"Running is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing. It's the rhythm of your life. It's an expression of love in time and movement, in the ups and the downs."
Recent Twitter post (Follow me at RunningDeeper)
As I write, the clouds are rolling in and I have just emerged from the jacuzzi, where I had been soaking with my family as we watched the fresh snow fall. Heaven.
Squirreled away in the mountain paradise of Idyllwild, our cabin sits at just over 6,000 feet. It's been a perfect spot to ease into my running again after an annual three-week hiatus to give my body a chance to recover from the last year's running, the half-dozen marathons and the beginning of prep for a year of ultra events. It has taken a fair degree of discipline to stay off my running feet, but now I am enjoying the fruits of my labor—or lack of it!
Originally, I'd planned to use my two weeks in the mountains to kick start my training for the Miwok 100k in May 2010. Having entered the lottery, there was little more for me to do than pray to the gods of running that my name would come out of the hat. The results were published a week before we were due to head up into the mountains.
My name wasn't drawn.
Disappointed as I was, I decided to initiate my training as if my name had been pulled. Then, a week later, I received an e-mail that 40+ people who had entered the lottery never followed up when their name was pulled, and so I had been added to the race list as one of the first 40 on the waiting list. Christmas came early this year. I swear, you could have heard my whoop of joy down on the desert floor, 6,000 feet below.
It's been a week of ups and downs. Literally. There's no flat running to be found here. My runs have entailed either 1,500 to 2,000 feet of descent, turning around, and climbing back up, or doing it the other way around—up and then down.
Feeling the crunch of crisp snow, hearing the sound of the wind rushing through the trees, smelling the fresh wood fires from deserted cabins, and carrying my pepper spray in case of hungry mountain lions, lungs burning for oxygen at the higher elevations, I have rarely felt so alive.
The ups and downs of these training runs are of my making—I choose into this mountainous terrain willingly and enthusiastically. I know it will grow me as a runner and prepare me for Miwok.
I could have used the initial news of my missed draw from the lottery as a reason to be down. And stay there. I chose to adjust, and live into my vision—and to act accordingly. I chose to make my down into an up. Hill training for the mind, for consciousness itself. Not only focusing on the law of attraction, which so often I see dissolving into empty wishing, but also engaging a greater law—the law of creation. Spirit, it is said, meets us at our point of action.
Time and again, if we choose it to be, running in the outer world can acts as an illuminating metaphor for what is possible as we traverse the inner terrain of our being.
Next time you encounter a "down" in your outer world, remember the value of hill training in your running life—and engage with your "down" form that perspective. Give thanks for the opportunity to build strength—developing your evolution into a true spiritual warrior.
