Me, Myself and A Trail
Tuning in to my higher self
I wasn’t very active growing up.
I’d played some little league baseball when I was a young kid, but that was about it for a while. I spent most of my time locked away in my room idling away my time on whatever book or game had my attention at the time.
This continued on up until the later half of my highschool years, when a close friend of mine with the sudden urge to get in shape decided we should join the school’s cross country team. For those unfamiliar, cross country is a long distance running sport, and in highschool settings this normally involves 5km races.
My last experience with running longer distances was the dreaded one mile they’d have us run in P.E. class — needless to say, I didn’t do very well.
But he convinced me and we joined.
The season or official training wasn’t set to start yet until a couple weeks out, so we figured we’d go do some practice runs at the nearby park. With my new running shoes and basketball shorts I set off on my first official run.
Little did I know this would be a huge turning point in my life and alter how I approach not only health and fitness, but life as a whole.
This first run, I made it a whopping quarter of a mile before I was absolutely winded. Needless to say I found myself a long way out from the 3.25 miles of a 5km race.
But something stirred within me at that point. Something deeply satisfying and rewarding.
Yeah, it sucked. It sucked gasping for air, it sucked that my legs burned as I pushed on, it sucked that I was sweating profusely. But it was during all of this “suck” that I came to learn a very important part of myself.
It was my higher self, the one “watching” as I pushed through the suck.
As the season and practice went on, I became more and more intimately familiar with this watcher. I realized that when times become really tough that he could take the wheel and allow me to take a step back from getting swallowed up by the “suck” of the moment.
But this isn’t to say I disassociated from the moment or became distracted, I was in fact intimately aware of what was happening and what I was feeling, even moreso than if I simply tried to “tough it out”. But it was as if I took a different seat, a more mindful seat, in the experience. It was as if instead of watching the event on TV where you’re at the mercy of whatever the camera man chose to show you, I was instead there in the stands watching the entire thing with a bird’s eye view.
This experience of running became not unlike a formal meditation meditation practice. But instead of sitting and practicing being mindful, I was running while being mindful.
It took most of my first season in cross country to be able to run the full 5km without stopping to rest or walk, but during that time I gained much more than just bodily endurance. I gained access to a part of me that could endure anything that life threw at me. All I needed to do was take a step back and take a more mindful bird’s eye view of what was actually going on instead of letting myself overdramatize the situation.
It wasn’t until years later in college that I began learning more deeply about mindfulness as a practice. But it was interesting to find out that I had been practicing it all along during my time running on trails — long after I stopped running cross country.
The trail at that park would be my own personal meditation teacher for many years. It taught me the value of being present and mindful and seeing things as they are. I feel like I can genuinely say that my path in life was altered the first time I ran that trail that day and even to this day, every run continues to be a meditative experience and full of new lessons to learn.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like more from me, feel free to check out my newsletter here.
