
The body—and we as individuals—adapt to this new way of being. It’s really an amazing process, a safety valve even. The body will no longer let you run up the stairs, because this is now a life-threatening option. You’ll get out of breath and be stopped. The body adapts and we adopt this new way of life. What was previously perhaps 80% of our capacity for living becomes the new 100%—the new maximum capacity. We lose 20% of what we were able to do previously. I suggest that this happens not just physically, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually too.
If our health continues to diminish, the level of our maximum capacity continues to diminish. Next 80% of the new (already diminished) 100% becomes the next new, even lower maximum capacity. Now we are 40% down. The body adapts again and we adopt a lifestyle that matches it. It becomes a downward spiral.
The good news is that the process works in reverse too. Make changes in the way you care for your body, and you can make what was 100% the new 80%. As you strengthen your body, its muscles, organs, and tissue with healthier living, your capacity for living now expands to what would have been 120%, but is now 100%. Fewer resources need to be allocated to emergency systems and more resources become available for building, maintaining, and creating you and your body. More for creativity, joy, and inspired living. You then adopt this as a new way of being.
You get to choose whether you use this “adapt and adopt” process to spiral up or spiral down. It’s a matter of choice. Of course, it raises an exciting question, one that I encourage you to run with today:
If I’m currently living at a 10, what would it mean to now think of that level as an 8? What, then, would my new 10 look like? And what would I need to do to adapt in that way—to adopt a new 10?
Happy trails!
