Well, its now been 3+ weeks since I’ve been able to run (nearly) daily, and this is the longest stretch of running I’ve had this year by about two weeks. FINALLY!

The best part of it is that running is finally starting to feel like something of mine again, where each of my steps is not an action directed at a physical end-point, but rather, it is an action done for myself.

I remember earlier this year reading a passage in Muriel Barbery’s “The Elegeance of the Hedgehog” and falling in love with the way it described movement, and thinking that it captured the way I felt about my running:

“A really odd sort of movement, very fluid but above all very focused, I mean focused within himself. Most people, when they move, well they just move depending on whatever’s around them. At this very moment, as I am writing, Constitution the cat is going by with her tummy dragging close to the floor. This cat has absolutely nothing constructive to do in life and still she heading toward something, probably an armchair. And you can tell from the way she’s moving: she is headed toward…. I don’t really know how to explain it, but when we move, we are in a way de-structured by our movement toward something: we are both here and at the same time not here beause we’re already in the process of going elsewhere, if you see what I mean. To stop de-structuring yourself, you have to stop moving altogether. Either you move and you’re no longer whole, or you’re whole and you can’t move. But that player, when I saw him go out onto the field, I coudl there was something different about him. I got the impression that he was moving, yes, but by staying in one place. Crazy, no? … (I)t became obvious in the haka: he was moving and making the same gestures as the other players (slapping the palms of his hands on his thighs, rhythmically drumming his feet on the ground, touching his elbows, and all the while looking the adversary in the eyes like a mad warrior) but while the others’ gestures went toward their adversaries and the entire stadium who were swatching, this palyer’s gestures stayed inside him, stayed focused upon him, and that gave him an unbelievable presence and intensity. … The Maori player was like a tree, a great indesctructible oak with deep roots and a powerful radiance - everyone could feel it. And yet you also got the impression that the great oak could fly, that it would be as quick as the wind, despite, or perhaps because of, its deep roots.”

I know it’s a bit of a long-winded passage to quote, but as with the rest of that book, I think it’s written exquisitely well and don’t think that cutting out more than I already have would do the passage justice.

Now, how this relates to my running. My first week and a half or so back recently, and in my previous returns to running again this year, I was always so focused on things that used to never even cross my mind. My concentration was totally on how my feet were landing, adjusting my footstrike as I moved uneven block of sidewalk to uneven block of sidewalk, focsued entirely on how loose the dirt at my foot’s next point of ground contact was. How would I have to adjust my stride, how much more is my foot going to slip in order for me to keep moving forward at the same rate/effort that I am currently at? Every step I was taking belonged to some measurable end goal (the end of the road, my driveway, that street sign up ahead). Each movement was not mine to be caught up in and enjoy.

But about midway through last week, I found my concentration on myself and nothing else. I was not caught up in my foot’s interaction with the ground; I was enjoying the joy of repetitive movement with my legs and arms, and the way that it was affecting my lungs and heart in such a wonderful way.

This is the feeling I’ve been craving since January. I can stomach things like bikes and ellipticals, even rowing machines and the weight room, but nothing but runnings has the ability to make me feel so free and content. And I do believe I’ve tried just about everything I could think of.

I think my intentional lack of wearing a watch has been a very good thing since getting back to this a few weeks ago. That way, I don’t have any concrete way of quantifying my runs. Sure, I know that the routes are taking longer than they ever have before, but without that watch there to tell me for sure, I don’t even think about it during the run; I’m just pleased to be feeling the movement again. But, make no mistake, I’ll be itching to really push myself again and get back into a racing a mindset… and probably sooner rather than later.