Three things about running and one thing about everything.

1.
I've been running a bit more consistently lately. I'm not in any kind of shape, I know, but I hope to get there again one day. I would say, "one day soon," but I know that it takes more work than soon indicates.

2.
As I've looked toward a future where I might regain a level of fitness that could put me a position to race again, I've been feeling the loss of Van, who was such a wealth of knowledge and experience, and whose immense generosity meant that he was always ready to share that wealth. There have been a few people along the way who have written running workouts for me, but Van was the only one who ever really felt like a coach to me. And these days, as I try to wrap my head around the cycles of training required to build fitness and regain lost running economy, I think about what I'd give for another one of those phone calls where he'd listen for a while, then tell me some stories about runners famous and not, and then cut right through the fog and give me the direction I needed.

3.
And as soon as I write the words "try to wrap my head around," I know I'm wrong. From the runner's perspective, there's no knowing or understanding or accepting the totality of the work that is required. I looked back six months from my best half marathon, and the workouts seemed overwhelming.

I looked back twelve months, still overwhelming. Eighteen months, still. Truth be told, I'd been running forty or fifty miles a week for almost three years when I ran that race, and the enormity of that kind of work is more than I can imagine today--there's an abstract knowledge of it, but the reality of work and fatigue and soreness and even pain and then lightness and ease come only in the moment of experience. The only thing that can be done (I first wrote "understood," but that's wrong) is what must be done today, because the entirety of the work cannot be comprehended by the runner, only by the coach, who is appropriately disconnected from the physical experience of the work. (Can a runner coach himself? Perhaps, but there can be a dangerous loss of perspective at times, one that can cloud judgement.) The runner can live only in the experience of the individual workout, perhaps with a very limited view of the path that lies immediately ahead.

4.
And of course, this is true of everything. We cannot live in or truly know the entirety of something: a career, a relationship, a life. There's no expansive view we have of our own experience, no omniscient perspective of ourselves and our lives: we live only in the experience of the day.