This evening, I came home from work, changed into my running gear and went for a run. I was tired, but I had set the intention before I left work, and I was going to do it. No argument. As soon as I set out, the tiredness melted away, and I could feel the proverbial spring in my step. For the last couple of weeks, I had been willing my body to run in that way, to run more on my toes, to kick up my heels, to take short, bouncy steps. It hadn’t happened. Today it did. Maybe it was the cold, with the frost already glittering on the pavements and my breath made visible in front of me. Maybe it was hunger, and wanting to get back to my dinner. But I like to think that it was my body saying to me, ‘Yeah, I know you are up for it, I am too’, a recognition of the effort that I was making – and actually the pleasure that I was taking in making that effort.
As I ran, it felt good. So I instinctively relaxed more, at the same as thinking about what I was doing. Shoulders down, swing the arms, lower legs swing like pendulums. And in another moment, I suddenly realised that I did truly feel like I was floating along – I could feel that my spine had lengthened and that I was really covering the ground. This felt amazing.
I couldn’t keep up at that pace for more than a minute or two, but I carried that feeling with me into the rest of the run. As I ran, I was thinking that I would commit to writing half an hour a day. That could be on the tube if necessary, the important thing was to be writing. And why would I not commit half an hour a day to doing something I loved?
I was also thinking about what I would write when I got back, and that it would be on discipline, and how discipline provides the space for you to be free in. I also thought about my other act of discipline today – my first Marvellous Monday, or dairy-free Monday of the year. I have gone the whole day without eating any dairy or meat products, and can say that I have enjoyed it. A colleague at work asked me, ‘Do you think that you will see the benefit from just one day a week?’ She must have assumed that I was doing it for health reasons. Without wanting to go into too much detail about the whys, I said that it was an experiment. And it made me realise that having experiments is good, to get us doing things differently, even if it is just drinking earl grey tea without milk rather than regular builders tea – and therefore slowly training the brain that it is in fact easy to look at the world differently, to act differently.
My reward at the end of the run? Paula Radcliffe congratulating me on running my fastest mile yet, thanks to the wonders of Nike+ technology.
There was a final lesson for the day. As soon as I sat down to write this, some little gremlins in my head started chattering to me – why are you bothering to write this, who is interested? Why don’t you just do some free writing in your notebook instead? And I’m sure that free writing would have been fine, and a good thing to do, but the ironic thing is that this piece is titled ‘On discipline’. If I had given in to those gremlins, then I would have been undermining the very thing that I was going to write about. And I told them, ‘I am interested’. Those gremlins, from a positive point of view, turned out to be a very good reminder of what we contend with everyday – and how easy it can be to tell them to go away. Because, you know what, this is the first paragraph of the piece that I wrote, then went back and wrote the rest. Gremlins. Dead. Ha.
