You are a Serious Athlete
No matter what your mileage or pace are.
Meditations for focus and purpose
This week, I’m sharing some meditations as I call them from stoic practice, to help you orient yourself healthily within your running practice. You might think that mental training is only for serious athletes, but you are a serious athlete. If you love to run, you’re serious, and you deserve to have some tools to help you with your mental training as well as your physical one.
Meditations, Affirmations, and Koans
If you follow this newsletter, you might remember the issue from a few weeks ago about mantras or affirmations. Mantras are statements we tell ourselves about ourselves, things like “I am strong” or “I am creative.” My concept of stoic meditations are similar but oriented outward. They are statements on the universe and our context within them, rather than statements about ourselves. Because they capture a universal truth in a short statement, these meditations often appear at their surface level as somewhat contradictory. In this way, my meditations are somewhat similar to Zen Buddhist koans you might be familiar with.
These sayings, koans, meditations, or whatever you want to call them, are used in Zen practice to reject logical thinking in pursuit of enlightenment. In stoic practice, their use is different: it is to reject selfish thinking in order to pursue a greater understanding and acceptance of our context, opportunities, and duties in the world. The enlightenment part of stoicism has to do with doing one’s best in regards to oneself, one’s loved ones, and one’s community, all in a balanced fashion. My meditations in running practice have to do with understanding running within the same contexts: self, loved ones, community, so that the practice supports us and we can individually support our practices.
As I said earlier, these are some of the meditations I’ve developed over the years. Let me know how they land with you; I would love to hear. For now, here are the sayings, from my practice to yours:
Time spent running creates time in turn.
By taking time for yourself, you will give more time back to others later. Total riddle! But very true.
By not running every day, I run every day.
Those rest and cross training days are crucial! They will keep you healthy and strong, so don't forget about or discount them.
There is no goal; that is the goal.
The purpose of the run is the run; the purpose of practice is practice. What does it mean for you to run because the run itself is the goal, and that goal is endless?
If you don’t change, then you can’t change.
This one is very obvious: You have to change to change. But so many times we want something but don't want to change our training or our form or our mental framework to get it, even though we want what that change will give us. So we have to change in order to change. It's both weird and completely logical.
Thanks for letting me share some of my meditations this week. Again, let me know how they land with you and your practice. I’ll see you Monday on IG and YouTube, so please follow those if you haven’t already, and I’ll be back next Friday on this newsletter. Have a great weekend and for today, remember: go run.
