Running to freedom

No matter how strenuously we fight it, age always wins the battle. The years accumulate on the body like body blows to a boxer, eventually beating out the stamina, the strength and the will. Few boxers can withstand the repeated pounding and they ultimately fade.

Most of us do not have to bare the body blows, not literally anyway. But the wear and tear of everyday existence has the same effect. We age and the cumulative stresses take their toll, so that we ache more than we’d like to admit and the things we did as younger adults — drink into the night, play basketball, go for a run — require significantly more time for healing.

We do battle with the years — or many of us attempt to — and yet the years always win. We change our diet, exercise, take various pills, but our bodies have a limited life-span. The body always reasserts its will, always has the final say.
I turned 50 in October. I have lived more years to date than I likely have left. And as I look back over this sentence — the use of the word “likely” to describe what is ahead, its wishful, pleading sense — I realize that I’ve tried to qualify the aging process, to wish away the reality of aching bones and a body that is showing its wear and tear. This wishfulness is, at base, the reason I go to the gym. It is the reason I run, or try to — to extend myself, to attempt to gain for my physical being an extended warranty of sorts. It is an effort to extend the life of the physical vessel.

And yet, there is something more to the running. There was a point when I ran for no other reason than it was what I did. It became a central element in my conception of myself; as much as I was a husband and brother and uncle, as much as I was a poet and journalist, I was a runner. I still think this way, even if I have not shown the same commitment that I did five years ago when I was training to run the 18-mile Long Beach Island run.

Mark Rowlands, the Welsh philosopher, is philosophical about running. In a discussion on Philosophy Bites, he divides running into four philosophical stages. The first is the “embodied self”:

When you get to my age, you are either injured or you are about to be injured, so as the run starts off I am sort of a fully embodied self and my attention is keenly tuned to anything that might go wrong.
This is the physical stage — when you notice the ache in the knee, the hamstring, the calf. This is the place where I find myself living these days. I have become keenly aware of the injuries and the aches — in particular, the repeated strain or pull in my left calf, in the medial gastrocnemius. It is a sharp, stabbing pain and it takes days to heal.
When I was younger, and I only mean eight to 10 years ago, my runs would start out in the physical realm but quickly move on to what Rowlands describes as the Cartesian stage, a stage controlled by the mind. The body becomes the mind’s slave, Rowlands says, and the mind uses an array of tricks to get the body to respond. It is both conscious and subconscious, but it allows us to run through discomfort and exhaustion to reach the next point — the next corner, the next mile marker, the next utility pole — and then continue. The mind, Rowlands says, is duplicitous, is firmly in control.

The third stage — what he calls the Humian phase, after the philosopher David Hume — is connected to this second stage, but is far less frontal lobe in its workings. Where the second phase is concerned with short-term goals and planning, this stage is much less directed. It is the equivalent of automatic writing.

The fourth stage, however, seems key to understanding the runner’s mindset, to understanding why we continue forward even when the reasons pile up and we probably should stop. He described his experience running a marathon a number of years ago. He’d been injured in the weeks leading up and had not had time to do the kind of necessary training. He was, he said, “undercooked.” At about the 14th mile-marker, he began to fade badly.

It occurred to me that there was no reason to stop. I could take all the reasons: You know, the sort of brutal, physical unpleasantness of the whole thing, the pain and the aches and so on. I could take all these reasons that I had to stop, and they were quite good ones really, and I could put them together and allow them to congeal into a dark persuasive mass. But still, they couldn’t make me stop. The reasons had no authority over me. Which is very like Sartre’s view of freedom. We’re free to the extent that our reasons have no authority over us.

Essentially, reasons are excuses. They come from the mind. They are rationales that can make us do things or not do things. But, he says — and this is the key point, I think — “there are reasons and there are causes.” The cause is the real injury. It is the thing that, he says, “deposit” the runner “on the tarmac in a second.” But absent these “causes,” we exert our freedom by acting independently of the reasons we have for doing or not doing things. To continue running despite the pain and aches, to push on despite the growing list of reasons he had to stop, was to demonstrate his freedom.

Having achieved this realization in the past, I can tell you it is intoxicating. To be free in this way is to be free of one’s body, to almost be pure mind.

And yet, it is an illusory freedom, as any runner — and anyone who has had to live with their own physical limitations — can tell you. The physical is always there, always imposing limits. So while the runner may achieve this kind of freedom for a moment, he still has to be able to distinguish between reasons and causes. He has to know whether he is just using his pain as an excuse or whether that pain is signaling to him something more pernicious. It is  something that becomes more difficult as we get older.

When I hurt my right calf a few weeks back, I ran through the pain. I finished by three miles, but the injury kept me from running for two weeks. I used the elliptical, which mimics the running motion without the pounding, but the did not get back onto the treadmill until yesterday when I set out for another three miles. The injury had not healed — in fact, I re-injured it — and I now face another idle stretch.

What I think this shows is that the differences between Rowlands’ reasons and his causes can change and do change with time. What may have been pure rationalization when I was younger, just an excuse to stop, has become something more, something potentially problematic. What was a trick of the mind is now a very real demand of the body that must be acknowledged.
In the end, we have no choice but to acknowledge the limitations our bodies impose on us, to recognize that these limitations may become greater as we get older. Running now has become a reminder of limitations, of the physical nature of existence, of the fact that there is an expiration date on our bodies. A scary thought, perhaps, but it is something from which we cannot escape.
Running is something I do because I want to and not because I need to — even if I may need to do it on some level to take off weight and address impending health issues. I run regardless of all of this because, no matter how much effort I put in, I know that I will never be able to escape the impact of Father Time. So I run because I want to, despite all of the reasons both for and against my doing so. Rowlands might say that this is an extension of the fourth stage. To do something just to do it, because we want to and not because we must, is to get to its intrinsic value, to find the absolute freedom in the effort.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.
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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

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