My feet will carry me

(This is about my run last Thursday morning.)

 

Running this morning was about as I thought it would be. In some ways. I knew we would have a sub, the sub who I know from experience doesn’t change things up as frequently as Julie. Things change every 2 minutes or so, but only in very moderate ways. I knew from Tuesday’s class with the same sub that this would be challenging for me, but would leave me feeling good. But today I also knew that the person I normally run next to would not be there. It wasn’t that I would miss the person terribly, but on a run that was already going challenge me with the boredom of straight running with few changes and no music, no one next to me to would be another nail in the coffin of “nothing to distract you from running.” Or, in other words, I was all I had today.

And what’s wrong with that? Why run if we just have to distract ourselves from the fact that we’re doing it the whole time? This thought fully formed only really occurs to me now, but I did think about how I needed to stay present.

I was struggling. My brain was searching for distractions. I was visualizing myself in my happy places, sort of, but then that took the form of imagining I was somewhere else and I didn’t think that was great. So I decided to look to gratitude to help me. What does being OK in the present look like? It looks like gratitude. So I started mentally listing the things I was grateful for that were right there with me. Sure, I’m grateful for family and friends, safety and peace, love and joy. But I needed to see what was right there in front of me. My body. My legs, my heart, my lungs. As soon as I started thinking about my body, I started to remember the weaknesses I think about with my body. I’m insecure about my abs and how weak they are. I know I don’t have the cardio-vascular endurance I want to have. This or that about my appearance that I don't like leapt to my mind.

No, that’s not what I want to focus on. As I reviewed my body with gratitude, fighting the insecurities that wanted to flood my mind, my gratitude rested on my feet. Not something I think about a lot, but I found that mentally this was a stopping point. Gratitude for my feet, and I didn’t need to go any further just yet. It occurred to me that I really have no fears or insecurities about my feet. I don’t worry that they aren’t strong enough. I just know they will carry me where I want to go. Maybe that means I take them for granted? But this was a moment when I wasn’t going to take them for granted.

From that moment until the end of the class, whenever I got thinking about how this was miserable or I didn’t want to keep doing it, whenever I wondered how much longer or thought I couldn’t go on, I brought my attention back to my feet, eventually starting to say to myself, “My feet will carry me.”

Make fun of my dorky affirmation if you want, but it was working. I would focus on the idea of my feet carrying me wherever I need to go, and I could also focus on the physical sensations in my feet—the flexing and the lifting and landing. How they felt inside my shoe. Soon, I started to ask, “what is making my feet go forward?” and that started me thinking about the body mechanics of running. How are my legs moving, where does that strength come from? For a few minutes I could almost feel an invisible cord from my core muscles pulling my legs forward and helping me place my feet again and again on the treadmill.

Oddly, even though I had rejected focusing on my abs because they seemed a weak area, definitely an area of insecurity, focusing on my feet helped me see the connection from that weak area (my abs) to my strong feet. How I can’t have running feet without abs to hold me up.

It was empowering and energizing. Instead of enduring, which is often how I get through my running class, I felt I was winning.  But I knew what I was doing: I was running. I couldn’t pretend I was somewhere else. I couldn’t get lost in conversation and forget I was running. I couldn’t think about the music. Not distracted, all I had was my body and my mind. I found that was enough, and I found I could do it. Because my feet will carry me.