My relationship to athleticism has changed pretty drastically in the last year. At some point, I began looking at my habits and decided I wanted a change. Swimming, biking and especially weightlifting became hobbies. Yet, running was like the final frontier of fitness. I’d always shunned it, mostly by telling myself it wasn’t for me. I’d look stupid and I’d feel stupid. It was for other people, some mystical class of “runners” that I had made up and to which I didn’t belong.
The doubt I harbored towards running and the certainty that I would humiliate myself if I tried were shields — part of a harmful mentality I had developed during my teenage years and still work to unlearn. I felt that I couldn’t fail if I never tried, and that it was therefore better to keep myself and my ego safe by never trying, never risking and never losing. But when I lived like that, I never won, either.
When The Michigan Daily Arts announced that they were running a relay marathon, I thought about how I’d spent so much of the past year rewarded by my decision to do things that were hard for me. The discipline that I had built could carry me through anything — and what good was it if it couldn’t carry me seven miles? Was that so far when that same will had already taken me through a seemingly infinite distance: the distance between my past and my present selves?
I began my training.
I found that the level of fitness I’d acquired in the recent months had some crossover with running. Once I had cleared my mental hurdles and began to test my limits, I felt far lighter than I ever would have guessed. But what really stood out to me was the sudden need to consider my body in an entirely different way.
When I began weightlifting, the mentality behind my movements was always preparation to, obviously, move a weight. It required firmness; you brace yourself to move the weight. The opposite kind of movement and mentality are needed for running. Movements beneficial for running don’t benefit from firmness or bracing oneself; they require a certain fluidity. After all, running, unlike weightlifting, isn’t concerned with creating tension in a specific, localized muscle, but with creating an engagement of the entire body in a unified movement — a greater pattern that undulates through the body from the ball of the foot to the diaphragm to the fingertips. It requires full-body coordination that was unlike anything I had previously trained for.
I saw a change in my understanding of movement, but I saw a shift in my headspace, too. In day-to-day life, I think most people would articulate their experiences as being “inside their head.” Cartes defined this as Dualism: To be a mind in a body, concentrated in one’s head by virtue of their thoughts, an active stream of consciousness. I certainly feel this way. When I lift, I feel entirely in my body on a good set. I feel like my consciousness is being diffused throughout my body. The most important part of it isn’t my brain anymore, but a body part: my chest, my quads, my lats. I might get up and feel dizzy, or feel my blood rushing in my head if I really push myself. My point is, I’m totally in my body when I lift. I oscillated between being “in my head” in daily life and being “in my body” when I exercised.
As I began running and experienced a runner’s high for the first time, I became able to identify a comfortable pace for my runs. Then, I became able to both engage my full body in the pattern of my running stride and to process things as I ran. Mostly, I thought about running itself, or sometimes, past incarnations of running; early humans stalking herd animals on the savanna or battles and sports of antiquity. The synthesis of all of these past runners of the human race parallels this other synthesis of the self; the mind and body trained on the same behavior, oriented towards the same goals, totally unified. It’s the attainment of something I thought I’d never be able to achieve — a homecoming to a behavior that’s as ingrained in us as breathing and a rejection of the self-doubt that kept me back. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
Daily Arts Contributor Max Resch can be reached at nataljo@umich.edu.
