I starting running with a grudge. That is to say, when I set out for a run this afternoon I was bearing a resentment with me, and the connotation of resentment as a weight fits. A grudge has its own gravity and inertia. Leave it alone and it won’t move. Get it going and soon it will require you to keep up. I started it in the morning and wound up running with it by the end of the day. That is to say, the resentment had gathered a good head of steam by the time I set out on a run this afternoon.
Some people run specifically for release from this stuff, but I find that I do stupid things when I run angry. I run too fast, or I get angry with the run. The run has no tolerance for such behavior. It does not give me a wide berth when it sees me upset. The run takes what I bring to it and puts it right back into my face. It does this until I pay attention to the run, until I give full focus to the moment. And I was not there yet.
The weight of the grudge pulled me down hill faster than I should have gone. It lead my beside rippling waters. It gave me great splits at every mile. I started to take pride in what the grudge was getting me to do. By mile 5, I was just over a 7 minute per mile average, and the grudge began to get ahead of me. The more it gained, the more I was left with just the run.
It was not so apparent at first. The ground was still pretty flat. But climbing Clingman Avenue, it became clear that everything I had was gone and the only way to finish was to hold on for dear life. No amount of technical fabric could compensate for the fact that I had gone out too fast, run too hard, for too long, with too little water. Breathe … step … step … breathe. Suffer.
At the end there was nothing left. At the end, I was weightless. Transformed. The grudge had rolled away. I’m not sure that peace is the absence of strife, but I’ll take the absence over the strife any day. Peace will come on those days when I have something to offer the run that the run can return as peace. It’s not worth it to beat the strife out of my body on every run, but it was worth it on this run.