I've been running again.
Not real running — six, sometimes eight laps around the turf complex at Tabor. I jog the long sides, walk the short ones. Yesterday it was warm rain, coming down in sheets, stopping, coming down again. I was soaked by the end of the first lap and didn't care.
Eleven years ago I ruptured the posterior tibial tendon in my left foot playing old guy lacrosse — the tendon that's supposed to hold up what was already a pretty flat arch. For a long time I didn't think I'd run again. Even a month ago, I'm not sure I believed it.
Somewhere around the second lap, the foot starts to talk. Not sharp — just a dull, familiar ache, the tendon reminding me it's still mine, still stretched out. My instinct used to be to fight it, or to stop. This time I try something else. I attend to it. My feet. My calves. My lungs, working. I let the ache be there without a story attached to it. And it's OK. It's not so bad. It's just my body, doing what I asked it to do.
There I was, three times this week, moving around fields I trained on as a teenager — back when they were grass instead of turf. And somewhere in that second lap, soaked and breathing hard, ache and all, a thought showed up that surprised me: it's not that hard.
That's not a claim about my fitness. It's a claim about my mind — about the voice that spends the morning building its case for why today isn't the day. The foot. The rain. The dishes still in the sink. That voice is a good lawyer. It has an argument for everything. But an ache isn't an argument. It's just data — information, not a verdict.
What I keep relearning, lap after lap, is that the argument was never the problem. The problem is whether I believe it. Every time I go anyway — every time I feel the ache and stay with it instead of arguing back — I'm proving something: that the story my mind tells me doesn't have to be the story I live by.
That's the whole practice. Not the running. The noticing that I am not my thoughts, not even my pain — and choosing anyway.
— Pete
P.S. - There will be no Practice Note Sunday, August 16th
Notes arrive on Sundays and some Wednesdays
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About me, and Practice Notes → here
About Integrative Coaching → here
About my book, The Why of Sports → here
