Many lives in a lifetime

My running in September, October and November is now irrelevant - December is what matters.  

I've decided to stop posting running stats for the day on the grounds that it is boring.  

"There will be worse days, and this was a way to hedge against them." That was the last line I wrote in the entry prior to this one. The next day I ended my streak, or it was ended, after 138 days. Work and life and rain all ganged up on me to end it just two days short of 20 weeks (without a day off from exercise). This afternoon I was standing in a kids' playground watching my young son and his friends climb and run and slide and scramble, and I said to a friend and fellow father, "I can't believe no one has been hurt yet." Within two minutes someone had. Not seriously, but it resulted in a nasty bump on a little boy's forehead and a few stressful moments for his dad. I should stop trying to be so fatalistic and / or tempting of fate. At best it's not helpful; at worst, it just winds me up. Winding yourself up is stupid. 

I have missed two days' running since November 21 and I have stopped the streak mentality. It starts off as a simple enough challenge but soon becomes something that demands to be served and when the inevitable day comes that does not allow any exercise the frustration of that is mixed with disappointment at ending the streak and nothing very positive is to be mined from it. I do not believe for one second that the actual running of a marathon is mostly mental, but marathon training requires a mighty mental effort. Irritation and frustration at rest are bad enough but when you are struggling on a run they can bring it to a swift and unpleasant end. This happened to me four days after admitting defeat on my streak - I just collapsed mentally after nine kilometers at a decent but comfortable pace and had to stop, thus worsening the mental wobble and making for a few harder runs than I would have expected. I was no doubt just getting tired, as well. There is that. 

And here I am on December 2, starting off another month. The picture above speaks for itself, I hope. I run and run and feel like I am getting somewhere but the fact is that at the beginning of the month I am starting from zero. I do this deliberately, this audit of my training. There is this awful truth about training that people don't talk about much and I can see why. It does not matter how fit you are or how much you have done in the past - it cannot last for long if you stop. In other words, you cannot keep fitness in store, like money in a bank. It takes a long time to build up and a short time to fade. That gives you some idea of the mental strength required to keep going. You can easily find yourself wondering what the point is because sooner or later you will stop or be stopped and all that hard work will fade away. 

The same can be said about so many things I won't even start to list them. It all boils down, in the extreme, to mortality. We will die one day - maybe sooner or maybe later, but it will come. So why bother? Why go to all the trouble of - anything? 

That sounds awfully negative and if you ever really start to ask yourself such a question, I hope it soon passes or you find a way out of it quickly because it causes only trouble. Just for the record, my own thoughts on it are clear and simple. Yes, we will one day be reduced to dust but as we are very much not dust right now we might as well enjoy the benefits and take some kind of pleasure in the living experience, even in observing its more absurd aspects. I often think about the world and its being without me and then remind myself that for this brief period I am allowed to take it in, play the game and see where it all leads me. The world does not care about me and it won't miss me when I have gone but I can nevertheless get something from it. If nothing else I can look at it and think about it and ask what the hell it could all possibly mean, without any obligation to conclude anything much at all. 

When I look back at those kilometers I have no recollection of, I feel a strange kind of longing. That fourteenth kilometer in the second week of September - where was I and what could I do if I could go back to it tomorrow? What would I do differently knowing then what I know now? Yes, kilometers can be seen as hours, meters as seconds, or whatever way you like to configure it. No matter what unit we are talking about, we are talking about the past and one of the unarguable facts about it - that it cannot be returned to. The present is always taken for granted, or at least it is oftentimes the case, and the future is that thing we look at as something we will deal with later. Which we will, when it becomes the present, so creating a new future and a similar putting off of action because the future comforts us that we have time to do everything later. 

On that fourteenth kilometer in the second week of September I was younger and had more potential. That person has gone forever, and there is no point lamenting it any more than there is in feeling bad about the oxygen I just inhaled and processed, gone as it is forever. I have for one reason and another spent an unusual amount of time recently thinking about life and death and I have returned to a sense I have often dreamed up. In this mindset I have died countless times already - not in any conventional sense, of course, but in the sense that the "me" in the past, for example the one that started writing this tonight, no longer exists. Yes, I am the same person but not exactly the same. A much better case can be made when we go back over several years / phases of physical development but the idea of my moving through time and in some way changing (dying) still holds some charm for me. It makes me feel much more alive.