Perspective and quick fixes

The perspective of moving out that door

They do say that the hardest part of a run is getting out the door. I say it to myself all the time. It is a handy technique to beat away the self loathing that will surely follow if you don’t get out that door. Runners are funny that way.

Now I am prone to a spot of self loathing as much as the next man.  I am also a king of procrastination, or rather grouping things in an order to be done. If you ask my wife it looks like procrastination. To be honest, I am not sure where this trait came from. My entire family is dynamic to the point of being wearisome. My wife too can’t stop moving and doing, a beautiful mix of activity and exhaustion to behold. Now before you start forming this mental picture of me standing at the doorway with my running shoes on, wearing a wife beater with a pizza stain down the front, blinking at the sunshine. In this mental picture I might even be adjusting or scratching somewhere usually not done in any sort of company never mind polite circles. Perhaps I belch or kick the dog and then slope back to a darkened room and settle back into a fragrantly stale couch. I am not that guy either.

Where has this trait come from? I think I can only blame Tetris. I was obsessed with the game as a kid. But I had a weird way of playing, I would build up solid piles on either side of a  long one-block wide gap, much like a space between skyscrapers, just waiting for when one of those long rectangular blocks would pop out from the top of the screen, slotting them down to the bottom row. Magically after a blink, seven rows of carefully arranged and compacted building blocks would vanish. That was far more satisfying that any score I got. I couldn't bear building a solid row on top of three rows with gaps in. Weird and particularly unhelpful. So you see, video games do corrupt the youth of today and clearly yesteryear. Happily that’s where my dalliance with video games ended. Shooting and driving fantasies never took hold. It did give me the idea though that things needed to be grouped together and completed in blocks.

Living in London didn't help either. I worked as a project manager in the City. Of course speaking to project managers about their work is perhaps one of the duller ways to spend your time. Pray you never get introduced to one at a party. Maybe quantity surveyors are the dullest of all. So dull that you are afforded a glimpse of what it must be like to be at a cocktail party in Zurich. No matter how interesting the project they are working on is, it is all dull sequences and timelines. Time will even, mid conversation, take itself off to whither and die in the corner leaving you standing in a stifling vacuum.

“Wow, you are building a hovercraft barge that will revolutionise… “

“Yes, but we can’t do anything until we have selected the right colour doorknobs for the cabins before we can…then of course on the critical chain there’s the marine license…”

That sort of thing. Filled now with self loathing you wonder why even asked?

A door with a view

But what it did teach me was the importance of perspective. Projects are nothing without the bigger picture with a series of structured steps leading up to it. So really a more advanced level of Tetris. English weather too gives you a sense of perspective. There is no waiting for a sunny day tomorrow because that day comes only twice in a year and never during Wimbledon. You just need to get on keep the big picture in mind. The weather was always terrible and if you wanted to go out running or cycling you just had to get out that door and grim your way through it making sure your upper lip didn't wobble at all. Guilt and doom too add to a sense of perspective that is unique only to living life in England. Guilt because someone somewhere out there was braving the weather and you weren't. Doom, because there is only so much grey sky you can take.  

Not so now that I live in Greece. Rain and clouds are only fleeting visitors and you can be assured that tomorrow will be a better day and you can just wait it out. Their weather is wholly responsible for the concept known as Greek time. It has no bearing at all to the Greenwich meridian or any US Naval atomic clock. Things get done later, when the time is right or maybe when the right day has rolled around or after dinner. Perhaps that’s why Greeks live so long. Infuriating. The lesson here is more the necessity of perspective and planning. Observe any Greek road works as a case in point and you’ll get a distinct feeling that the whole thing is influenced somehow by zodiac movements, the seasons or only when their mothers let them out after dinner. A few months later the whole thing is dug up again or collapses.

Don’t open that door

Sometimes running out that door is just rubbish advice. It is difficult to distinguish at the time, some runs do get better and you return home with a smugness that is more insufferable than self loathing. At other times they just get worse and worse. A few nights ago I really did not want to run. I had had a long week and it was the last week of the school term. There is tiredness in your bones that only teachers will know. Nevertheless I felt I was behind in my training, I had to run, I needed to run but I shouldn't have run. The whole way round one of my regular trail routes I felt like the unfortunate Edgar in Men in Black:

Imagine you had been given a second chance to live and got to inhabit someone else’s body and to your dismay you end up with a pretty useless corpus. Nothing ever clicked into place. My feet were clumsy and my lungs had no interest in what the rest of my body was doing at all. I had the distinct feeling people were staring without looking at me as I jerked along the path, the way people do at parents dragging a tantrum throwing child behind them in a quiet supermarket. I didn't even feel better when I got home. Just like that time when you asked that tedious fellow what they did at that party – you never get that time back.

But other times it can be blissful, a release so glorious and unrealised at the time. Yesterday I ran up into the clouds on our local mountain with our four dogs, got drenched, leapt over bushes following the dogs and was annoyingly happy when I returned home.

Arranging four dogs, one of whom is deaf, neatly in a photograph is nigh on impossible. Three was the best I could do.

After a week where I felt like an Edgar and then like a kid, I thought about the value of perspective and running

•  You need a sense of perspective with your training just the way you do with life. Unless you are training for the Olympics and are not having fun, you need to look at what you are doing.
• At some point you’ll realize that as a runner you are the sum of all the steps you have ever taken, not just that last training block. Make your runs count.
• Training well is always better than just training.
• Getting out that door and moving is the next best thing. If you can’t run and feel like an Edgar, do something else. Walk, take the dog out or ride a bike. You can run well another day. 
•  Run when you can with man’s best friend. It is entirely worth it and you’ll feel like a kid again. There is nothing as happy as a dog running. 
• You’ll never be as young as you are that day. Enjoy it because it won’t come round again.

      Hacking about without purpose and perspective just means you’ll get a job in the Athens Road Department. Once and only once you have been let out after dinner.