Experience

My meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy would have been 80 years old yesterday. Among the many thing he taught me was that life is about experience and from this experience we learn to move forward in our lives. This morning when I went out to run I had a quite strong pain in my left hip and a couple of times it wanted to spasm. I started by walking about 50 meters and then try to jog, but it didn't want to let me. ordinarily my mind would have said don't run go home and rest the problem. I have been running multiday races for about 25 years now and have learned a few things. So I continued to walk and focus on relaxing the muscles in my hip area. After a few more minutes I tried again to jog. This time the pain had subsided and I could run, by the time my run was finished I was running comfortably. Of course if the pain had increased that would have been a different matter, but experience has taught me to not give up after just a few steps.

A little help

For the last year or so I have been experiencing some lower back tightness from time to time. It does not really bother me when I run so I kept putting off doing something about it. As is often the case I finally got the inspiration to do something and decided to add what I call box situps after my run. This is a variation of an Egoscue situp. Right now I do just 20 after my run each day and after only 2 days things have improved.Also my digestion seemed to have improved and also my energy levels. Go figure!

200 Days

When I am on a running streak I usually don't keep track of days after I reach 100, but due to a project I am involved in I can now say that I have reached 200 days. This of course also translates into 6 1/2 months. My experience has been that just as in some races there are days when the inspiration and enthusiasm is there, but some days you struggle and some days you just fly. You can even see it as a metaphor for life, you just have to hang in there, good and bad.