Finding your Inner Runner
February 5th, 2010 by info
How many dedicated runners hit the pavement shortly after the alarm goes off? How many have clothes laid in sequential fashion, shoes meeting one at the front door, along with the sound of the first fresh coffee brew perking from a nearly darkened kitchen?
Yes, this is the life of the inner runner. Our culture yanks on the runner’s shoelace by referring to these ingrained habits as obsessions, but runners’ know differently. This is the stuff of life, the edge to which reason cannot cross. Now, combine the morning scenario with a grisly climb up a rocky slope, a slippery and sodden ravine barely visible at first light, the sound of a coyote whisking under a Hemlock tree, and the image of the “trail runner” appears.
Trail running has a Zen nature quality to it as one tramples into the underworld of flora and fauna, leaving the comfort and semblance of the concrete backdrop behind. There is a sense of inner urgency to return again and again to nature as our culture yearns for this romantic interlude. Hence our environmental issues all speak the language of returning to roots that pull us downward to our soulful core, our relationship to nature itself.
Trail runners aren’t necessarily more enlightened then others, nor more conscious of their choice to grace the ground of roots and earth, but trail running is contagious, and seems to call upon our primal nature to drink in the surroundings and become one with our wildish selves.