I want to talk about running, and I want to talk about it for several reasons, not the least of which is that I can't do it. Because if I could, I would be out there someplace running rather than here in church talking about it.
I want to talk about running also because it calls attention to an aspect of body image that may be overlooked when we express concern for, oh, say eating disorders. Many, and I suspect most women, tend to view their body image in terms of appearance. Not neccessarily how it appears to others, by the way. My son, for example, likes to look good just for him, and a friend of mine views fashion an artform in which she participates. Like most artists she doesn't give a damn what other people think of her sartorial tastes.
But there's another side to this body image thing that has to do with what a body can do, and I think that this aspect of body image is more of concern to men. Ask women whose body they would like to have and you'll get more Carly Simon wannabees than FloJo wannabees. Ask men the same question, and you'll get a lot more Bob Hayes wannabees than Mel Gibson wannabees. Well maybe not, but that's only because no one can remember who Bob Hayes was. He was once the fastest man on earth! He was also a running back of some note for the Dallas Cowboys. And he was the physical hero of a lot of guys, a lot more popular among men than, oh, say Paul Newman, the then current hearthrob of the silver screen.
"Ha, " you may say, "you're just looking for an excuse to talk about running. But if men envied Hayes, it wasn't because he was the fastest man on earth, but because he was an outstanding running back." And, you're right. We testosterone-crazed males only want the bodies that are good at blood sports like football and World War III. After all, as I believe Darwin pointed out, you women hold the evolutionary cards, and over many generations and many species females have mated with the big, strong, aggressive males best equipped to defend them from linebackers and other predators.
But then, there's running. Did you know that we humans are the consummate long-distance runners of the animal kingdom? No other animal runs like we do. And running, well it's not exactly a blood sport is it. Far more useful to those escaping from the head monkey than to those aspiring to his position. What's more, unlike football and other blood sports (roller-derby being the exception), women do it, and they do it well. Oh, not as well as men (can't ruin my reputation as a complete sexist), but very well indeed.
Built for running, we are, which brings me to why I really want to talk about running. It's special, at least special to me, and I think it's special to me because it's special to us. Oh sure, there's walking. How about a morning hike up to Stanford's radio telescope in the hills of the San Francisco Peninsula. Nice, I suppose, but you could walk it a thousand times, and it would never be remotely like running up that impossibly steep slope, turning West at the crest, and, with the blood of the running gods coursing through your veins, racing the sun across the Foothill Range-and winning.
And there's cycling. Want to know about a nice ride? Catalina Boulevard in San Diego out Point Loma, to Cabrillo Point, especially if you take the hill down to the tide pools and back up. Good place to observe the pelicans heading up and down the coast. But you you could ride out Point Loma a thousand times, observe a thousand pelicans and never be with any of them. To be with the pelicans you have to run with them.
Now I don't want to put down walking. It's a nice sensible activity, easy on the knees, and if you walk fast enough to make it really awkward and uncomfortable, you might work up a sweat. And I don't mean to put down cycling, even though it killed my running career, put a significant dent in my swimming performance (bummed-out shoulder), and has not exactly done wonders for my love life. But, running was, is different for me. And I'd like to know why! So, I am saying to myself, maybe if I tell it like a story, like Janet told her story, some answers will emerge. And wasn't Janet's story incredible? It is rare to find such quiet courage and steady resolve, and we are blessed to have found it in one of our own members.
My own story, sigh, is nothing like Janet's. In fact, my story is almost like hers played in reverse. If hers was the story of paradise regained, mine is the story of paradise lost. And I got into running the same way that she got out of bulimia, gradually, probably for a number of reasons, and without any one event that marked the transition. I started a few months after I stopped smoking, when, one day, I wiped myself out running a half block for a bus. I was overweight and out of shape, and I decided to do something about it. I stopped eating and started running, quarter-miles at first. A quarter mile quickly became a mile, then two, then three, then five. Somewhere between two and three I figured that I should invest in a pair of running shoes: $26.
