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Or: What I think about when I think about running.

I used this month's Audible credit on vol.1 of an unabridged Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire to prompt myself to keep up my daily run up the mountainside. At 40 hours and with two more volumes waiting in the rafters, I think I found my summer soundtrack. Not that I expect to remember most of it, but a few bits will stick, and I'll log a couple dozen kilometers at least in the process, so double-win.

Running is neat. Let's get that out on the table right now. It's at least as neat as napping, and twice as healthy. Here are some things I think about when I think about running, written as a presponse to getting through What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. (This'll be the third time I've started the book. Hopefully I'll get through the first chapter this time.)

:: Running, unlike walking but just like cycling or writing, gets me into this starman zone where I can just go as hard as I want and have fun doing it for a couple of minutes. It's an awesome feeling, but it only comes after an interval of really being involved in the activity, which is important to remember because if you forget about that you're likely to not find the motivation to start.

:: Here's a graph of my motivation when running on pavement or on flat, oval tracks:

kinda tapers off

And here's a graph of my motivation when running in the woods:

/!

I've been like this as long as I can remember. I was never any good at running miles in school, I wasn't very fast, and I got winded pretty quickly. In the woods, though, back in PA or now in Nagano, dodging or jumping over things kept me alert and kept me going. There was something thrilling, if that's not too strong a word, about running in the woods, even if it was only the fun of changing pace and having to watch where you were going. But running, like everything I guess, is more mental than physical. If you keep focusing on the negative or the monotonous, which running in circles or alongside straight roads all but pounds into you, you're likely to wind (short i) yourself mentally, even if your body could physically go on in more ideal circumstances. For me at least; I'm not advocating for forest-based races at the next Olympics or anything.

:: More on that last point: running in/on paved circles is to running in the woods as a lot of standardized education is to learning on your own. The former, unless you've got a pretty good teacher at the helm, is a monotonous, sometimes scary experience, whereas the latter is intrinsically motivating. The former trains you through the lenses of one-size-fits-all curricula; the latter lets you explore the world through your own eyes.

(Not that running tracks or going through the school system is all--or even mostly--bad. Just that it's good and advisable to know of and pursue a balance in stuff like this, since there are more than a few solutions to the game of life.)

:: Off topic: Bolero is great walking music.

:: My apartment and school are on one of the declining slopes of Chino that make up the toes of the 八ヶ岳 mountain range; the 永明寺山 (Ei-mei-ji-yama; Eternal Shiny Temple Mountain) is on the facing ridge-thing. Me and this mountain have become friends. After school, there's enough daylight left that I can run up to near the top of the mountain where there is a 50 meter slide which is Very Fun Indeed to slide down after a good hustleup the hillside. (It's technically a mountain, but since Chino is already at 800+ meters, the mountain probably only pops up another hundred or so meters from the town. I'll have to check the actual ascent sometime. But if it's only relatively a hill, it's a big ass hill.)

thïs > alles

The mountain and I are friends. The sky, though, has become jealous. I've been caught twice at the top when a shower creeps up from the other side of the mountain and drenches me. Last Sunday it was heralded by all manner of thunder and lightning, and also a snake. I was going to wait it out (the storm, not the snake) at a pavilion near this slide, but a friend brought to my attention that he doesn't remember any short storms in Japan.

Cue the run down the mountainside. The rain wasn't so bad under the trees, but each thunderstrike was closer than the one before, and just before I got out of the woods the lightning and thunder were Way, Way Closer Together.

And the snake. Running downwise you have too much momentum to stop yourself, so when I was brushing through tree branches and saw in the middle of the wee thin path a thick green snake crossing it, I didn't have time enough to make way. I spend way too much time in the woods out here not to have done my research on the poisonous species in the area...but here we were, lightning crashing, rain falling, snake coming up, hospital far away, and my heart running at a good enough clip to get any hypothetical poison running through my system in no time, give or take.

So I:
1) yelped,
2) jumped, and
3) didn't look back.

I lived, unelectrecuted and unbitten, alive to run the snake grounds another day. And now I have all sorts of intrinsic motivation to look up what else can kill me in Nagano besides bear claws and far falls. Thumbs up to that.