Mind Food

Me on the beast again, putting in time tonite.

See, intervals sharpen the straw, but continuity of motion strengthens it. De-crapify it: Run long without stopping, become a better runner.

A big part of running distance - a disproportionately big part - is mindset. While I wouldn't advid someone 400 pounds over weight with bad joints trying a 10 km for their first run, I CAN say that once you have a base, it all turns into mind food.

It's really a moving meditation. If you have some of THAT practice under your belt, you can escape to a bit of the timeless place. Regardless, it's a pull of tension - after the white burn of warm up has drained and the blood vessels are happy in their transport work, you can either:

-stop
-run below a comfortable speed
-run at a comfortable speed
-run above a comforable speed
-push yourself
-hurt

And staying with the yin yang of it all, they all have pros and cons.

-Stopping - good if your injured, bad if it's a half-hearted surrender.

-Running below comfortable speed - good after a lot of miles or if you need to recover; bad if it's just because you haven't found the run's cajones and squeezed them a bit. Expect ennuie and half hearted surrender if you continue.

-Running at a comfortable speed - good, and a challenge if you're going for strengthening the saw; bad if it's the cajones thing. See previous point.

-Running above a comfortable speed - good for sharpening the saw; bad if you are on the edge of physical ill.

-Pushing it - see above.

-Hurting - see above and above.

I can stick with one or a couple of the above, or cycle through the whole thing, which is where the mind food comes in.

Started off comfortable tonite and ran for strength; first 5 or 7 minutes was fine. The mind had lots to chew on - things that happened today, philosophy, meditation, checking out what's going on around me, thinking about tonite. Then that food gets a little thin. Usually around the time that some level of exertion sets in.

At that point, I have the choice to either feed the mind more, starve it, or try and go to the timeless place.

Again, I usually transit through the three. There's correlation between the three and the plusses / minuses of the levels of exertion:

-run slow - easier to go on less mind food; counter-intuitively, this 'easier' space can be harder to maintain. The timeless place is maybe POTENTIALLY easier to get to from here, but staying there can be difficult - pulled back by a mind that is getting bored by the repetition of foot after foot after foot.

-run fast - it's not necessarily that it is easier to go on less mind food, there's just less choice about it period. When you're hurting and running the ragged edge to your capacity, it's hard to think about much but the seconds ticking off on the clock.

T'would be interesting to put together a mind-food diet for runners.

namaste