running bared

I went for the longest (of late) run this morning. Don’t fret – for me this is only a few kilometres.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The Bad Thing element of it, I think, is for another post another time another place. Sadness sometimes motivates repetition of movement. Sometimes you have to run through things, in your head and in your legs.

So let’s just talk about the good things.

I’ve been feeling motivated by a woman lately in the exchange of poetry and thoughts. This is a really exciting and interesting place to be. I feel challenged to rework work that I would ordinarily have left half-baked. She is also a runner. I’m hoping to get to run next to her for approximately 10km in July. This may not seem far, but I’ve never really been a runner.

I have another friend, Jonas, who is a runner who reads and – although I do not know him (inter)personally, I have spent some five or six years following his blog. He started writing at the same time as I did and I think he may actually be the only person who is still reading my personal blog that I have never met. I only ever had one other stranger reader and she is now my facebook friend, having been scared off the interpersonal nightmare which is blogging. This is a great honour. These two readers. To have one reader over five years is an especially big honour. I feel obliged sometimes to try and have a more interesting life as a result.

Anyway, sometimes Jonas pops in and says things which are about someone knowing but not knowing you (as I know and do not know him), and they are immensely comforting to me.

As I said, he is also a runner.

I should acknowledge I was once, nominally, a runner. But I realise now that – some fourteen years since I finished high school – it has been a very very long time since that nominal category really had any meaning. And that time, I was definitely a sprinter, short and more stocky than muscular, I was certainly not the kind of athlete (again, I snicker) who enjoyed the training. I liked only the short distances, the aggressive focus. At best, I could say I got into hurdles, because there was something measured and precise about getting your pacing right for the distances between the barriers. After that, the long training runs blah blah, they sucked. My school made you do some kind of sport, so I chose ones that required no ball coordination and no team interaction – running and swimming.

It did not help to have this women run against you in your school girl competitions, it made everyone feel terribly lame. Which we kind of were.

Either way, I ran this morning and made it to the beach. After an evening of horrible storms, and just before another morning of the same. I ran – feeling surprisingly easy and paced – and arrived at the ocean.

To get there, I feel like I need to almost relearn to run again, to use all of my feet, not to expend all my energy going up and down, rather than forward. And to keep my knees on my good side. Because, as the world’s most lovely yoga teacher used to say, knees do not forgive – so you must care for them extra hard. This is quite hard for me, relearning things sometimes.

Like many people, I like to do things that I am good at. And I don’t like to do things that I am not good at. That means I get better at the things I am good at and worse at the things I was not good at to begin with. Like driving a car.

For a little while there, I had someone that I was able to run with. This has never been an area of comfort for me. Because getting worse at something I was once good at is especially difficult – because as I grow frustrated with having been okay at something, I neglect it, and therefore become worse. I’m sure you’re seeing the vicious circle, right?

Either way, this morning I reached the ocean. And watched the surfers and the sunrise and the rainbow action and felt so very relieved to be alive. The thing I love about the ocean and like about cycling and that I am beginning to like about running is that it reminds me that I am an animal. I often live in the headspace, not in the bodyspace. So things that make me feel like a bodyspace I like a lot. Making love to someone can make me feel that way. But that’s not really what I want to talk about right now.

At the end of my run, and the looking at the ocean hour, I picked up a coffee and a roll and started to walk home. It started raining. I found a dog. A dingo in fact. Lost looking and strangely alert to the road, I found myself unable to just let it wander by. I had to call the pound/council/rangers and set off a whole range of crazy admin things. I remembered New Years Eve and got sad in a big way all over again and could not let the dog go.

On the way home through the rain, a lovely woman walked me home under her umbrella after seeing me and the dog sheltering under the eaves of a house. Thank god for my high visibility rain coat. She was in town for a party, and is applying for a new job, we chatted and she kept me dry and we wondered about the dog and the weather and the rain and PNG and school girls and the storm which was coming. Then I went home and waited for the ranger.

I wonder a lot about the storm which is coming.

This is Sheba. She is home now with her folks.

I know why Sheba was running loose because she absolutely jumped this 2m high fence like it was nothing at all, perched as ably as a cat on the narrow fence and was out in the street before I could even get my wet running gear off and break two lightbulbs in the apartment I’m staying in. And she was not having a bar of the rope I took out from the back of my car. She was, however, okay with sitting just outside the door and watching me with these dark pool eyes standing out against her pale fur.

All this without really making a sound. Dingoes don’t bark, they howl (I think?) and there was something profoundly still and quiet about Sheba. There was a sense of her being a trained/pet dog, in that she came when called, followed along beside me quite happily and was alert to the presence of people around, but there was something also un-trained/pet dog about her, just far too athletic and neat and white dusky and not that interested in me and what I was doing or the loving I was trying to bestow on her.

Definitely a runner.

The storm has come in good and proper now, the sky is sheet grey with an eerie still light coming in through the window. The thunder is shattering the peace and the heavy rain is bending the bamboo outside my window.