Somewhere around five or six miles, I decided to try a race: the Uptown Races, 8K in and around Chevy Chase Maryland, with a wicked hill at the end. It was great. I started out like a streak. I had never run faster. Right up to the point the 4-1/2 mile mark, when I got sick. Still, I finished the race, and I was hooked. On every weekend, except in deep midwinter or the hottest part of the Summer, you can always find an 8K or 10K somewhere in the Washington area. And I ran them all. Little bitty races like the Women in Federal Law Enforcement 8K (really!)-maybe 40 runners-to great big ones-The Cherry Blossom Classic, so popular you they had to have a lottery for for entrance applications.
During the week, my neighborhood wasn't a bad place to run. And for breaks, I'd take off on the hike-bike trails. Twenty-four miles of C&O Canal Towpath up to Seneca. Twenty-seven miles of the Washington & Old Dominion Railroad to Purcellville on the Blue Ridge. Mount Vernon to the South, and Rockville to the North. And in other towns-I've mentioned San Diego and Palo Alto. San Francisco is a great town for running. The best hills, the best views. Turtle Creek in Dallas. Fresh Pond in Cambridge. Naturally, whenever I was trapped in some town for the weekend, I'd find a race there.
At some point, my self-concept changed. I used to think of myself as a research psychologist and a family man. Gradually, that changed. I came think of myself as a runner, who happened to be those other things as well. And the question comes back; "why?"
There's the physiological explanation, of course, you know, endorphins and all that, but, if you believe, as I do, that everything mental has physiological concomitants, that's a non-explanation. Besides, other endorphin-producing activities don't seem to pack the spiritual punch that running does. No one ever talks about a biking high or a hockey high.
Maybe I was just looking for company. Running is something of a social activity. Most runners are introverts like me, but there is something about a race that brings out a certain cameraderie and propensity to actually engage in conversation. There's always a minor celebration going on at the finish line-free breakfast and people talking about how well or how poorly they did. Still, if one were looking for a jolly crowd to socialize with, one would not pick runners. Apart from finish-line celebrations, they're a pretty grumpy lot.
How about health? Maybe I ran for my health's sake. True, running kept my heart rate down in the 40s, my blood pressure under control, and my weight down. On the other hand, I was always hurting someplace or another: sore ankles, burning feet, thigh injury, you name it. There are a lot healthier ways to stay healthy.
No, to find the lure of running, I have to look elsewhere: to spiritual dimensions, I think. For one thing, there's a sense of well-being that comes from running. It's hard to describe. I remember one race, the 1992 Jingle Bell Run for Arthritis, a 10K on Hains Point in Washington, and it was cold. A lot of runners came wearing Santa hats or reindeer antlers, and one guy, every year brought his German shepard, sporting a pair of antlers and wearing the race T-shirt. They gave each of us runners some jingle bells to tie to our shoe laces, so we ran along to this little ching-ching-ching sound. I ran a pretty good race in '92, a shade over 46 minutes, picked up a muffin and some Gatorade at the food table, and, when the cold started settling into my legs, headed out across the park to my car. They had a DJ playing Christmas carols. He was playing Jingle Bell Rock as I left. I remember looking back across the park watching the last runners cross the finish line with their Santa hats bobbing up and down and thinking that life couldn't get any better. And I was right, it hasn't. But now, every time I hear Jingle Bell Rock, I'm reminded of that race and I get some of that same feeling back.
This was not an isolated experience. Sure, I've had more than my share of really rotten runs, but I've had a large number that have left me feeling, in Browning's words that "All's right with the world." No other activity has ever given me with the same sense of well-being.
And then, there's the Zen of running. "Zen, ha, ha!" you scoff. There's no Zen of running, but I'll bet that the runners among you aren't scoffing. What is the Zen of running. It's getting it right, from the inside out, and recognizing that when you are running, that's all there is, to live in the run, to surrender to it, and, at the same time to master it. I tried to convey something of the Zen of running in the children's story this morning: "Run your own race. Reach deep inside, and you'll find something you didn't think you had." Of course, there's more to it. Knowing how long and how fast to run, pacing during a race, even knowing who you're racing, because no matter how many runners there are, your race stretches only from the furthest runner ahead that you just might beat to the furthest behind that just might smoke you. Even knowing when NOT to win, that's part of the Zen of running.
