| Prelude |
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PRELUDE
A QUEST AND A QUESTION “What’s holding me back.?”
For weeks, ever since I first saw the list of course participants for the upcoming Natural Running Course, I’d been in a state of eager anticipation. I was really looking forward to meeting up with this group. I wasn’t prepared for meeting someone else deeply interesting: myself.
The group of people gathering together for this course form an awesome bunch. All of them are committed runners, each in their individual way. Together they bring to the course an extraordinary amount of running ‘lore’, of nous and plain good horse-sense about running. Amongst them is an author and commentator on running that I really respect and then,there is a young guy who has been helping with a scientific project in Kenya who I’m keen to quiz about key aspects of natural running. There are some naturally gifted runners and, as it turns out some highly emotionally intelligent individuals. It has the promise of some great chemistry, some interesting challenges and insights ahead. I’ve had such a rich array of insights about natural running recently. I am fired up with some unique formulations to explore and present to this astute gathering of runners. It gets my juices flowing to work out ways of not just thinking about ones running but of ways to think into it. That’s my passion: to reveal insights into how to open into ones running body, to more fully inhabit it. I am up for the challenges of putting this over. New ways of exploring demand major shifts of attitude. They can challenge core beliefs about how to improve running form. Great- no pressure there then!
I like to lift my eyes to the bigger horizon, to explore how the running body fits into the wide panorama of evolution. I have a mission to dig down through strata upon strata of habitual and cultural overlay. Is it possible to get down to the bedrock.? Is it possible to reveal a natural stride unconditioned by the wearing of shoes? Consider all the strides ever taken in our (at least) 2.4 million year history. 99.9% of those strides have probably never had to adapt to the modern factory made shoe. And those strides have walked and run us to an extraordinary success in evolutionary terms. OK there is nothing wrong with big horizons, with a big mission like revealing a natural stride but one major interest that participants have in natural running centres around injury prevention. A key part of the interest runners have in natural running is to be injury free. Pain is indeed the gift that nobody wants!
The trouble is that it is now the Friday before the weekend course, a course trumpeted to be about injury free running and well…I have a bit of a problem…ah hum: I have injured both feet. The right foot I skewered on a rusty tent peg at the Solfest Music Festival the weekend before. The left foot I damaged a fortnight earlier. My dog will stop on a five-pence piece for an arresting smell, ( always blame the dog!) and forced me to side step off the path. My foot jammed down awkwardly on a (mercifully) round stone hidden under a tussock. I know exactly what I have done: I’ve badly sprained the tendons around the connection of Tibialis Posterior to the metatarsal. It sets up an inflammatory response between the cling-film like periosteum that lines the bone and the bone itself. By ankle twisting injury standards it’s no great shakes. Everything else about the foot and ankle works great but every time the foot rolls toward toe-off it twangs the damaged tendons. Ouch. Bottom line : I just can’t run. Walking is marginally even more painful. So here’s the scenario: The next day a bunch of highly committed runners are gathering for a course on injury free natural running and well… here’s me, hardly a great advert for barefoot running: both feet are crippled. That is certainly pulling me down from those bigger horizons. In fact my movement horizons have narrowed dramatically. That’s not quite all: to add to the anxiety my mother with advanced senile dementia has fallen through the floor she recently flooded. Time for any grand plans and preparation is severely curtailed.
I step gingerly on the treadmill. C’ mon running is often about penetrating, pushing through pain. I am absolutely determined to push my foot through the pain of the rolling action to toe-off. Oh dear, it works so superbly normally, a sure.swift action of amazing tensile strength. It can take me flowingly over rocky terrain- very impressive. And I’m proud to think I’ve unearthed a missing 3rd dimension to the foot action. This twin opposed spiral action of the foot winds and unwinds with enormous power. It reveals that what we conventionally call pronation and supination are more than a two dimensional rocking action but a superb 3D spiralling twist. A spiral action that furthermore can be seen as beautifully connecting from head to toe. It’s a great and insightful theory. However in my ‘Laboratory-of-One’ approach to natural running it is vital that I can “walk the talk”, that I can demonstrate. I aspire to be a living demonstration of a natural stride in action. I am not a bit comfortable with “talking the walk”- infact I’m now wishing I hadn’t quite tough on those who do! Something that normally works so superbly, a source of pride and wonder, a source of amazing endorphin fuelled highs, now simply- hurts like hell,
I step off the mill. The ankle twinges painfully. I look in the mirror at that 64 year old who has recently started squatting in my face. My face reflects the complex “ball” of pain that I’m caught up in. The most painful aspect is the pricking at prodding at my Pride, at my reputation. I’m thinking, despairingly, does Pride really come before the Fall, because that bloody fall seemed to have come before my wounded and injured Pride. I ask myself, what am I so desperately trying to make happen here. I am determined to force my injured foot through a range of action so that it can “show-off” it’s usual superb action. But there’s a new set of conditions in the wretched ankle, a damaged set of tendons. I am angry and disappointed, resentful. And I’m determined to muscle through the pain come what may. All this is cattle-prodding me to get on in the drastically limited time available, all in the in the hope that it might warm-up and ease. The injured foot is sullenly having none of it!
