Baby Bird in Hand

One of my best running tips is never found in the conventional coaching books.
Here it is: have the left lens of your glasses fall out about two minutes after the start.

Having your lens fall out might not really help you, but it helped me. If your glasses fall apart, you'll be forced to run the rest of the race with your glasses clutched gently in one of your hands. If you hold too tightly the frame might get bent in some way, holding them too loosely will bring on the disaster of trying to find the dropped lens in amongst twenty or so thousand moving running shoes. (Talk about impossible; in this Sunday morning's race I saw a plastic sandwich bag in the middle of the roadway just before the startline. In it, clearly visible, was a ten dollar bill.  About 100 people ran by it in the three or four seconds I was watching. I'm sure someone braved the on rushing crowd, but not me.)

This wasn't the first time I had to run with my glasses in my hand. The lens popped out on the beach in Florida once. It's subject to humidity and temperature it seems. It took forever to find it amongst the sea shells. A couple of times, it just seemed easier to see in a snowstorm without the glasses than with, sometimes I was bothered by the sweat in my eyes and I just took them off and in the 18 mile marathon warm-up last year, the weather was a softly blowing rain, not enough to soak you through but enough to fog my lens like a coating of Vaseline.

So, you carry your glasses as if they were a baby bird and because of that, because you can't hurtle along with clenched fists and half closed eyes, puffing like a toad and pounding your feet while zigging and zagging through the crowds of runners, you relax into the running. You can't do anything else. Holding a baby bird has this odd effect.   All you can do, baby bird in hand, is keep your pace steady and your breathing clear. This does not happen all at once, but it does seem to happen without you trying to do it. Your arm swing evens out and you start to place your feet upon the pavement. Place, not plop, or plunk or thwack, you -place -each -foot  where it needs to go.

You are able to take notice of the things happening around you, see the faces of the families and friends who will stand by the roadside for two hours to see the six second vision of their friend, their spouse, their sister, their sons and daughters running by, you hear a guy bemoaning the early defeat of Kansas in the NCAA tourney,  listen in as you pass the seven mile mark to a mom talking via her cellphone on a speakerphone to all her kids at home eating breakfast while she is out here running or you just listen,    listen,,,  to the myriad sounds of the footsteps and the breathing. That includes, of course, your own breathing which its now moving in and out of you so evenly you can almost see the arrows of it's direction.

 Now let me be clear, this just-right-tight-grip, steady pace, clear breathing and listening in on your surrounding universe does not mean running slower than your goal, it doesn't mean running slower at all. If anything, you notice that you are keeping or beating your average pace goal and you aren't getting all stressed about it. The hills are just there and then the tops of those hills. The downhills are run with the brakes off but you never seem to have the feeling of being out of control. Try as you might you cannot hear the sound of your own shoes on the roadway because you are nearly floating along.

Okay, and now here's the weird part, at some point you do feel as if you were floating. Really. That Vaseline look that the rain-covered lenses gave you now becomes how you see the whole world outside of you, moving from vaguely unformed features to see everything sharply crystallized. You become aware that you are seeing, but the body the eyes are in doesn't feel connected to the eyes. You know you are running and you feel as if you could run forever.

I told you it was weird.

The first time it happened to me, I was a little shocked and I tried to hold onto the moment, to hold onto the feeling, but that is like holding a babybird too tight. I slowed down and tried to drink in what I was seeing....and it was gone. And I could not get it back.

Weeks went by and then one morning, just as I was finishing a really good dream about being in someone's big home in the mountains, someone in the dream said "When it comes, go."
I woke up.
--
I do still run with my glasses sometimes, but not unless I will need them to read something after the run. Most of the time I do take my headset and listen to books on Physics or Cosmology or the creation of modern English or Math.** But, most of the time, I just take me.

And in one of my hands I imagine I am holding a little baby bird.

And we fly.

~~~~~
**(Someone asked me the other day why I listen to books on Physics or Cosmology or the creation of modern English or Math. I said it was because I don't know anything about Physics or Cosmology or the creation of modern English or Math.)