Running – Page 48 – My Outdoor Living Room

Ch-ch-ch-ch-challenges

Another long run in the bag on Sunday. Three and a half hours by myself out on the road. Quite unimaginable really. The human body is amazing. Compare the time spent on that run with other things that you could do. You could watch two films or two football matches. It’s half of the average working day. And yet, even without music to listen to, I didn’t get bored, or negative. I thought about a lot of things, a kind of therapy. Definitely not a meditation though. I think in order to do that, I would have to focus on my feet. By definition, meditation is the art of focusing on a single (hopefully virtuous!) object or thought, so rolling countryside and lanes don’t tick the boxes. It’s a great way of getting to know yourself though, seeing where your thoughts go, and finding out what you’re capable of. I don’t talk about my running at work unless I’m asked about it mainly because most people find it difficult to understand why I would want to do it. Equally, I find it difficult to understand why they want to spend their free time in bed until lunchtime, then switching the TV on for the rest of the day. If pushed, I always reveal that I’m just happy doing it and constantly pushing my ageing body to achieve things I never dreamed of. In other words, finding out what I’m capable of.

I think a life testing yourself in any way is a virtuous life. A meditation I guess. Challenge yourself to run a marathon, walk every street in your town, spot every species of wildflower that you can, count every star – whatever it is. It will fill you up. It will help you to dream. It will give you something to talk about when other things fail. And guess what? Keep doing it! Keep reinventing challenges. You’ll discover the outdoors, yourself and your next big move.

Small things. Baby steps.

Fresh off the back of the weekend came the inevitable Monday morning blues. The mental kicking and screaming tantrum informing me it’s time to go to the circus again.

How many of us genuinely love our jobs? I’d guess it’s a minority. My job is OK. Tolerable. Maybe I take it for granted. If I did find a job that I loved, however, would I still seek the physical and mental escapes to balance it out?

The dangerous thinking is that (assuming we live to current life expectancy) we spend about 80% of our life at work. Add on all the time we spend asleep, and we’re left with…well…not a lot.

I went running yesterday. It was a long run. I just set myself a time target to see how much distance I could cover in three hours. I enjoyed being out; the weather, the scenery, the solitude. I also loved the challenge. A fair way in to it, I began to tire and it became a case of putting one foot in front of the other. I began to think of how each step, although small, was part of something massive and the end goal wasn’t possible without the smaller parts. Just like moving a mountain. It’s done pebble by pebble. Or a beach, grain by grain.

This led me to wonder. The time spent at work, coping with stress, hoping for better days, more money, ‘clean desk’ policies, unjust promotions, coffee break gossip et al, is worthless. But we all need a job. Filling your marathon-length life with lots of small things adds up to a happy life. Making the most of the the small things. Small things add up to big things. Do more small things. I’m hoping to do some voluntary work, picking up litter. What I pick up will be a minute segment of the litter in my town, not to mention the planet. But it’s a little step towards a much bigger goal. Baby steps. Not just for babies after all.