That was zen. This is tao.

I have always been attracted to asceticism in one way or another. Movements or religions that place emphasis on denial, discipline and physical hardship have always held a fascination for me and running affords opportunities for them all. Examples might be the eastern orthodox churches with their long traditions of hermitism, the more familiar Christian monastic orders or the now equally familiar Buddhist orders. Their renunciation of material belongings is an essential element of their appeal but there is another element that is even more compelling: the motif of purification through pain or physical suffering. A motif not uncommon I suspect among runners. Suffering, of course, can take many forms: self-denial, fasting, or physical discomfort to name but a few. And in this regard and others, running can bear at least a superficial resemblance to ascetic religions. Consider the case. It has its own rites of worship: private worship is constituted by the runner’s training; public worship by race meets. It has its own practises and rituals: witness the runner stretching before a run and you are witnessing a habitualised ritual that will be repeated perhaps many thousands of times during the course of their life. And they pray! They offer up invocations that they won’t get injured before a race; that they can get their mile splits down; that the finish line is immediately around the next corner; that the cyclist on the pavement will get off the bloody pavement. Not to a deity you understand, but to the spirit of running, the zen of running. A runner will often push through the pain barrier in a race or in training, not because they are masochists, but because of what lies on the other side: the satisfaction of having given their best; the feeling of being tested and not found wanting: and, in my case at least, the feeling of purification by ordeal. It feels redemptive. If life is a series of debit transactions with the soul, running makes a positive contribution to the accounts. So you see, it can very spriritual.

Not that I felt particularly spiritual this morning when I was running long intervals. I ran well outside what I expected to run – 20 seconds a mile slower in fact on average. I ran 3 mile splits with 2 minutes rest between splits and a mile of warm-up and warm-down. I clocked the splits as:

First split: 7:19
Second split: 7:12
Third split: 7:12