Sometimes a nice routine run is what I need. You know one of those runs where you don’t really have any lofty goals or times that you are attempting to achieve.
The ones where you just let your mind wander and go places that you haven’t gone in years.
That’s about all I remember about this 5.0 miler, well other than the slime that comes out when frost is leaving the dirt road down back. Which makes things a little less fun for the type “A” runner that I tend to be? Focusing so much on how I am running, trying to meet those pace goals and just generally training, not enjoying the running.
Then again stomping around in the mud sometimes brings out the little boy in me and about the time I got down on Blake Road, I had a big smile on my face and was hitting a few puddles that I could have avoided.
No, I didn’t wear my white Meraki’s, instead I was playing around in the Cloudflyers and acting a like a little kid again.
Something about playing in the mud brought back memories of being at my Grandparents house in Newport and how I used to go out on the corner and stomp around in the big mud puddle that was always there when it rained. Then how the town would set out the old oil pots with actual flames to warn drivers of the puddle and how I would go out and splash water on them.
My grandfather would get so mad at me because he had go out and re-light them.
Yeah, memories of another time and place.
Sometimes that is what running is for, to bring to the surface old memories and make you think about things that used to be. No, not all the memories are great, but sometimes those are the ones that you need to face and then put them in the proper places in your life. Then you can move on from them or deal with them so that you can.
Yeah, today was one of those runs where I put to bed a few more bad ghosts too, that I thought about after playing in the mud, remembered how they made me feel and looked at them as the adult I have become, not the child I was when they happened. Things ain’t always the way I remember them, when I look at what I thought happened from a different perspective.
A bit of a retrospective run when it was all over and while I felt pretty good after it was done, I think it was more the psychological side than the physical. 🙂
Putting old ghosts away is a something all of us need to do sometimes.
Harold's Blog 
I was watching NOVA and they were looking at sleep.
They think that in REM sleep your eyes move as your mind switches from one thought to another. You are just flipping through thoughts and images like flipping through a picture book.
Of course you remember none of this when you wake up but it is essential to brain health.
I wonder if the state of mind we are in when we run is similar and has similar benefits.
We all work through things while running but often come home with no particular recollection of the run or what we thought about.
Sometimes when I am writing a race review I realize I have forgotten a lot about the course and things I saw. Maybe I’m just getting old!
LikeLiked by 2 people
That would be a helluva research project, but how would it be set up? Would give a lot of interesting data and answer questions or raise even more. Science is great at that. :-). You should talk to some of your contacts and put an idea in their bonnet to look at. I would volunteer to be subjected to the testing hehehehe. Getting old is good, but I think we get focused when running about our running and are not as observant about things going on around us and don’t get what we see into the memory stacks 🙂
LikeLike
maybe they could have us wear a hat with electrodes like they do in sleep studies. It would be fascinating to see which parts of our brains are lit up and which parts are sleeping!
LikeLiked by 1 person
It would be an interesting experiment and I do wonder what the results would be. 🙂
LikeLike
Oh no!! 😢😢 Is there some misunderstanding?
LikeLike
No, just remembering and thinking about some stuff that happened from a different perspective all those many years ago. 🙂
LikeLike