Dispatches from the middle

I shall handle these in reverse order, and then – looking back over this point – go for a bit of a ramble. A couple of days ago, I made the mistake of running without my balaclava. The fact that I couldn’t find my balaclava (have since re-discovered it) might have had something to do with it. I’m not sure why/how I could have misplaced it though – it’s not like I use it for a great many things – but I did. On the day in question, with no balaclava to be found, it was about -20C outside, though much closer to -30C with the wind. The same absence of mind that allowed me to lose my balaclava also persuaded me not to take the wind into consideration. Just as everyone drives like they’ve forgotten what snow is immediately after the first snowfall, I guess runners can forget what a headwind in -20C feels like and blithely trot out bare-faced. The first 10 minutes of the run were miserable; I seriously considered turning around and running right back into my building, not to emerge until April. As my face froze, however, and the pain settled into a tolerable numbness, I decided to keep going. I managed to stay more or less out of the wind, and the remainder of the run was, while certainly not pleasant, tolerable.

There are a host of sensations unique to running on a really cold day, and, it would seem, it’s easy to forget them. I’ve never done any serious training at altitude, but I imagine running in very cold weather touches on what that might be like. It’s harder to breath, harder to move, you expend energy a lot faster. I’ll have to take off and do some running in the mountains one day to test the theory!

On this occasion, I was out for about 45 minutes, and by the time I got home, my face was covered in tiny balls of ice where my breath had condensed and frozen. This has happened many times, and it always makes me slightly self-conscious of the little hairs on my upper lip. Unsightly accumulations of frost! And of course, now I’m blogging about it… Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for the camera, I didn’t carry my camera with me and the trip up the stairs to my apartment did away with the wee ice balls, so I don’t have a picture. Hopefully (?), soon though!

And now, with the idea of freezing to death as an icy springboard, on to irrational fears! Is there an activity, an idea, or just generally an aspect of existence that, in theory, shouldn’t be any more intimidating than any other, but that for some inexplicable reason just scares the crap out of you? I have two. Well, I have many, but I have two that I’ll own up to here. The first is finances. Thankfully, I’m quickly overcoming this one with the help of a wonderful friend and financial planner who has a gift for explaining financial concepts, but for the longest time, my brain would simply shut down (a crazy feeling!) every time I heard words like “mutual fund,” “interest rate,” “investment” and so on. And it’s not that I’m disorganized or irresponsible with my money, it’s just that, for some reason, at some point, I convinced myself that any but the simplest of financial concepts were too complicated for me to grasp. Which is ridiculous, but a thorough convincing is not an easy thing to undo!

My second irrational fear is my computer. My computer and all the extraneous bits and pieces associated with it – iPod, camera, the external hard drive I will one day own. Figuring out gadgets is much the same as figuring out financial concepts – it’s often relatively intuitive and centered around a few basic principles upon which one can expand. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure things out and become reasonably proficient, but I always seem to stop at the bare minimum, paralyzed by a fear of not understanding that, oh so ironically, prevents me from learning any more. Stupido! [In a feeble attempt at defending the fear of computers, I will say that the vocabulary is tough to grasp. I’m all for being creative with language, but the use of completely unrelated words to refer to objects and concepts is very confusing for beginners. Like “cookies”? Um…yes please? To the uninformed soul, the only logical connection existing between cookies and computers is that it’s a bad idea to get crumbs in the keyboard.]

Both of these fears center around an inability to understand. Apparently, I shy away from things I find difficult because I’m afraid of not being able to understand quickly and completely. Is the underlying problem, then, a fear of failure? Or a fear of only partial success? Is the problem, perhaps, still clinging to absolute concepts like “failure” and “success”? After some thinking, and speaking about this to two of my dearest people (AP and J, I’m looking at y’all), I’ve come to the conclusion that the point is very simply to do. Endeavoring to do well, to learn, and to improve, is great, but doing in the first place is key. I find as I get older, I’m far more focused on optimization. My crises are crises of optimization, and this is hugely counterproductive to experimentation, adventure, imagination, and attention to process. J made a very good point the other day about being process-oriented. Don’t fuss over the end product, focus on the process. I like this. Learning what I can and enjoying each new finance- or computer-related discovery is much better than stewing over the fact that I’m not already an expert.

The idea of process is also very applicable to training. Some runs will feel great, some will feel shitty. Some will be fast, others painfully slow. But get out there and cover the goddamn ground! Focus on putting in the miles, not on the optimization of anything. Obviously, this is the end goal, but if you know what steps are necessary to get you there (basically, a lot of hard work), then concentrating on the process will make the whole project a lot more enjoyable. And it will leave a lot more freedom for change, growth, and experimentation.

Booyashaka!