I’ve recently started running again after a long hiatus due to a back problem.  The problem hasn’t gone away, only gotten more familiar. But the desire to be running again is more important than the fear of doing further damage.

I came late to running, very late,  and it still surprises me that I’m the kind of person who likes it. I mean, what’s to like?  No music, no choreography, no equipment, no special times, no team mates, no nothing, except pure, unvarnished effort.  Always on.

So I don’t know why it was that day about 20 months ago I decided to go for a run.  And even more puzzling, why it was that I did it again the next day and a couple of days after that.  But I certainly do know why I want to spend that pure, unvarnished effort again.  It was an experience I had in January 2008, only about two weeks after I started.

*****

It was hot that day and going to be hotter when I got to “The Tan,” the sandy running track around the Botanical Gardens. I was just coming round into the last side of the square, along the front, near the Yarra. I was hot and stumbling and in a running patch, though this is vastly dignifying the whole affair.  My head was completely empty except for two thoughts: “how soon can I go back to walking?” and “how far to Anderson Street?”

And then something strange happened. I took another step and the world changed.  Everything around me slowed down and expanded outwards. I felt as if I’d stepped into another room, an extremely spacious one. Everything remained the same, only became more like what it was.   I remember looking at the trees and seeing them go past, I distinctly remember the feeling of swivelling my head to watch them.  I remember realising the trees were going past and that I was moving down the track but that I was no longer driving the vehicle.  Something or someone else was driving, and I was like an inane, be-lulled dog in the passenger seat, smiling and nodding at the scenery going past and knowing the trip was going to last forever.

Because this was the other thing. I knew that the I, or the whoever/whatever, could drive the vehicle without my effort, and that we — it and me — could go on driving/running for ever and that it never had to end.  I remember thinking to myself, “oh, what a shame, sooner or later when I get to Anderson Street I’m probably going to have to choose to go back to real life.”  Whereas I knew, with complete certainty, that there was no end to “this,” that “this” could go on forever and that it was me who would choose to end it.

During the whole episode which would have lasted about 10 minutes, I felt the most perfect sense of ease and spaciousness and sufficiency.  Nothing was absent, everything was there: in the sandy track, in those trees, in that noon, in that day. When I got to Anderson Street I did indeed choose to stop.  I was about 1,500 metres on from where I’d started the experience.  I could easily recall what I’d thought and experienced during those 1,500 metres but I hadn’t run it: someone else had.  Effort had been entirely absent; someone else had taken on the effort while I’d had just pure ease and enjoyment. 

The experience didn’t “vanish”; it just went back into whatever realm it came out of.

*****

For a while I wondered what it was, or at least what to call it.  I told a few people about it, including a long-time runner who struggled to hide his envy and smothered my descriptions of the experience with  descriptions of his fruitless search for the experience.  He told me that often when he nears the end of a run he’ll spur himself on to another 5km, just on the off chance he should capture it at last.  He also called it the “second wind,” which suggests to me a lack of imagination he may never remedy. Either that, or I’ve been severely ripped off in my previous “second wind” experiences.   No, no, no, it’s not a poor old “second wind” or a “runner’s high.”  “Out of body experience” is probably closest to one aspect of the experience, but only like a crass nickname is close.  The feeling of the experience was like one of those “magic eye” drawings, where you gaze cross-eyed at the drawing until the “picture” pops out, and then you have the feeling you could take a trot around inside the picture. It was just like that.  So, for a name, “magic eye drawing,” is the best I can do.

But now I don’t wonder what it was, or what to call it.  I just like to remember it sometimes.  I didn’t continue running because I wanted to have this experience again. No, I continued running — and want to do so again — because I had had this experience and I felt grateful.

*****