My Unchanging Self
I am sitting in the sun on a roof terrace in Morocco high up in the Atlas Mountains…
My shoulders are aching and my bottom muscles are stiff…
The back of my nose is scratchy and my eyes feel quite heavy…
This is the result of living and training in a land where the air is thin and the hills are steep…
I have been doing my running training by doing short repetitions uphill, as the lack of air doesn’t lend itself to long repetitions without some weeks of acclimatisation…
On reaching an altitude of around 2000 metres I have historically felt slightly ‘ill’, sniffy nose, scratchy throat, lethargic, cold unless in direct sunlight…
In the 80’s I can remember living at just over 2000 metres in the Swiss alps for a few weeks…
I felt his way all the time I was there, ‘the slightly ill’ feeling, and so two times a week we would drive down to Sierre in the valley, where I would run a track session and afterwards we would sit in the town and drink coffee.
I would feel completely well, run well on the track too, feel ‘back to normal’…
And so I am witness to this…
The changes that occur, the body being challenged, but more importantly it is an opportunity to observe whether it brings up anything in me…
Anything to clear…
Maybe the stiffness in the body and the sniffy nose is the stuff clearing…
Maybe the air that challenges the system and the steep climbs that stretch the muscles access the stuff that wants to leave…
I have no idea, we can make up all sorts of stories to give meaning to things as we journey as humans, but none of them may be true and even if they are, they will fade away when the body dies…
Within all of this…
By this I mean my ‘travelling the globe adventure’ of the last 17 months… The uncertainty of what is next, my body being challenged by different climates, food, environment…
Within all of this I am finding my unchanging self…
My stillness.
I am finding myself and recognising that there is no self to find.
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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