RE-FRAME: This is all about language. This is all about choice. This is all about decision. YOU have a choice to make. You can choose to make a difference to how you view the world. You have within a preset inclination towards, or away from, any number of feelings, actions, emotions and experiences. AS a long distance runner my task is to keep moving onward when my body would rather have paused, stopped, given in, collapsed at any of the doorways I pass on my route. As a climber I an inclined to find the most challenging, dangerous, complicated route to travel to the top of a cliff. (Most cliffs I ascend have a 'walk off', a path that can be walked down. If I want to see the view from the top, why not just walk up there?) WHY push? Why sweat? Why bleed? Why suffer? TO achieve. FOR success. FOR joy. The sensations of suffering, of pushing the body. The reasons for the sweat dripping into my eyes. The sharp rocks when I climb, that scratch and cut as I jam my body against them hoping for a little extra friction, another inch higher... the suffering is the reason we Do sport. We suffer that we might in the end, achieve. "can fear be a power-full navigation tool?" RE-FRAMING is about looking over our concepts of negative emotions and experiences, and shifting them into helping them to find our way. How can fear be a power-full navigation tool? How can jealousy clarify our desires? "I'm smiling on the surface, I scared as hell below." THE object here is to grab something dark, turn it over and hold it up to the light. Taking the darkest of times, focusing on them and finding the pain and suffering, then reasoning with it in the light of steady meditative focus allows it to become a learning point. AS you read through my examples and learn a little about what scares me, what makes me turn around, back off, re-assess my situation and also see what makes me push deeper, finding my hidden reserves, think over situations when you have experienced these feelings and look over how you can use those emotions and memories to re-tune your attitude to face the situations better next time and perform differently. UP-SETTING is about upsetting the record you have been playing and making the replay different, better. More in line with your values, your beliefs, your ideals. IT is the dream of the success, the top out on the cliff, the finish line of the race, the achievement, that we DO the suffering for. Yet the suffering, the fear, the pain can be power-full tools to help us see where we are going, how to get there and what we can gain as we go along the way the our end.
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FIRST run of summer yesterday - Sunday March 2nd. I know it was summer because I set out without a headtorch and I could see! 6:42am sunrise as I hit the road a few minutes before that. IN the first quarter of the run I crossed paths with more deer than cars. I listened to more songbirds than engines. I breathed more scent from crocuses, daffodils and snowdrops than exhaust fumes. So, arguably those flowers are all spring flowers, yes. And early March is spring, yes. And the sprinkling of rain and - still - flooded footpaths and by-ways are remnants of the atrociously wet winter, yes. However, I am running for summer. I am pushing for the bright mornings and clear skies, I am going for the fine weather and delicious hot scented summer air. And nothing else. I left behind me, quite happily - though I am sure before the slide towards winter following the Solstice in June I will navigate plenty more in the dark - thrilling moments of running along trails spotlighting my location with my headtorch and staring bright eyed up into the cosmos and playing games of constellation spotting. Running towards Orion, or dashing towards The Plough, connecting the dots and finding Polaris as I bend my way back north and shoot for home under a sky of scattered specks of stars. RUNNING builds me into my biggest self. Some-one who gets up and Does. Not some-one who sits back and says, 'yeah, maybe next yeah, next time, next week...' I am deliberately and steadily releasing, through focused training and intense physical effort, a part of myself who I no longer feel a need to express and enact. THIS part is a characterisation that I have come to see in myself over the past few years of self-discovery and mental focus. This is what I feel times of my life have been shaded by, I curl up and hide. I tremble and am afraid. I try to escape from life into my own little shell of a world, not willing to express my thoughts, my opinions and my beliefs for fear of ... what? Being ridiculed, being railroaded, being trampled, laughed at, forgotten. This alter-ego, my alternative self, is a personality that I have named Pequeno. Pequeno is a Spanish word meaning Small. I choose to no longer be small. I choose to no longer be Pequeno. Pequeno is Spanish, it means 'Small'. I choose to no longer be small. I choose to no longer be Pequeno... PEQUENO does not like Blogging. Pequeno does not like coaching. Pequeno wants to settle for a quiet and low-risk strategy of non-expressive and 'playing it safe.' There is a time for Pequeno, a time for caution, a time to be safe. Unfortunately none of the world's achievements were made without risk, without danger, without putting some-thing out on the line. NOW is a time for action, for constant effort and deliberate attention. Now is a time for focused creation of the future. Without that, nothing else will come. Only a rewind and rehash of the past over and over and over. SAFETY, as Pequeno would have me live within, is not safe. It is an illusion of safety. It is a paradigm shift to leap out and create my own business, income, world, life. And it scares the life out of Pequeno, I feel him inside me squirming and kicking. Don't do it, don't do it. You can't say that. What will they think? AND who, may I ask is They? Who am I going out on the line to impress? A lot of business 'mentors' that I have had who clearly sought to feel the Pequeno within me have spoken well to him. They have fed him the fear filled world of self-employment and the difficulties of managing my own world. Pequeno hears those stories and does well at rerunning the tapes. I nod and smile and then ignore them. The mentors have told me the business model is not viable. I throw back examples of ten people who have already done it and they ask why more have not. And argue statistics and Pequeno listens, and then pops them up for me at choice (or rather inopportune) moments - which is to say somewhere between