The fork in the road

A conversation (in my mind) with 'Running & Being' author George Sheehan

Morning, friends! ☀️

After two months of letting my heel heal from a recent bout of plantar fasciitis, I’ve been slowly, gingerly getting back to running. I’ve been doing runs outdoors on the trails near me, and a handful of runs on my treadmill. It’s an odd experience, learning to listen closely to my tendons, ligaments and muscles again, straining to hear what they’re trying to say.

I was in tune with my body after running the Richmond Half Marathon last November, and feeling strong again. So, taking these two months off feels like being put up in a shed for a while, and coming out again to see the daylight for the first time in a long time. I feel a little like a deer on its first day on its legs; are these things really going to work?

I’ve been searching for advice on starting running again, on getting in tune with your body again after a long layoff, when I stumbled across a book I go back to from time to time — George Sheehan’s 1978 classic Running & Being, which you’ve no doubt seen me cite here before.

The book’s fourth chapter, “Beginning,” caught my eye especially, as it captures so well what I’ve been thinking and feeling lately — that my body is like a machine that’s been turned off for a while, and it needs a little push to turn back on again.

As I read it, I debated which sentences to pull out and share with you in a post. But the more I read, the more I realized the idea he’s expressing — that it’s not too late — comes across so much better when you read the full passage.

So I thought I’d share it with you:

“The people who think they know say that given a second chance a man will make the same mess of his life he did the first time. Playwrights and novelists over the years have never given us any hope that reliving our lives would have any different result the second time around. Our scientists and psychologists seem to agree. Even such disparate thinkers as Bucky Fuller and B.F. Skinner are together on this. ‘We shouldn’t try to change people,’ wrote Skinner. ‘We should change the world in which people live.’ It is a thought Fuller often expressed.

Some, of course, take the opposing view. The people who deal in Faith, Hope and Charity seem to think that one day is as good as another for changing your personal history. Philosophers since recorded time have recommended it. From Pindar to Emerson they have told us to become the thing we are, to fulfill our design, to choose our own reality, our own way of being a person. What they didn’t tell us was how to do it, or how difficult it would be. When Paul said to put on the New Man, he reminded us of the unlimited potential of man, but the lives we lead constantly remind us of the obvious limits of this potential.

Clearly the Good Life is not as accessible as the books say. And yet it is not from want of trying that we have failed. We start our new lives with almost as much frequency as Mark Twain gave up smoking (thousands of times) and with about the same success.

Can tomorrow be the first day of the rest of your life? And can that life be completely different from the mess it is today? The answer, of course, has to be yes, or all those great men wouldn’t have said so. But how do you go about it?

The first thing to do, it seems to me, is to retrace your steps. To go back to that period of your life when you were operating as a successful human being (although you most likely weren’t aware of it). To go back to those times when your soul, your self, was not what you possessed or your social standing or other people’s opinion but a totality of body, mind and spirit. And that totality interacting freely with your total environment.

Somewhere past childhood that integration of self and that response to the universe began to dissolve. We came more and more to associate who we were with what we owned, to judge ourselves by other people’s opinions, to make our decisions by other people’s rules, to live by other people’s values. Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, our physical condition began to decline. We had reached the fork in the road. We took the well-traveled path.

“One who took the path overgrown with weeds and rarely used was Henry David Thoreau. The world knows Thoreau as a man of intellect, a shrewd observer, a rebel against conventional values. What has not been emphasized was that he was an athletic, and a fine one. He was, of course, a great walker. This kept him in prime physical condition. ‘I inhabit my body,’ he wrote, ‘with inexpressible satisfaction: both its weariness and its refreshments.’ It would not be too much to say that Thoreau’s other activities derived their vitality from the vitality of his body. That the self that was Thoreau depended on being as physical as he could be. And that no life can be completely lived without being lived completely on a physical level.

If Thoreau was right, the way to find who we are is through our bodies. The way to relive our life is to go back to the physical self we were before we lost our way. That tuned-in self that could listen with the third ear was aware of the fourth dimension and had a sixth sense about the forces around it. That tuned-in self that was sensitive and intuitive, and perceived what is no longer evident to our degenerating bodies.

This may come as a surprise even to physical fitness leaders. Physical fitness programs have long been based on the desire to lead a long life, to forestall heart attacks, to feel better generally or to improve your figure. No one ever told us that the body determined our mental and spiritual energies. That with the new body we can put on the new person and build a new life, the life we were always designed to lead but lost with the body we enjoyed in our youth.

Now, common sense will tell you that you’ll never see twenty-eight again, but the facts on fitness show that almost anyone can reach levels of vigor and strength and endurance equal to most of the twenty-eight-year-olds in this country. Given the good fortune to find an athletic activity that fits him, a man can recapture his youth and a second chance to listen to what his total self held important at that time.

If you think that life has passed you by, or, even worse, that you are living someone else’s life, you still can prove the experts wrong. Tomorrow can be the first day of the rest of your life. All you have to do is follow Thoreau. Inhabit your body with delight, with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshments. And you can do it if you’ll just go back to that fork in the road.”

This is what I’m attempting to do now. To slow down, and listen to the little twinges of pain in my heels, the way my tendons and nerves send me messages. To pay attention, maybe for the first time ever, to what my body is communicating to me, and to make an effort to be more attuned to it.

Have you ever reached this kind of fork in the road, with an injury (or anything else)? How did you respond?

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going — and have a great, great run out there today.

Your friend,

— Terrell