UNACCOMPLISHED GOALS

How we all have some kind of intimate experience with unaccomplished goals!  We have dreams we have had to accomplish something either in our distance running or in life all together.  Here are some great thoughts about this reality!

It seems that every accomplished holistic distance runner also has their share of stories about facing unaccomplished goals.  Every distance runner with an experience with in-accomplishment within the year!  Within the very process of covering miles on foot lends to a series of goals; private, social and even sub-conscious goals within the runner.  Even in meeting goals not accomplished there is not much to dissuade their passion, for the greatest satisfaction of the holistic distance runner is to run in itself. 

However, somewhere seated below the spiritual strength and satisfactions of a run, in every journey we must manage our intellect and our bodies.  These two usually glean strongest off meeting and accomplishing goals.  Aside from the time spent on the road or trail there is also the regular confrontation with distances.   Time spent running and the distance covered also provide the sensation of accomplishment, yet both also are notorious for misleading a runner.  This is the reason every mature distance runner has a ready story about their experience with an unaccomplished goal.

In the runners consciousness there in nothing strange about this reality… this daily confrontation.  Whether running one mile or one-hundred miles, the holistic distance runner embraces the obstacles and demands.  They face the possibilities of every run with vigilance and patience.  No matter what, you can be sure that in every distance they have also faced the confrontation of not accomplishing all they set out to do… then living and adjusting themselves to this reality.  Cheers and be well!

THE PEOPLE'S DRUMS

Surely we have been designed for the sacred… first, abundance within.  We CANNOT be “large” when divided out in commonality.  We are rich in the abundance of intimacy with limits to the quantity we share.  The sacred resists commonplace… the precious is precious BECAUSE it is rare.  Now… what would one say their life is of this?  What is the consistency of your relationships?  Do you have the sacred? 

We always look for focus points in/for distance running.  One of the greatest things I have found that I can do for myself in a run is to ask myself, “What is the strongest and most predominant sound I can hear right now out running?”  If it is pre-dawn, here it is usually the crickets… but then I often run in the mid-morning where it becomes the birds.  Both of which I have often found myself completely overlooking... un-acknowledging.  And I wonder to myself just what is my life all about?  There should be a purity about these things.  I know it is about His design of LIFE and His appreciations.  Then as another sound seems to match in penetration... it is the every ready foot-plants... one after another... the soft tread of rubber popping away down the asphalt. 

Thinking naturally of anthropology... foot plants reminding me of indigenous people groups and their tribal use of drums.  Especially those peoples of the Americas.  They begin soft, pulsing drums to start ceremony.  They send off runners… messengers if you will… out into the wilderness and to simply run out hearing the rhythm of the drums.  Then sometime after… the runner running… the drums keeping tempo so far away until the runner faintly hears them any longer.  Then the runner will turn for home.  Returning to the slow increased volume of their people’s drums… returning to waiting people who desire to hear the message they have brought from the wilderness.  THAT is beauty and culture! 

In thoughts and understandings it has been my hope to illuminate Holistic Distance Running to a post-modern people!  How so many need such simplicity!  There is a foundation in such efforts and in such relationships to discover ones own humanity.  To become more ennobled… a beautiful man, or beautiful woman.  Most of all, to discover better ways of sharing yourself with another person.  Because sharing your-self with another person is the essence of LIFE!  Cheers!