Running in Circles
Running in circles sometimes appears to me to be rather strange way to have lived my life…
Training runs that have circled around a loop – one step in front of another – to simply return to the beginning again, the same starting point from whence I left…
Circles of a running track, many many revolutions of that…!
Round and round, lap after lap, each lap returning me to the beginning…
Everything in circles; living on a planet that is round in shape, turning on its axis in the circle and circling around the sun, while the moon circles around us…
All the planets orbiting around each other, returning to the same spot eventually…
The circle represents wholeness, totality, the infinite, timelessness, eternity…
‘I saw eternity the other night like a great ring of pure and endless light… All calm as it was bright…’
This is a line from a favourite poem of mine, ‘The World’ by Henry Vaughan…
Running in circles for a lifetime has lead me to understand more fully that consciousness is the centre and the circumference…
“The nature of God is a circle of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.”
I once ran an ultra race… It was 100 kilometres long… The race circled ten times around a lake in Copenhagen… Ten laps of ten kilometres each…
My friend Wendy was with me; we have been friends since we met at nursery school when we were four years old… We were in Copenhagen to celebrate us being on the planet for fifty journeys around our sun…!
The anniversary of her beginning day was in the March of that year and mine in the May… We went on our mini break to Copenhagen in the April…
‘Would you mind if I ran a race on the first day Wends?’ I asked… ‘Of course not’ she replied…
‘It will take all day though…’ I laughed…
Fortunately it was a sunny day, the sun sparkled on the lake and there was a coffee shop nearby… Approximately each hour I appeared and ran by. Wends took photos, cheered me on and handed me ‘fuel’, sometimes a banana, sometimes a drink….
My mind stayed still as I ran and ran for more than ten hours, except over and over I repeated…
‘God is at the centre and circumference of all being…’
My meditation on the move which returned me after many minutes and hours right back to where I had set out from that morning….
I have been running all of my life – it feels I was born to run. In the running step I experienced freedom and my true expression. I came to see that I needed to ‘get out of the way of myself’ and let my energy flow through the running step; allow it to express itself in the dance and the motion of running. I ran for England and GB for some years. My first international was in 1979, a three mile cross country race; and I continued to run at international level until 1993. Two of my best results were first place in the Dublin City Marathon in 1985 and 7th place woman, 3rd British woman in the 1986 London Marathon in a time of 2.36.31, which gained me selection for the Commonwealth Games.
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