Wholly Accepting This Moment…
I ran for 65 minutes this morning; some of it with Anadi and then I ran on for a bit before turning back to meet up with him on the beach and go for the swim I didn’t go for last night ?
Not being too aware of stats when I am actually running suits me as I like to run ‘free’… This could look like something of an irony given that Anadi’s platform is all about sports analysis…
However I also value seeing what is going on in the body… I just prefer it reflectively rather than in the moment I am running.
I am not someone who pushes in actual training, so reflective analysis works well for me… As I wrote before in my article for Anadi, I am the master of ‘Long, Slow, Distance’… I just like going running.
My ‘pushing’ in the past was of a very internal nature… I was always hard on myself about the times I ran in races and in interval training… So the tension arose from the ‘not good enough, could do better’ energy; and a sport that measures your ‘worth’ with how much time you take to cover a certain distance, meant that I had definitely landed in the right place to clear this inner tension…
‘Not good enough, could do better…’ An eternal inner mantra, that got lodged pretty firmly.
I remember running my best ten mile race… 55.10 for first place in the Woking 10… I had run my fastest time, and come first… And yet on the following Wednesday when AW (Athletics Weekly) was published I saw another of my contemporaries had run under 54 minutes in another race the same weekend, and I immediately felt the familiar energy about myself… ‘Not good enough, could do better’… (I haven’t run better btw ? )
It seems a madness now, reflecting… !
And that is exactly what tension within us is, tension that means we are not wholly present in this moment to what is happening, and wholly accepting of this moment…
It is madness…
And the only answer is to dive deeply into it and feel it fully until it leaves us and then we are free… This can take time of course, because we can be very attached to these madnesses as they inform our life, and we even believe we are them! “That’s just me; that’s just the way I am…”
Well… Of course it is not the truth… None of us are our tensions; we are free and we are beyond anything we can perceive with our minds…
The clearing of the tension is the first step towards living in the gaps between our breath, where we will meet with our true nature.
And, I am very much looking forward to Anadi’s new devices arriving…!
It will record all that is going on for me while I am running but I won’t be able to see it until afterwards… Perfect.
I will be able to monitor and reflect and learn within my new paradigm, my new journey unfolding of having fun in my bare feet, without the old stories of the past creating blocks of tension to my freedom of expression…
Finding out in each step, what the next will reveal…
We had a glorious swim… I whipped off shorts and stood bare bottomed on the empty beach to put my bikini on… Anadi laughed – “There’s a guy behind that rock…’ I turned and sure enough there was a guy behind the rock… He smiled and shrugged his shoulders and I smiled back…
In the same way as I wonder when it became strange to wander around in bare feet, I wonder when it became strange to wander about bare bottomed…?
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.
As a little girl I ran barefoot for many years, and then I put on shoes to race around the world. Fifty years later I am travelling the world as a nomad with my husband Anadi and I have taken off my shoes and I am running barefoot again….
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