"Everyone is an athlete. The only difference is that some of us are in training, and some are not."

It's been difficult for me to keep up with this, my schedule having been so bumpy. It's not my day, but heck! I'm sure you won't mind.

Brown, House Master: They certainly drive themselves hard on the playing fields.
Ruxton Towers Reformatory governor: They're high-spirited Mr Brown.
Brown, House Master: If they weren't, they wouldn't be here.

~The Loneliness of the Long Distance of the Runner

Have been running more and more, at least in terms of adding time. I ran for about an hour and twenty minutes last Saturday, and then today I took about 15 minutes off that route by changing the streets a bit and running almost all of the hills. It's Oakland and Berkeley, and there are hills galore here. As Jon always tells me, hill work is speed work in disguise.

Am I trying to get faster? It's thrilling to run fast, and when all of my muscles are resting where they should be and I'm not tensing my shoulders or shortening my stride I know that this is flying. Maybe not objectively, Maybe objectively I look slow, maybe I am as earth-bound as a boulder. Still, it is a kind of power, but not a stingy one, not one that is hoarded and tight. Rather I feel the expansiveness of something that doesn't belong to me but that is of me, that I don't have to own because it is not separate from me and cannot be divorced from me.

That sounds crazy. What am I trying to say? I'm trying to explain how sometimes I do experience the sublime, through a combination of both effort and surrender. I don't have to think too much, at least not in a language of words. I just have to surface and dive and then surface again, rhythmically. No explanations or justifications, no criticism. Meeting myself, in a way, on the roads, on the trail. Recognizing what is possible in the moment it manifests.