This notion, that there is a Zen, a rightness of running, brings me back to the topic of this sermon: body image. Because the Zen of running, at its heart, is nothing more than being conciously embodied, of conciously being a thing that runs. This is not, of course, a concept that's limited to running. It works, I'm sure, for any other physical skill. For some, it's dancing; for others, it's baseball; for others, it's playing music. In all of these activities, the performer reaches a state in which she is living consciously within the activity. The baseball player watching a pitch, knows to a certainty, that that pitch is her pitch, and that her body knew it before she figured it out, and has already started to swing the bat, which by the way, is now part of her body, and she knows that all she has to do to hit the ball out of the park is to keep her eye on it. The Zen of baseball. (By the way, I made all that up. I don't play baseball; I'm blind in one eye. If it rings true to you baseball players, it's because I'm a runner.) Nor, do I think is the concept limited to physical activities, because there's a fuzzy boundary between the mental and the physical. Professional chess players, I'm told, view the game as an athletic activity, and the best athletes vow that the differences between winning and losing are mental. And I'd be willing to bet that even mathematics, the most abstract of all human activities, when done well, has at its core the same practice of conscious embodiment, of living in the math.
It's important, then, that we keep ourselves embodied, consciously embodied. It's part of being alive. Those of us, in our long distant past, who did NOT learn to run our own races or who did NOT learn to find that extra bit of speed, fell prey to those of us that did. That's why it's so important to us to live in a skill, to master it, to get better and better at it. What makes the notion interesting, and somewhat troubling, is that we're not all wired in the same way. By either genetics or early upbringing, some of us are bound to fiddle players, others to be runners. You can't be anything you want to be. I am a runner. I know that a 46 minute 10K, while nowhere near a winning time (I've never ever won a prize in a race), its a respectable time for a 50 year old male. More than that, I know that running felt right for me. It fit me. It may not fit you; probably doesn't, but something else does, and as Joseph Cambell reminds us, we all all need to find that thing.
I have to finish the story. In the Summer of '93, I was running, and swimming (which I did to keep from running too much), so I decided, why not try biking. Which I did, and it was an ok activity, relaxing in a way. That Fall that I moved to San Antonio. The following Spring, March 19, 1994, to be exact, I was riding my bike up Lockhill-Selma just North of Wurzbach. The bike began to wobble a bit, then a bit more, and then fell over. I fell with it. My thigh-bone hit the ground, bashed into my hip-bone and crushed the socket like an egg shell. My 18 years of running ended as suddenly and as violently as Janet's decade of bulimia began. The joint did not heal properly, and I'll never run again. I take that back. Once a year, I find that I just can't stand not running and I try a mile or two. It is very painful, but still very satisfying, I must say. I have no substitute for running. I bike, but I'm a lousy biker, and it just doesn't feel right, kind of like being a slave to some machine. I still swim, but it's not something I really enjoy, particularly since every stroke is painful due to another bike accident I had a couple of years ago that bummed out my shoulder. So, I'm still waiting for something to take me up, as did running, and pull me along until, again, I become something I can be.
Jean and I, last week, went to hear this Indian guru, Swami Satchitananda, speak at the Mind Science Institute. The Mind Science Institute, by the way, is, to my mind, a living testament to the dictum that if its called a science it probably isn't one. The Swami's presentation was entirely consistent with my view of the Institute, but he did say one interesting thing pertinent to the issue of body image. "How do you see yourself?" he asked.
The answer that he dragged out of the nonplussed audience, was "with a mirror, of course." "But what you see in the mirror is not you," he pointed out. "It is only an image. Break the mirror, and you are still there. Only the image will disappear."
It's time we broke a few mirrors. It's time we decided that our bodies are not things to look at or even things just to take care of. They are not just houses for brains. Rather, they are places to be, and tools to be used. They are good for having fun, and are good for learning stuff. Even though I can't run anymore, I'm still happy to be a runner, to be in that place, mentally and spiritually. I still treasure every good race I've ever run and every fine run I've ever had. To paraphrase a Shake Russell song, originally about Texas, "Running, my friend/When it's all said and done,/You taught me well./I owe you one."