Frosty Beauty Beckoned Us Into The Park...
A landscape covered in wintery wonderland frosty beauty, beckoned us into the park once again.
We ran for an hour. Up and down and around and about - past the frozen lakes, up the hill and then down and round again - circling the tree by lake, magnificent and still in the winter scene. White geese nearby.
I felt vibrant, full of energy and light on my feet. I can feel my fitness building, even without huge amounts of running yet.
The changeability of my life in the last few weeks hasn’t leant itself to a big amount of running, and I can see the value of this. My return from injury being tempered as it has been, is allowing a rebalancing, a deep down recovery. A new line in the sand has been drawn…
I don’t believe my injury was a fluke, an unexplained, ‘Oh dear, poor me, how did that happen?’ occurrence…
I think it had been coming for a long time. My friend Greg who is ‘much more than a body worker’; describes an Achilles tendon injury as the rebuilding injury; because it takes you right back to basics.
Re-building is required; I had known deep down for a long time, that I needed to take a break, recover, re group, really ‘let go’ before ‘going again…’
I have learnt a lot through all of my injuries; and I have had many!
The injury road has always allowed me another exploration of any inner patterns that are locked in, holding me back; often paradoxically through ‘pushing forward too hard’
This Achilles injury of last September, in truth dates back to 2011… I had trained so well for the Edinburgh Marathon which took place that May. I wondered how fast I could run in my fifties… I shifted my lifestyle so that I could prepare well.
I ran most of the miles alone so as to build my emotional energy and allow my soul its journey. I committed to always sleeping for no less than eight hours; this meant adjusting my workload… I faced and cleared the fear that arose through putting my running first again in my fifties…
Just before the race I ran a threshold training run with my friends Rob and Jim. We concluded that I was capable of 3.05 plus or minus 5 minutes depending on uncontrollable factors on the day.
Rob’s favourite term with regard to sporting wisdom is ‘control the controllables’. This can be applied to all of life; we can only control the controllables, and then respond to anything we cannot control from a place of ‘taking responsibility’ for our responses and actions, thoughts and feelings. This means that we are in the position of ‘being the chess board rather than a pawn on it…’
I loved that race; twenty five years on, running along some of the same roads in Scotland as I had in the Commonwealth games marathon; my big brother Stuart was there again standing cheering me on just as he had been in 1986…
I finished the race in 3.08 – 3.05 plus 3 minutes!
And it was then that the pattern that has ‘felled me’ so many times took a subtle hold again…
The time ranked me third fastest over 50 year old in the UK. I felt inspired to aim for number 1, and I was also inspired to run towards a sub 3 hour marathon again…
All this was exciting, looking up the road to a new destination; but it was then that ‘the push’ occurred; the trying too hard; the not allowing full recovery from the marathon, felled me…
My left hamstring was tight at the end of the marathon; it didn’t fully loosen and I was back training a month later. I was flying. I was so fit. My heart and lungs in amazing shape… but my biomechanics needed some more rest.
It is important to always travel at the pace of the slowest part of the body; I didn’t listen fully; and so I hurt my knee…
And on reflection in the past three years leading to my Achilles injury last September; I didn’t really and truly give my body the chance to fully re align or get fully fit…
I was working a lot; and I met Anadi!
I kept running but I didn’t listen to the voice that kept saying to me ‘Go back to basics…’ until I was stopped completely…
And so now I have a new line in the sand; vast vistas of possibility spreading out before me.
It feels that the ‘push dynamic’ that I have sought to free myself from since I was young has fallen away…
We will of course see if this is true, as the days in this new 'unnamed, untamed unclaimed land' as my friend Liane describes Anadi's and my journey; this land beyond the line reveal themselves…
My father was always urging me to ‘slow down’ to resist the urge to ‘do too much’ and so ‘over–train’… He kept up a routine of exercises himself every morning, as well as swimming three times a week - until he died... Not long before he did leave his body he said to me...
‘Darling, I think I am learning; I wasn’t feeling like swimming my 20 lengths today, and so I just did 16 – I am learning!
‘Daddy’!! I exclaimed, laughing – ‘if you are just learning to slow down, what hope did you have trying to teach it to me…?’
It feels to me that rather than learning to let go of trying too hard, the dynamic of ‘pushing’ might have fallen away.
Without the push, within me remains the powerful and positive dynamic of stretching, striving, reaching for the stars