frequently and constantly! "I listened to more songbirds than engines. I breathed more scent from crocuses, daffodils and snowdrops than exhaust fumes. " PEQUENO-NO-MORE! My mantra when I am out on the trail. I may not be the fastest runner out on the trails, or in the race. I may not be running as efficiently, or training as hard, or pushing so much weight in the gym (unlikely as I never visit gyms, my exercise routine with weights involves having my son and niece sit on my back and doing push-ups (they are both 4 and thankfully my younger son, age 2, settles for sitting on my ankles!) Weight training and my life, not so much!) The precision of my training routines, and my flat tire that stops me taking a long ride home from lunch out as the boys go out on a play-date. There are all sorts of slips, trips and misadventures in this process. And Pequeno is there, noting each one down. Suggesting a little more hiding, not pushing, not going out running - it's raining and it's dark and it's flooded. Well, of course it is dark and raining and flooded. It is January 2014. What else could it be! The battle for mental supremacy in my world. Pequeno and The Weather Versus Will Power and Drive. SUNDAY 2nd March, Will Power and Drive won out a major victory. I completed my first half marathon. On ironically the same day as Reading Half, I set out at 6:40am and cruised in relative comfort the link up lap I created the night before, Winnersh to Arborfield across the back of Barkham to Wokingham, then a weave home along quiet roads. Major dilemmas on the way; wading knee deep along a footpath trashed to excess by horses - hosed off in the front garden before going into the house! And... actually that's about it. Walk break at half way to have a long drink and eat an apple. Squelching wet feet - situation normal - from the horse fields, I am getting very used to having wet feet now though, it has been a winter for wet foot running. "Pequeno and The Weather Versus Will Power and Drive..." PEQUENO was not too happy about the accomplishment. Only a suggestion of, Ok, you've done that now. Let's stop, you've proved you can do that, now, let's move on to... err, no. How about the next training session, the next run, the next early morning. The next mission. Keeping my eyes up, my feet flashing over the earth I roll over the hills and up the inclines, sights set firmly on the stars as I stitch together what celestial navigation I may be able to pull together and string up my old self to dry. Poor Pequeno will never be the same again. And that is exactly the plan. I have no New Year's Resolutions. In fact, I'm not sure I ever have had any. HOWEVER, I have got something a little different. I embrace a Word of The Year. Introduced by my wife - Vicki - and spread like smouldering fire to people around us, friends, family, colleagues. The point is not to claim desire to do this or that, the resolutions of 'get fit', or 'swim a mile', or 'eat less chocolate.' SPECIFIC goals are very vague, it is so limited, so singular focused. Using a word and seeing where I choose to let it take me is liberating. That is why I like it. It is infinite. It is scaleable. I can make it as huge, or small as I choose to focus attention into it. It is not a vague desire to sketch out a future-self and say, I'm going to be that person. I will be fitter, stronger, thinner, more literate, better read, the list goes on. My Word allows me to evolve and twist and come back to it, grow some more, wander off for a month and then come back newer, better, shinier. RELEASE is the Word of 2014. As a part of this journey I have thrown myself into a project I have attempted to engage with a few times before, running. Not just going for a run, once a week, or twice, and doing a few K. This is all-in, this is gut-busting, this is intense. Step one, marathon training. Come the middle of the year I will be marathon fit. THIS is enough of a project for most people, the aim to run a marathon some time in their life, or to run the same one for a few years and beat down their time somewhat. Following my marathon year of 2014, after a couple of marathon races in the summer and autumn, I will be launching into ultra-marathon training at the end of the year. WHAT is ultra-marathon? Any race longer than a marathon - because that is not hard enough for some, not deep enough, not trying enough, not testing enough. So, come the season of 2015 I will be running races of 30 - 100 miles. After that who knows. There are races up to multi-day 400 miles. RELEASE and running are intricately linked, by 'training' program is a process of daily meditation, a process of activity led mentation. In the fashion of cultures all over the world who engage in running as a process of focusing their meditation and enlightenment practices I am engaging in my running for the internal growth process of expansion of my mind and to learn deeply about myself. The longer the run, the deeper the state of meditation and introspection possible. ULTRA-marathon runners observe that the process is always a battle not with competitors, or a struggle against the clock, it is an internal and mental process, learning to push harder, go further and keep going. The finish line is only part of the journey, not the destination. All points in between, Mile 5, Mile 63, Mile 87, they are all just parts of the journey, and that is how the journey runs and how this record plays out. THERE will be set backs, there will be delays, there will be obstacles. I look forward to them eagerly and hopefully. Running is not dwelling on and being consumed by set backs. Ultra distance running is about embracing and overcoming the odds. It is about overcoming and crushing obstacles. It is about It is about releasing the issues I face on the trail. SO, where will we be taken on this next roller coaster of a journey of a year? Where will I find myself come next winter? How many miles - and how many pairs of shoes, running shorts, jackets and trails - will I have smashed? Only time will tell. I'll see you there. I am off to see how far away my limits are compared to where I once thought they were. ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance. New runners for Christmas! Time for some serious trail abuse.
More on the barefoot running phenomena as I learn about it. And more on the status of my poor shoes no doubt! |
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AuthorAndy Clubley-Moore: joyful outdoor sports activist, writer, father, husband. Lover of life, activity, success and barefoot living. |