“If you want to improve your body, do something for your mind. If you want to improve your mind, do something for your body.”
—Andrew Huberman (source)
I’ve been doing far more for my body than my mind lately. Even the things that I’ve been doing for my mind have really been about doing the things that I’ve been doing for my body, better. All of which is another way of saying that my mind is in need of improvement. Repair is probably the more accurate word here. Rest and recovery seem apt as well. But I guess it’s all the same in the end.
(I started writing a post a week or two ago that began with a sentence that went something like: “Every now and then, I feel the need to abandon the intellect and put my energy into things more primal.” I wrote nothing more and deleted the draft within 24 hours. The intellect can’t actually be abandoned, of course. But not writing anything more was my best effort. And it does take effort. My instinct is to give a shape to all I think and feel. It is also to be alone. So writing alone about what I think and feel became my shaping tool many years ago, and it now requires discipline just to not do it. This is one reason among many that I can’t deal with social media. Sharing one’s thoughts shouldn’t be so easy or face so little resistance on the way out. Not unless one’s in a conversation or something. When I look at social media, I see a growing digital museum of us at our worst and most performative. When I partake in it, I see myself as complicit in this. So I just can’t. Here, I’m at least forced to bleed a little and ponder for longer if I’m bleeding too much or not enough. I don’t always get it right, and I’m not sure that writing here is actually any better, but we all need somewhere to put our bloodier thoughts, I guess. Mine go here.)
The main thing I’ve been doing for my body lately—in addition to the yoga and breathwork that I’ve been doing for years—is running. I’m not enough of a runner yet to feel honest calling myself one. But I’m growing a little obsessed with becoming more of one. As with writing, and all other things that grow into obsessions, discipline is required both to do it and to not do it.
I have no problem waking up at 5am, stretching, doing some breathing exercises, then driving to the park for my run. There’s even a kind of thrill that comes with it. Leaving the house in the dark to do something that I know will be hard, but that I also know will make me feel great after, as long as I do what I told myself I would do, the first few steps of which are already behind me by the time I walk with my phone’s flashlight through the wet grass and fleeing frogs and get on my motorbike and drive through the back roads and rice paddies and winter fog while keeping an eye out for dogs and snakes and chickens crossing the roads.1
The discipline begins when I’m in the middle of running and met with the thoughts and feelings that want me to stop. It’s taken some time, but this is where my breathwork and meditation practices (as well as the guy I sometimes run with) swoop in and keep me going. In fact, I would go so far as to say that running is breathwork and meditation. At its core, running is about initiating one’s own distress and then accepting and staying present with it. Think too far ahead and you’re done. Those thoughts saying stop are just you thinking too far ahead. You can almost always take the next step. You will also need sufficient oxygen in your lungs and muscles to keep going, though, so it’s helpful to know how to use your nose and diaphragm to optimize getting it there.
An equal amount of discipline goes to not overdoing it, to not pushing too hard across too many days in a row and injuring myself. Because I absolutely will do this if I don’t use restraint. I will and I have. Because I want that great feeling. I want to devour it and keep it in me and force it to be there all the time. Even though I know that it can’t, and that I can’t. I cannot cling to it. I have to let it go. Its absence is just another kind of distress that I have to learn to accept and stay present with. This is a meditation, too. Everything in life is, or can be, as long as you stay aware of it and work at it.
Watch out for the mind that doesn’t know it needs work. Mine evades that problem by being a sputtering mess and breaking down all the time. It will always need work, and I know that. I also know that that work will be an endless balancing act, a constant push and pull in opposite directions, just like everything else on this absurd ball of beauty and horror and entropy and death. I also know, or can’t help but believe, rather, that that work is both the least and the most that I can do with my time here.
“I don't really focus on the war. I think I focus more on me. Like, what I can do [...] how far I can go. I think that's enough. Because the war is very wild. It's a wild animal you can't control. You can only control one thing, and that thing is you.”
—Francis Ngannou (source)
Endurance. That’s damn near all I’ve been thinking about lately. How can I endure more for longer? What are my weaknesses? What can I do about them? These are questions for all areas of life. Not just running. But what I’ve learned so far about running is that it is great practice and preparation for the rest. It is training for suffering with suffering. It is suffering with a purpose.
To be clear, my running-induced suffering is little more than a warmup for actual runners. At the moment, I’m working my way up to a 5K that I plan to do in mid-December. I didn’t start running with that in mind. It just became a target, a literal sign I saw at the park that said, less literally, here is something achievable for you to work toward. It’s not me pushing the limits of what humans are capable of. It’s just me pushing the limits of what I’m capable of (and capable of doing repeatedly), which as of this week is a ~21-minute 4K. A far cry from the feats of the ultra runners I’ve been drawing inspiration from, but it’s a start, and the only other things on the menu are more and longer.
While listening to podcasts with and watching documentaries about endurance runners like William Goodge and Robbie Balenger, I’ve been struck repeatedly by the darker depths of the motivations driving them: the insatiable desire to learn one’s limits and push beyond them and oneself; the underlying chasm of mental and spiritual anguish that demands actions more than words; the overarching spirit of fitness and fellowship and personal transformation that arises from those actions; the application of physical pain and discomfort to heal emotional pain and discomfort; the catharsis that comes from converting suffering into a propellant.
I’m familiar with all of those. As a beginner runner, though, especially one who’s been aiming to eject himself from his head, more or less, I hadn’t come close to putting into words any of what running was causing me to think and feel and discover about myself. Those things were all there and happening, but they lacked articulation until I heard them spoken so plainly by others. When I did, I was hit by how deep those individuals had dug into themselves while running hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of miles, as well as by the raw eloquence of their expressions of the human condition. Together with the start of my own running practice, it was like discovering writing all over again, an alternative language and cadence.
In a short documentary about Robbie Balenger, in which he runs 242 miles through Texas in just under 77 hours, outlasting the battery life of the Tesla that drove the same distance ahead of him, Balenger describes running in a way that sums up a few of my past and present experiences well:
I say that running is the inverse of a drug. With drugs, you feel really good while you're doing it, and then you feel like shit afterwards. With running, especially when you're getting into it, you feel like shit while you're doing it, and then you get to feel great afterwards.
As I’m starting to get a little more comfortable with running, I’m learning that the “doing it” part, along with the right mental posture and presence, can feel pretty great, too. And for anyone lucky enough to have an addictive, masochistic, seeking, and insatiable nature, I’m doubtful that there are healthier ways to apply it. If there are, there can’t be many.
We are all but little men and women with big brains and machines living in an environment that we weren’t adapted for, one that seems to want us to be lost and sad and immobile and plugged-in and sick for all our livelong days. Most of us have little to no control over much of that environment. But we can control how we react to and navigate it. And that’s exactly all that we can control. The best reaction I see on offer right now, then, is to do things for my body to improve my mind. To use my body as intended. To run, out of chairs and rooms and screens, into pain and suffering and discomfort, and through my morning mutations. So mote it be.
I know why the chicken really crossed the road, by the way. It’s because chickens are terrified of everything and panic whenever anything moves, and also because even chickens with heads run like chickens with their heads cut off.