Last weekend, I ran a 10k race. It was my first race at that distance in maybe 25 years. In fact, I think there’s only been a few times in the last fifteen years that I have run 6.2 miles, even just for fun or exercise.
I could feel painful blisters developing on my feet almost from the start of the race, and the weather was over 90 degrees. Nonetheless, I zoomed along and came close to winning my age group. I think that my good showing came in part because I was doing a concentration meditative technique during the whole race, which I think helped free, unify, and integrate my body’s energy.
During the race, whenever my mind got caught in thoughts – how far there was left to go, would I pass that person, would that other person pass me, what would I feel like after I stopped running, how hot I was, my developing blisters, or any other thought – I would feel heavy and start to slow down, and sometimes even want to stop and walk.
It reminded me of my which school years. Back then, I had a box full of trophies, medals, and ribbons earned from all the competitive running that I did. During races, however, I was often aware of how much I was thinking, and felt like that much mental activity – that much blood flowing needlessly from my muscles and into my brain – was dragging and slowing me down. It was frustrating, though, because I didn’t know how to do anything different.
So, what I did in the face of that was a one-pointed concentration meditation practice, similar to the common practice of focusing one’s awareness on the breath. I tried to maintain awareness of the physical sensations in the soles of my feet, while also repeating two different mantras. One of my mantras was “We live in a world of our minds own creation”, reminding me of how the perception of her mind is subjective in terms of creating how the world seems to us. I also chanted, “Decay and death comes for all people and all things eventually“, as I looked around and saw myself, the people around me airplanes in the sky, even the Bay itself, I thought of it as all ephemeral and impermanent.
These practices seem to help me accept the pain and discomfort of my blisters end of the heat. They help me to let go of the tight grip my mind might otherwise have had and on my body relax instead of clenching up against pain, and instead feel something eternal and refreshing. Maybe it was just a simple as that it was helping my body relax but I felt like touching this eternal thing gave me burst of energy and lightness that buoyed me and helped my feet get wings. It reminded me of this experience.
At times when I was on a straight away and there was not much happening in front of me, I would close my eyes for up to twenty or thirty seconds at a time, to limit the amount of things there was to think about and to be more intimate and concentrated with my mantras and the feelings in the soles of my feet.
At the end of the race Emily and I talked to a guy who was wearing a shirt that said “All Things Are Possible With Christ”. Even though the way he was thinking about things may have been different from how I did, and how we are coming from different religious traditions, I felt like the way something larger than himself may have kept him propelled throughout his race was similar to what happened for me.