It’s winter in Colorado! Haven’t you heard? Oh yes, we have grey clouds and sleet and cold to spare!
So, not wanting to catch pneumonia- which, turns out, is not a disease invented by my mother so I’d wear a coat- I ran on the treadmill today. B-O-R-I-N-G is really the only way I can describe this activity. I set out for a good five miler with some intervals and up until about four minutes in, I was feeling pretty good. I had that I’m-a-runner-and-nothing-can-stop-me attitude. But then something did stop me: boredom.
In four minutes I had flipped through twelve different songs, watched everything on the six televisions I could see from where I was and talked to both people running on either side of me, twice.
So, I decided that it was Let’s Make A Deal time in JustRun world. This is a little game I play when I’m running where I start to make deals in my own mind so that I can finish a run. Sometimes, they are simple like “get to the end of the block and then you can turn around.” Other times, on the really hard days like today, they’re more complicated. I begin equating the completion of a run with totally unrelated events or tasks in my life. Today went something like this: “if you get through this run, you will complete the project you’ve been working on tomorrow… if you get through this run, you will have no problem finding your way around the new city you’ll be visiting in two weeks… if you get through the next mile, your dog will finally learn the word ’sit’ does not mean ‘run circles around me and bark’” and on and on it went.
Obviously, this is a distraction I use to get my mind off what I’m doing. It’s a distraction driven to the extreme by the monotony of a treadmill. But what if that were really how things worked? What if events totally unrelated to one another became the determining factors in our lives? What actions depend on other actions? And I realized I already knew this because this is how it works.
There are no accidents. Gritting through a treadmill run may not mean I’m going to be better at work or at finding directions or making the dog listen to me but it does mean something. It means that though it may not be obvious right now, there is a reason for the miles I’m running. I’ll be better for having run them; stronger in body and mind.
And so now I know the reason for the treadmill. It keeps going and going as long as you’ll let it. More speed can be added and you can adjust the incline but it just continues to turn under your feet. And you get through it. Not for the accomplishment of today’s five miles, but because it’s leading to all the miles after.
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