Wood’s Tea

Tara Parker-​Pope says she’s been met with sneers when admit­ting she’s train­ing for the NYC Marathon using Jeff Galloway’s “run-​walk” method. One sup­port­ive response to her post is all she is allowed to enjoy before a reader named Adam jumps in with gloves off in the second:

I’m sure Jeff used the run-​walk method to great suc­cess in ‘72.

Nice. Gal­loway ran in the ‘72 Olympics. Undoubt­edly Adam is right that Jeff wouldn’t have been taking a one-​minute walk break every five min­utes during his train­ing. But he misses a subtle dif­fer­ence: Parker-​Pope isn’t trying to win Olympic Gold. He adds this:

This is not about purity, it’s about respect­ing the distance. Too many people take on the marathon before they’re prepared—never having run before and never racing shorter dis­tances. This run/walk busi­ness strikes me as a short­cut to underperformance.

Respect­ing the dis­tance: this is the kind of idea that can only be formed by a cer­tain kind of brain. A brain, per­haps, nour­ished by blood with an abnor­mally high testos­terone level. It’s the kind of idea an upper­class­man har­rier passes on to a fresh­man, as if it were a badge of honor. Again Adam misses the point because he thinks of racing only in terms of per­for­mance, as if to ask “Why be in it if you’re not trying to win?”

Why indeed? (Full dis­clo­sure here: I used a couple of Galloway’s books when train­ing for the Port­land, OR marathon in 2003.) Gal­loway makes a point of chal­leng­ing run­ners — espe­cially those with prior racing expe­ri­ence — to ask them­selves whether they really need to always run com­pet­i­tively, either against them­selves or others. Espe­cially in the first marathon, he sug­gests stick­ing to the idea of com­plet­ing the course rather than get­ting hung up on a par­tic­u­lar time.

In yoga classes I was taught to let go of the com­pul­sion to achieve a cer­tain level of strength or flex­i­bil­ity, or to finally be able to get in a par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­cult pose (asana), or to do it better than, say, the one other male in a room oth­er­wise full of female yogis. As an Amer­i­can male I found this chal­leng­ing.  Yoga — at least in the hatha tradition — is about much more than the asanas. It’s about qui­et­ing the mind, about aware­ness, about being in the moment.

In the same way a runner in Galloway’s pro­gram can take each train­ing day as it comes. Others may crit­i­cize the method, but one does the run for the day, taking the pro­scribed walk breaks. On a strong day one is tempted to run faster, to take less breaks, to get on with it, but one lets these thoughts pass and does the run and the breaks. The week­end runs get longer…prolonged…epic. One is tempted to worry about them in the week before, dwell on them during the week after, but there is a short Wednes­day run at hand and one returns the mind to the present steps, to the rhodo­den­drons in bloom every­where, to the breath.

A better idea: respect a coura­geous woman taking up a dif­fi­cult and unfa­mil­iar chal­lenge, who’s shar­ing her expe­ri­ences and inspir­ing others to do the same. 

I started run­ning again today.