Looking at my reflection with eyes full of worry and self pity when, out of the blue comes a menthol fresh, cool clear question. It just drifted into my head: “WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK?”. The question only fuels my mounting anger and frustration.. Why of course it’s the injuries!. Why did they have to happen just now. Why is my time and attention being pulled away by my mother’s tragic situation. Oh no no, the question is not going away that easily and it comes back again: coolly “WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK?”. I’m tearing my hair by now. Look isn’t it bleedin’ obvious that without the injury and my mother’s plight I’d be sailing full of confidence into the workshop I’ve so been looking forward to. If this is the still, small voice of Conscience, then its neither still nor small and it seems to have a terrier like tenacity: “. Crystal clear and insistent it comes again WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK?”
Then- BREAKDOWN. Like stepping off a crazy travellator, everything now stops and the whole prideful, painful ball of suffering just falls apart, disintegrates. And rather than feeling broken I sense myself breaking through somehow. I start to realize that what’s holding me back is this hurtling and hurting meteor of Pride. This has had me trying to force, strain and push my foot to do something it usually does superbly. In a forehead smiting way now I get it! Pride does indeed come before the Fall: The ability that I’ve cultivated to run barefoot over rocky ground has become an identity. That identity has been challenged and severely shaken. The dogged persistence of the question “WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK?” has guide me eventually to an insight and a truth: it was the whole ball of hurt pride and associated suffering that was holding me back. I had identified with those feelings, screamed for pity and found just grounds, evidence for feelings of despair. In the moment of breakthrough I stepped off the travellator and DISIDENTIFIED. Where moments before there was the desperate , cattle-prodding, straining, striving pushing of the aptly named FORCE of Habit, there is now stillness, insight and hope.
I’ve entered a very humble, vulnerable and opened out state . I wholly embrace and accept the injuries. In fact they have given me all the preparation I will ever need to deal compassionately with my Mum’s tragic decline. It is all the preparation needed to communicate genuinely with the group of people I am about to meet who will essentially demand from me not puffed up pride and ego but the authenticity that is the ground of any real teaching. After all I call these courses “Crossing the Line”. That insistent question had. thankfully hauled me screaming across that line to a remarkable insight . Like a stick of sea -side rock “WHAT’S HOLDING YOU BACK” will run through the centre of this course and open up some real and practical possibilities, amongst other things, how to improve running form. As I settled into this state I had a feeling of deep privilege that I was able to pass on a real Teaching.
What sense I can make of this goes something along these lines: The hole I had skewered through the right foot and the injured tendons on the right ankle are real. The cascade of ego-driven fear, anxiety and despair are not real but mind manufactured limitations that were holding me back- and how!. The holding back works at multiple levels. They centre around attachments that I have become caught up in. But what was to be made very plain in the next few hours was the degree to which I had massively interfered by pushing and forcing my foot to work in the usual way. From the instant of the moment of breakthrough, I simply let go of the limitations of all of this. It just fell away from me. In no way could I get puffed by what was happening. Letting go and leaving myself alone in this way enabled the genius of my evolved support system to fire up WHUMPF like a huge and powerful boiler. Delighting in what it does so superbly it rapidly established a workable set of complex alternative kinesthetic flow lines to find ways around the new set of damaged conditions. The injuries seemed like rocks in the stream. The support system established ways to re-direct kinesthetic flow lines like water flowing around the rocks. What had previously been terrible obstacles, stumbling blocks to pride and ego were now revealed as gifts that opened me up to precious and humbling insights. In all of this, in no way does the pain “miraculously” disappear. But there is something ’super-natural” going on and it is not in the other-worldly sense we usually use this word, but nature ‘souping ‘ itself up to fully do what it has evolved to do: to heal, repair and renew. The pain of the injuries become an integral part of the adaptation and healing., an intense sensation flagging up that I was being looked after- cared for. It is true nobody wants it, but for sure it is indeed a gift! Rapidly I was able to run on it again within hours, the same care that came from a sense of the injuries being cared for. Soon it was opening out moves that hours before seemed impossible . As things opened out came a return of the endorphins, harbingers of hope and optimism and gratitude!. Naturally I want to celebrate this., to emanate it and let it suffuse through the course.
All told this sense of stepping off the escalator, the stepping back, the disidentification with pride opened to an ineffable state of vulnerability and softness and created a nourishing acceptance of contingencies, of injury and pain. It continues to reconnect me to a child-like sense of wonder at the extraordinary process that grew me safely from fertilized ovum to a foetus, from a baby to a child, from a child to a man and the little bit of growth that took place as I stepped despondently off that running machine. I recall that all the ego part of me that I call “I” could do was to fight tooth and nail with the insistent “WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK” questioning. So could I take any credit? No more than I could get puffed up because my liver works so well!
What if, in a parallel universe there were no injuries, no suffering of a dear demented soul. What if puffed up with pride and in full sail I had strutted my stuff flowing over those rocks, showing off what feet can really do. Might that have buttressed the walls of an identity. made it less likely that I’d confront someone deeply interesting before this course started -myself. |
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