In the summer of 2019 I bought myself a fitness tracking watch. It wasn't fancy at all. In fact it was a hopelessly rudimentary "tracker" that didn't even have in-built GPS to track a run. I still just wore it and amused myself by looking at my heart-rate during my runs. At least I had a stop-watch on hand.
I used to "track" my runs by visiting google maps after my runs and painstakingly redrawing the route I took. It was annoying because google constantly tries to optimise the distance, so if you ran from point A to point B, you need to add several stops enroute to retrace your path exactly. Further, I would run on pure instinct and go down random streets just to look around - a nice way to explore my locality, but it made my runs harder to track.
If someone back then asked me my best 5k pace, I would have no idea. I never really thought about tracking my runs, firstly because I didn't know others were doing it and secondly, because I felt this is contrary to the spirit of running. Running for me was always about pure joy and instinct. Run as far and fast as you possibly can just to feel the high. I had no fitness goals, no target body-weight, nothing. Measuring your runs and trying to improve your numbers felt like something that would kill the joy of running.
At some point, a couple of my friends took to posting screenshots of their runs from Nike's run-tracking app. And another friend bought me a fanny pack for my birthday, since he knew I go on runs occasionally and he thought it would be useful for me to carry stuff on the run. Before that I never carried my phone on runs - just my home-keys and a 5 Euro note. The 5 Euro note was in case I was feeling faint and needed to rush into a store to buy a chocolate or an energy drink. I've never had to use it, but I still always carry a few Euros with me.
I disliked carrying my phone because of how they bounce around in the pockets and also because I felt that my running time doubled-up as my break from screens and devices and gadgets. It was the time to let my mind wander and just enjoy the outside world to live in the moment.
Once I had my new fanny pack, I could carry my phone. The truth is that no matter how much you hate the fact that you're addicted to your phone, you remain addicted to it. And you will carry it with you every chance you get. I started taking my phone with me and started tracking my runs on the Nike app. The joy for running being killed by numbers and statistics? Screw that, let's play with this new toy!
The trouble with numbers is this weird human desire for nice, round numbers, whole numbers or numbers that are direct multiples of the number of fingers we have. I would run maybe 5.8 km and feel like stopping, and then say wait, why not round off the last 200 metres to make it a nice 6 km run?
This was also an unseasonably cold spring in Rome, with temperatures staying close to 0 degrees for long periods even in March. Something about the pandemic made me want to be outdoors and be physically active - I had hated staying cooped up indoors for months and months with seemingly no end in sight.
I ran in forced, small bursts throughout the late winter and spring until it paid off in the summer. Once the weather got warmer, I truly hit my stride, going on some really long runs, covering distances I never thought I could.
Running brings me a very deep joy. So doing it in an unstructured way, doing it instinctively and just for the heck of it gives great joy as well! Structuring it and chasing statistics can make it more of a chore than it should be. What I eventually realised though, is that being structured and strategic about it makes you a better runner, so it can bring you even more joy in the long run (pun intended).
I found this out in April and May of 2021 when I ran over 250 km in just these two months, distances I tracked with my running app on my phone that I carried in my fanny pack. It still wasn't extremely structured, for I didn't have any long-term running or fitness goals. But I would leave the house thinking on the lines of - "today I should run 8 km" and this meant sometimes I had to hold back even when I wanted to run as fast as my legs would carry me just for sheer joy.
My rhythm broke later in the summer (Italian summers go all the way to September) because I got rather busy with wrapping up my PhD. At that point I had come up with a quote that I'm really proud of - "PhD is what happens between running to forget your codes and forgetting to run your codes" :D :D
I ended up running over 350 km in 2021 since I started tracking it properly. But as I said above, most of it this was just in the space of two months when this little son of the tropics felt really good to feel the warmth of the sun again.
Come 2022, I decided to set a running target for the entire year - 1000 km. Maybe another day I will write about how this is going, but to make a long story short, I am on course to end up with somewhere between 750 to 800 km by the end of December. And while I'm disappointed, I'd like to give myself reasonable credit. I had lost all my stamina in January after a few months of no running. For the first attempt at a long-term running goal, with my schedule being constantly disrupted by travel, my thesis defence, job interviews and finally moving countries, it's a solid effort.
Anyone who knows anything about the world of running knows Eliud Kipchoge, the absolute master of long-distance running. The greatest ever, other than some of our cavemen ancestors who probably casually achieved such feats while stalking prey and running from volcanos. In fact, I only know the name of one active long distance runner - Kipchoge's!
Kipchoge has a beautiful quote. "Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions."
It's something extremely deep and something that has really speaks to me. When we speak of freedom, we always think of it in terms of the freedom to "do as we please", which is to say, the freedom to pursue our desires and passions, the freedom to simply follow your mood. Discipline is the exact opposite, it is to force yourself to not follow your mood.
Maslow's (disputed) theory of the hierarchy of needs places at the very top "self-actualisation". "What a man can be, he must be." I would even say that this is the zeitgest of our times. Popular culture is replete with cliches like "You be you". "Follow your heart." People are often said to travel or do some things to "find themselves", that is, to find some kind of true self hidden within themselves so they can understand it and fulfil the passion and destiny of this alleged true self.
I don't know if self-actualisation itself is actually contrary to Kipchoge's thoughts on freedom. But to "just be yourself" is to be a slave to your immediate mood and passion. To be truly free is to actually shackle yourself in a purposeful, disciplined way. The freedom to pursue your every desire and mood, to "let yourself be", is a way to shackle yourself to your mood. And mood is fickle.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig asks "How to be a perfect painter?". The answer, in his book (pun intended), is to become a perfect person and then paint naturally. I have explored this idea further in a previous blog post - https://mavinahanu.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-perfect-painting.html
I'm nowhere near a perfect person nor a perfect runner, but today I cannot simply run "naturally". Or I would prefer to say, what is natural to me has completely changed. I have become a more disciplined person, more in control of what I want to do. So when I run for joy, or run "naturally", it is still very precise. I don't overdo it. I am clear about how far I can run at what speed, how much energy I need to save for the rest of the workday, etc. But I know that someday, when I'm truly exhausted and tired, when I'm having a terrible off-day, if I want to run it off and experience some catharsis, I can run it off far longer and far faster than I would have dreamed to be capable of even 18 months ago when this all kicked off. In that sense, I am truly more free to run. If I had simply continued to run naturally, to do it as and when I have the mood to do it, for only as long as the mood lasted, I could have never have been this free.
There are two footnotes to add here. The first is that this journey towards discipline has been slow and gradual. I should make it clear that I'm still quite an indisciplined person who very very often misses personal targets and just gives up and follows my immediate mood. It's just that these developing thoughts have made me constantly conscious that I want to move in the direction of more discipline, even if I'm miles and miles away.
The second is that growing up, my father always stressed greatly on discipline and good habits,. And we would get lectured by elders on how we would eventually "realise" that they were right all along while I would roll my eyes. Well, I guess all the world's a stage, and this is an eternal drama that keeps repeating. And we will one day just repeat the words of our parents to our kids, while they repeat our words back to us. To say it simply, my parents were right about this :(
Discipline is freedom.
No comments:
Post a Comment