I am on A Lifelong Quest...!
Janai and his mum Lynn were waiting for me outside the sports shop; I arrived typically dripping with sweat, having walked the mile down the main road from Gros Islet to Rodney bay shopping mall…
We greeted one another and I apologized for my slippery state! ‘I still haven’t acclimatized’ I laughed ‘I am a typical westerner and I am continually thawing…’
I was glad of the air conditioning in the sports shop…
Lynn was talking to the shop assistant ‘I prayed to God all night long that I would find a way to get him some shoes…’ she was saying…
I was with Janai, ‘have you always liked running?’ I asked him… ‘I have only just started, with my school, two months ago’ he replied, ‘and I have found I am good at it…’
He picked up the running spike, there was only one choice; he handed it to me and I held the light sleek article in my hand and wondered at life - how only yesterday I was saying to Anadi that if I ran on the track again I would but myself some spikes…
As I was speaking, I was remembering the feel of their light beauty…
Just one day later I am buying a pair of spikes…!
While he was trying them on, his mum told me that the school want to send him on some training camps; ‘but they did not like that it he has no shoes’ she continued…
As we left the store, Janai said to his Mum that he didn’t want people to see him carrying a bag from the sports shop… ‘I understand’ I said ‘why not turn it inside out…’ and so he did…
I learnt that trick in 1978 when I was working in ‘Victoria Wine’ during the Christmas holidays… Grayshott health farm was just down the road, the people staying there were on strict ‘cleansing diets’… But they would often turn up at Victoria wine ‘needing booze’. They would ask us to turn the bags inside out so that they could sneak the bottles back into their health farm without being spotted…!
Janai took down all my contact details… So, maybe I will know the journey of the shoes, or I maybe not… But it was a wonderful experience for me to launch the brand news shoes into their running life - and to give them a runner to race them around the track… A lot faster than I can!
It’s a funny thing trying to run fast really, but I like the way ‘the quest’ affects everything else in my life positively… I don’t mean the results of races, because really and truly it’s the training where I discover any unconsciousness, and by that I mean tension… I am generally a ‘relaxed racer’, Nigel used to comment about me in my international running days ‘If we can get you to the start line all is well…’ It was the patches of training between races where the ‘troubles arose’…
Today a friend Mel was curious (on facebook) as to what unconscious running would look like… I said that I thought that it looks like anything else done unconsciously, full of tension and no flow; he said he had been imagining that unconscious running would be running around bumping into everything like a pinball, but then commented that this is a good metaphor….
It is… A great metaphor; when we are full of tension and therefore unconscious of what is going on inside, this can reflect in our outer actions and experiences in that it can be like bumping into things rather than flowing and connecting…
And so I like trying to run fast again, because I am curious to discover and winkle out tensions and old patterns and outdated memories. They only emerge in my running and no other aspect of my life now; and they only emerge in the space where I commit to training with intent…
I am the same being; racing is a space of relaxation for me, albeit focused and quite ‘full on’!!
So, I am ‘finding out’ if I can aim for the stars and run in the flow…
This has been a lifelong quest
And I am still finding out…