Be Where You Are
This morning, I woke up without an alarm. It was the first time that I can remember doing that in what seems like months. Recently there has always been something to do and even if I know I can sleep in a little late, I’ve made it a point to at least set the reminder alarm so that I don’t go too deep into the morning.
My room gets a lot of natural light. One window opens up to the Northeast where you can see the buildings of what must be Westwood or West LA. Two more face Northwest where you can make out the Santa Monica Mountain Range. The last opens up Southwest to the beach and sunset. I never have to use lights during the day, and in the mornings the light will pour in from the Northeast window above the head of my bed, gently at first and getting more aggressive as the sun rises higher in the sky. Today that window woke me up around nine o’clock. I had some good plans for the day too.
Without anything specific on my plate, I was going to wake up and go running, following that up with a quick workout. Then I would clean out my car, do my laundry and knock out a little meal prepping for the upcoming week. Once all of that was feeling good, I would sit down at my desk to write this article. It seemed like a really good plan the night before.
When I woke up and walked across my porch to go get a towel from the dryer, I was struck by how nice a day it was.
I’m always amazed that this feeling still happens to me.
Southern California weather is just about as good as it could be anywhere on earth. I’m starting to think that rain might just be propaganda made up by the liberal media. Yet there are still days where you walk outside and think damn, this is a good one. And when I experience that good day feeling, I go directly to the beach.
I live exactly three miles from the beach. I know this because I run there sometimes and I usually live in the space that exists between three and six miles. Below three doesn’t feel like I’ve done enough and when you get past six you start committing to more time consuming workouts. So when I’m feeling good and in the groove with my running, a jog from my house in West LA down to touch the start of the Santa Monica Pier is enough to feel good, but not enough to throw off my whole day. Coincidentally, the distance between the Santa Monica Pier and the Venice Pier on Washington Avenue is also three miles. I learned this fact when I was dating a woman who lived just south of the Venice pier and would start my day with a nice pier to pier loop.
So as I was driving down to the beach on this exceptionally good weather day, windows down and music blaring, I started feeling myself a little bit. I thought it had been quite a while since I made a little pier to pier loop and what better day than today. I could choose a great playlist or album, pop my shirt off and dive right into the sights and sounds that are Santa Monica and Venice Beach, as the Winter fades away and we step into those beautiful Summer beach days. All these great thoughts of my own athleticism and physical fitness at the beach flooded my head as I pulled up to the shoreline and parked my car.
Then the run began.
Now, the run wasn’t bad. I didn’t start it out and think that I had made a terrible mistake — which has totally happened before — but it also didn’t start as smoothly as I had hoped. To begin with, I started my run at the same time as another guy who was going in the same direction. This is never good because it always becomes a race. I tried to let my competitiveness slide and allow him to get out in front of me, but as I ran I started to think maybe that wasn’t the right play. I sort of broke down his stride, his form, his age and overall fitness and thought it was better to pop out in front of him, so I did. I turned it up just a notch or two and skipped past him on the bike path as I started to groove into my run. The problem is that this groove was a little faster than how I normally start a run and it was certainly faster than what I would do if I were planning to run six miles. So while I was able to get out in front of him, I started to notice all of those little things that aren’t feeling as great as they could be feeling, and questioned how far I would actually run.
I’ve said this many times before and I’ll say it many times over but the key to distance running is being present in the moment. The second you want that run to be over and start thinking about the things that you’ll be doing after the run, or counting the miles and minutes until you are finished, you are cooked. That’s when your brain starts to realize that you’re running and you really don’t have to. You could totally be walking. Nothing is chasing you and this isn’t a race. There is literally nothing that says you can’t stop, freeing yourself almost immediately from all those uncomfortable feelings that are associated with endurance sports. The temptation is always there and the more you think about all the other things, the greater it becomes.
That’s where you’ve lost the present moment.
Meditation was definitely my first introduction to looking at the present moment. I was never a distance runner. I saw running as the thing that you did so you could play ‘real’ sports. There’s a great line from the television series Eastbound and Down where Kenny Powers (former famous baseball player) tells a triathlete, “I play a real sport, I’m not trying to be the best at exercising.”
I will admit that back in high school, that is totally how I viewed the track kids. So running as a form of meditation came much later for me. The cool thing about running though, is that it is black and white. You can run a marathon, or you can’t. You can finish that mile in under seven minutes, or you can’t. There really is no gray area. Sports like basketball are different. The other team might be better than you, but if you guys show up and play your A game, you could beat them one out of ten times, and that's all it takes. You can try a little harder on a given day and make it count for something, whereas I don’t think any Olympian lines up for the 100-meter dash thinking that on that specific day they might be able to knock a couple tenths of a second off their regular time and bring home the gold. Nobody was ever going to beat Usain Bolt unless he tripped.
My point here is that running, like meditation, brings you face to face with reality as it is. Not how you want it to be. Not how you envisioned it to be. Not how it could be. Not how it shouldn’t be. But exactly as it is.
That’s important because so much of our world is about getting away from how things are.
Ads constantly tell you that they can take the hassle out of buying a home or a car or insurance. When you’re in line at the grocery store, you turn to your phone to see someone in Mexico or what your favorite sports team is up to. In this day and age, we are seeing the great death of the here and now and it seems sad to me.
Part of the reason we try to avoid the here and now is because it’s not always good. Today, I didn’t run six miles. I shot for four, turning around at the Venice basketball courts and two miles, thinking I would have enough juice to get all the way back, but completely bailed when my app told me I had hit three. It’s a shitty feeling to not accomplish a goal you set out to do. It’s a little bit heartbreaking when things don’t go the way you expected. But that’s the reality. I can’t run six miles until I can run four, and today I could only run three. That’s where I am right now, but the cool part about that is this:
The here and now ain’t so bad.