Blog Archive

I've been meaning to pull out some of my old MySpace blogs since I'm never on that site anymore and the blog is mostly inaccessible now. Plus, sometimes, the old becomes new again. Anyway, here's one from Friday, March 02, 2007.


Breath holding

I'm a map person - always have been. I can look around at my environment and find exactly where I am on the map using any landmark: a prominent building, a bend in the road, a distinctive intersection. I know how to use a map to tell me where I'm going, and if I look at a map to find directions to where I want to go, I can put it aside and translate almost perfectly the 2-dimensional drawing into the 3-dimensional scene that exists before me. And, if I know the scale, I can easily estimate, with a fair amount of accuracy, how long it will take me to get to the next landmark. Not everyone is like this, I've learned from experience. My sister is a good example. Generally speaking, Susan doesn't have that kind of spatial intelligence. She's brilliant in many many ways, but map reading and direction giving and following is not one of her strong suits. From her, I've gained a sensitivity about personal strengths – and it's OK, I think, for me to be "good" at maps and for her not to be. She's good at many things that I'm not good at, and thank god. It's one reason why our personalities compliment each other.

For me, maps provide comfort. They tell me where I've been, where I am now and where I'm going. Whether on a road or a trail, in a car or on foot, I like looking at the map to see how far I am from the next city, or the next bend in the trail, or how much elevation gain or loss I'll be facing ahead of me.

I used to check maps compulsively – constantly orienting myself. I'm learning, though, to trust more in the journey, in the here and now, and stop concerning myself so much with the past or future. It's something I learned from marathon training, I guess. In the beginning, I felt compelled to know before I started my run what the route was, in its entirety, as it appeared on the map. I could never trust the chalk route markers that always told us where to turn, but not a moment before the turn arrived. I needed to be able to *see* it in my mind's eye before I began. In looking at the map, I would translate mileage to time, so that if a turn on my route came along a mile down the road, I could know that in about 11 minutes, I should expect the turn.

When you're running 18 or 20 miles, you have to learn how to focus on something other than the time and distance, or you'll lose yourself, become overwhelmed by the thought of it. The problem was that if you checked your watch or the map every two minutes, time and distance slowed so significantly that you'd drive yourself crazy. So, the first part of the process was unlearning the time check on my watch. Stop worrying about how many minutes I'd been running and how many more minutes I had to go before the checkpoint. The key was to learn to trust the distance, trust the route markers, trust the *feel* of time passing instinctively rather than using the meter of the watch to provide this information. To extend my tolerance for not knowing where I was on the map, to surrender myself to the process and not worry so much about the outcome. To let myself be surprised that the checkpoint had arrived rather than always anticipating it. Flow comes when each step you take become the focus; the journey is the flow, flow comes not from the start, nor the end.

And, soon you learn that the run ends before you are ready for it to. This is even more of a reason to stop anticipating the end, to be happy for the miles in between, because once it's over, it's over. There's no getting it back again.

I was thinking about this on my road trip this past weekend – I know the trip from Charlottesville to Charleston so well that I don't need a map to find my way, and yet, I kept looking at it, until finally I put the damn thing in the truck. The "orienting" that used to be such a comfort has almost become a hindrance to the enjoyment of the now. And, symbolically, all of this is quite apropos considering this *thing* that I have been holding my breath about for weeks. Truth is… the breath holding is a waste of time. I just need to remember that the surprise is better than the anticipation…