There is something so... what is the word... cleansing about running.
Physically and mentally.
Physically, when I get back after a run, my lungs feel open, my heart exercised, and my legs ache. You take the pain with the relief. The thing is that exercise high will last the day and even the crack of my sternum as I take a deep breath is a pleasure. Sounds strange, I know. I would have never have said this a year ago, when I just started running. However, it is true and when I do not go out for a run, when I am injured (I am old, I get injured), I know I feel a little more lethargic.
I am also a clothes size or two down now too. Had to buy a new wardrobe. Ah well.
Mentally, it is a similar thing. There is something about getting out into the countryside whether it is for a dog walk or a run that just fills me with a sense of peace and calm. There are days when I deeply need that - work stresses, life stresses, they all build up over time.
Putting one foot in front of the other, focusing on breathing, listening to your body, feeling your heart beat fast in your chest, eyes fixed on the path ahead, and testing your mental resilience to just keep going that little bit further, that little bit faster, becomes the everything of existence. Yes, there's an end point, a finish line, a point at which you need to run no more, and you can look forward to that, deeply wish it was a little (lot) closer at times, but every race has an end, every moment passes, every meter you travel is one more in the past. The thing with running is you have to move forward or you're going nowhere.
Once the aches kick in, once your lungs start to strain, your heart to beat faster than it ever has, you're tested and every step you take you pass that test. And you do it time and time again. It is victory after victory. Win after win. Success after Success.
It doesn't matter how fast you are, how you compare to others, you are running against yourself and the goals you set.
That's the key to it. The satisfaction of winning against yourself and your own limits. A friend of mine keeps telling me I am putting limits on my thinking - and maybe that's true, but at that finish line, when you stagger to stop, sweating, hurting, exhausted, there's a sense of accomplishment which will carry you through to the next time.
Reading and Writing is the same, I feel.
You can read a book, be carried away on a swell of imagination when you fall into the zone. When that writer has conjured the world for you, when it syncs with your mind, your inner cinema, the words can fall away in the subconscious and you just... read. It's an amazing moment, like meditation, when you fall into that zone and another when you wake from it, closing the book and know you'll come back to it later, when you'll fall once more into book, that world and those characters.
Writing is a more of a challenge. You are building that world, those characters, and story. But you do build it, and in creation there is joy and freedom. One word in front of the other, on and on, until there's a book, a completed story. There's a writing zone you can fall into when the characters take over, when you've got to know them so well that what you're really doing is reading a book the moment it is written... you are no longer writing, but freeing the story from the ether in which it exists - an ether of the mind.
I suspect musicians would say the same, sports folks too. Anyone who partakes in any activity, physical or mental, and does it well enough, dedicates themself to it, will know these feelings, these freedoms and victories.
So, if there is something you love, go and hold onto it, pursue it with vigor and effort, enjoy it for all it is worth, keep putting that one foot in front of the other until you cross that finishing line, and know there's another race, another checkered flag ahead.
Keep going.
I need to get back to writing. It has been a while.
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