The Why… Grayson Highlands 50 Miler
Goals:
Have fun
Don’t get injured
Finish the race
Bonus: Finish around 13 hours, or middle of the pack.
Results:
Had fun
No injuries
Finished 49.7 miles with 7,500’ elevation gain. Placed 36 out of 148. Time - 11:57:22
Thoughts:
People ask, ‘Why would you run 50 miles?’.
The big ‘why’.
Not sure I had an answer to that. Maybe my why was because something deep down inside felt the primal need to get out and move, to see where I would line up, to explore the depths of my physical body. Curiosity became my why. What I learned was this…
The basics. Our brain is the computer, our body the vehicle. The computer is programmed through a millennia of survival to maintain stasis. This homeostasis is safe, it is balance and equilibrium. It is ‘the ability of an organism to maintain a stable internal environment despite changes in the external environment. It's a process of self-regulation that helps the body function properly and survive.’ It is not getting eaten by a Sabertooth Tiger.
Unfortunately, the vehicle is at the command of the computer. The more opportunity for homeostasis in a climate controlled building with locks on the doors and windows that don’t open, with food delivered deskside at the click of a button and swipe of the card, all the better.
Such an unfortunate chain of events, as now our vehicles have grown slow, unmaintained, laden with extra weight. Our very movement, when we chose to do so, is inefficient. We couldn’t run from the Sabertooth should it return from the halls of extinction if needed. Increasingly, we couldn’t even get out of our seats. Our electric golf carts won’t save us. Evolution just hasn’t kept up with the times. The threat to our survival isn’t predation, hasn’t been for 10,000 years, but instead it is cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
In the words of Allan Watts, ‘This is a disaster. Time to wake up!’ It’s time to override the system. The computer has deluded us into believing it is in control for far too long. As the Inn Keeper of Inveronan once told me as he passed me pencil from over the bar so that I might sit by a highland stream and write the day away… ‘You are not your body, you are not even your mind.’
From where does our energy come from? What drives us hither and thither? What is it that got you on top of a mountain at mile 32 where the wild ponies graze on bald grassland as the wind kicks up at your back after a 4 mile climb? What is that voice in the quiet stillness that we no longer listen for, nor can be heard over the news and media and emails and advertisements that form the static of modern existence?
Our consciousness. Our energy source. The spark which ignites our being. The illusive why of who we are.
This conscious energy may be our spirit or soul. Its voice alludes us as we seek to connect through prayer, meditation, yoga, therapy, and fitness. For if we do not connect with it intentionally it turns dark, and like a neglected child seeks attention by craving mind altering substances and dopamine hits.
Running is meditation.
Someone asks, ‘What do you think about when you’re out there?’
‘I go into a trance. My mind and body are in movement through the world, one with the space I am moving through, focused only on breathing.’
Running can be like dancing. You do not dance to a destination. There is no purpose to the dance, save only to dance. In this way, totally present in the moment, running is meditation only with the introduction of pain.
In training our goal is to visit with pain in small doses. Visiting with pain we become familiar, even enter into a relationship with it, increasing our threshold for it. The goal is to become intimate with our body, understanding it so that we can know when our mind is manipulating us into returning to stasis. We discipline our mind and body so that so that we can know our thresholds, so that we can push up to our redline without bounding over into injury. In training we are just visiting the mythical ‘pain cave’, but in a race, be it a 5k or 100k, we are no longer acquaintances, we are existing with it.
Kicking off from the start line, the work had been done. The 500 + miles since my last race had been run. There was no expectation. Have fun, don’t get injured, finish. My why was curiosity. What would I learn from mind, body, and soul when pushed 20 miles beyond my longest distance? Could I push up to my threshold without going over? In the lowest of lows would some veil of wisdom be slowly revealed.
What I experienced was that pain is the result of the mind being slowly severed from the body, layer by layer, until completely and unwillingly the two become separate and beautiful functioning entities. The body liberated from the mind suddenly becomes far more capable than we ever could have known. When that happens we find that the mind is humbled and vulnerable. It is no longer the great trickster manipulating us into thinking it is in control. Instead, it becomes a servant to our conscious energy, a servant to our soul spirit.
Now we find ourselves moving totally present through the wilderness, drawing from its energy, in existence and flow with its respirations, a part of its constant breathing. We are in touch with the primitive long distance runner. Not the sprinter running from bears, but the endurance hunter and gatherer running down his prey over miles and miles. We are moving, not as prey, but as the predator.
The pain has not left us. Oh no. The legs are lead ballast, the heart may begin beating hard and the breath drawn short and erratic, the stomach rejecting calories and nauseous, and you can witness your energy source, like a lamp in the night, slowly fading. This is nature too, and you are consciously aware of it without attachment to it, you are existing in it without controlling it. The exhaustion, the breathing, the nausea, the legs, all these things are problems to be solved, but they are not the outcome. The outcome is much greater than that.
The mind, a good servant and terrible master, now fulfills its role as communicator. ‘Stop drinking that mix. Your stomach wants water, your muscles need electrolytes.’ ‘You’re not tapped out, you are using more energy than your body can convert. Slow down. Take your time. Take small bites from the energy bar.’ And so on, the mind and body serving the one.
This is the why. Because we learn not to be afraid of pain and suffering. Time falls away in significance as we are present with our existence. Our being is stripped down and its components clearly defined. We can see the definitions of our mind, body, and spirit in their own separate roles, we see their personalities, capabilities, their light and dark. We can work on each one separately for a while before returning to the outside world in which we are inundated with distractions and confusion.
How is it that we have come to live in a world in which running 50 miles over highland mountains with wild horses and waterfalls coursing through deep woods and over grassy balds is so much simpler than walking out our door and getting into our cars to fight traffic and endure the bombardment of billboards and media and advertisements to arrive at our destination where we stare into a screen in which every communication demands our attention and requires us to demand of others, and so on, and so on until our mind in crisis and overload takes the drivers seat to keep us in the lanes. Then finally, once off the highway it craves dopamine hits to return to equilibrium, all the while our bodies reduced into atrophy while our conscious energy that forms our very own soul is reduced to a quiet voice in the wilderness calling to us unheard.
This is why we run…
