On wanting to quit

El Cabrero has been a terribly inconsistent blogger lately. I think I've been running around too much.

Speaking of running around, today was a case in point. I've had a 15K run planned for some months, although I can't say I was looking forward to it. The race in question is the Poca River Run, which touts itself as West Virginia's oldest road running race.

It is a pretty 9.3 mile course along the river, which today was swollen from recent rain storms, including a fresh one that soaked me on the last few miles. I've gone farther on harder courses. For some reason though, running this one brings out the wimp in me. This year as last I wanted to quit just about as soon as I started. Everything seemed to hurt and go wrong for the first mile or two. It didn't get a whole lot better after that.

My back hurt. My lungs hurt. I had a bad pain in one heel from what turned out to be a hole in my sock. It's the kind of thing you can put up with for a good while but it would have really caused problems on a longer run. There were other aches and pains. But misery morphed into plain old discomfort as the miles ticked away.

I think one of the great gifts of endurance sports is just that. You learn to endure. You learn to watch pain and discomfort the way Buddhists do in vipassana or mindfulness meditation. Like everything else, pain is an impermanent thing. If you watch it, it doesn't usually stay the same. Sometimes it gets worse, sometimes better and sometimes it just migrates somewhere else.

You also learn not to obsess about the whole thing but rather take it one mile at a time. There seems to be some evidence for that thesis anyhow.

That reminds me of the statistics classes I took in graduate school, another endurance feat that I only managed to survive by making my teacher laugh and go off on lengthy tangents. On every test, one question persisted and it gave good advice for working through problems:

Q. How do you eat an elephant?
A. One bite at a time.

JUST ONE MORE LINK. It's about former Massey CEO Don Blankenship's long delayed rendezvous with justice.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Pain vipassana

Every time I do some serious bookstore browsing I'm struck by the number of books on meditation. There are tons of them. I have a theory about that that goes something like this: reading or writing about it is way more fun than actually doing it. I've tried the sitting thing off and on over the years but seem to do better when in motion with things like karate.

One time a friend and I spent the night in a traditional Theravada Buddhist retreat center in WV's eastern panhandle. The practice there was to do seated meditation for an hour at a various intervals of the day, two being the bare minimum.

I decided to be hardcore so I wrapped up my legs into a full lotus posture, determined to gut it out. The method used there was vipassana or insight meditation and the basic practice was to sit and focus on breathing. If thoughts or feelings arose, one was to note them without judgment and return to the breath. Or something like that.

I spent most of the hour thinking "Jesus Christ, my knees hurt!" After a while though, I tried to just observe the pain rather than get caught up in. And, yes, that is way easier to say than do. But here and there, I managed to do it for a few seconds anyway and after a while I noticed that the pain wasn't constant but seemed to ebb and flow in intensity. Just observing it didn't make it go away but it did seem to create a little space for a moment or two.

I found that practice of "pain vipassana" to be useful at other times, such as endurance events like marathons or triathlons. I really don't enjoy doing those things--it's more like I enjoy having just finished doing them. The event itself is pretty much a total drag. But it did help to just observe the level of pain or discomfort and make the most of the times when the level went down.

I've been thinking about this because since Monday I've been hit with a sudden bout of what appears to be sciatica, which in my case is intense, sometimes agonizing pain in the back and down the legs. Going across the room sometimes seems like an ordeal--and I usually spend a lot of time in serious physical exercise. I'm determined to keep moving as much as I can until it gets under control, which means more pain vipassana.

But I'd SOOO much rather just read about it.

TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. Here's a classic example of the low road approach to economic development, which usually involves giving away the store and getting ripped off in return. A telemarketing company located in Wheeling in 2006 because it got a three year tax break. Now they're moving to Pennsylvania. And we all know this isn't the first time something like this happened.

CORPORATE CRIMINALS? Here's another take on the Massey Upper Big Branch mine disaster can the various investigations going on related to it.

A GOOD READ. Here's an amusing list of the 10 books aspiring writers shouldn't read.

OVERDOING IT. While physical inactivity is a bigger problem for American children, pushing them too hard in sports can also do damage.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED