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RUNNING INTO LIFE
(Cover Story, Science of Mind magazine, May 2007)

The rising sun engulfed me. I dug in and climbed the grade, pulled by the sun, mindful of nothing but the blazing orange furnace and my steady breath. The surrounding eastern New Mexico desert, its heat and bone-drying air seemed as inconsequential as yesterday’s to-do list. I felt weightless. My body strided my mind into a new train of thought I’d never before entertained in the middle of a 13-mile race: Enjoy your run into the sun.

For the next four miles, I ran into the sun as my brain released the euphoric endorphins that create the “zone” or Zen space to which cyclists, mountaineers and distance runners refer when they talk about “runner’s high” or “blissing out.” Never, since turning 40, had I run a race that turned into a spiritual experience and revealed a platform for living gracefully. Nor had I run into a rising desert sun for a half-hour.

Just 90 minutes after beginning this half-marathon, I crossed the finish line, smiling and laughing inside, emotionally and spiritually higher than a kite. It was my fastest half since my teen years. The real shocker was finishing third overall — at age 43. Considering I’d hung up my running shoes for 22 years after high school to build a writing career and help raise kids and stepkids, the accomplishment felt good indeed.

As I caught my breath, I backtracked exactly one year before that Labor Day 2002 race, to the day my wife and her ex-husband suddenly left the United States for Germany in front of my face. How I was supposed to find meaning and purpose in life after that? While accepting congratulations from two people I passed during my reverie in the rising sun, I thought about how, on that same dark day, I took one action to stir up those places inside myself that wanted to love, celebrate and honor life again: I went for a run.

Every time the hurt, depression and anger threatened to engulf my subsequent days, I ran. The ensuing four months of daily runs returned me to an inner sanctum I’d built with deep meditating, deep thinking, journaling and engaging in creative acts. I took a different area of personal focus onto the road, and worked it through the deeper levels of mind that grant access when it’s you, the open road, clean air and no immediate pressures. The runs also kept my intuitive and discerning faculties receptive enough to take a step — a move — that brought healing, greater purpose and a host of friends who extended their hands to a hurting soul.

Running helped to save my emotional life, and probably my spiritual and intellectual life as well. The ultimate solution was spiritual, but running served as the conduit. I realized that, for me, running had become a way of life with wholesome benefits: higher fitness levels and a conspicuous drop in doctor’s visits; the chance to experience more nature; greater focus and clarity; a stronger sense of purpose and achievement; a way to gain new friendships and community. I reconnected with the sense of well-being I’d lost. I launched into a fascinating journey of adventure, wisdom, companionship, health and love that has since defined my middle years.

I kept running…and running…and running, eventually turning into a world I thought I’d abandoned in a 16-year-old’s dream – marathon running. Since I’ve never shied away from an ultimate challenge, it also refueled an old life goal—wearing a Boston Marathon finisher’s medal around my neck.

The Feel of Vibrant Life: Running in Nature

Church of Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes stressed the importance of opening our minds fully to the processes of the natural world. His rationale: The natural world offers a model for a fully integrated and interactive mind that thinks deeply and clearly on all levels at once. I’d read similar philosophies from Socrates, Swedenbourg, Emerson, Goethe and Steiner, and my personal path of raja yoga (royal yoga) connected all mental processes to soul and spirit with the natural world providing the necessary environment. At least that was my interpretation.

It wasn’t until I spent several years taking long runs in natural wonderlands like New Mexico, Hawaii, Italy, the Bavarian Alps, New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the desert canyons that feed Tucson, the Northern California redwoods, Pacific coast, and cypress swamplands and hammocks of Florida that I grasped what Rev. Holmes, Goethe and the others were saying.

One of the greatest, most life-affirming gifts of running is the accessibility it offers us to nature and her rhythms. We can cover miles of a fern-strewn forest trail, beach or mountain meadow in a fraction of the time it takes to hike. Our heightened senses can smell the various scents, hear the music of the birds, insects and animals, see the wonderful interplays of color and design that nature provides. While appreciating the beauty and serenity, the mini-break from our busy lives, we feel the landscape beneath our feet — the ruts, uphills, downhills, hollows, grasses, turns, exposed roots, rocks, changes in terrain. Running in nature reconnects us with our body-minds, which many of us left behind in the workaday world.

In the midst of this spectacle, our minds kick in from a higher, less cluttered place. We see ourselves in these flat or undulating landscapes. We connect the action of a mother raccoon protecting her young, or a hawk circling for food, with our own actions in daily life. We start sifting through issues, challenges and plans in our life, and we either take them into deeper thought or arrive at solutions on the spot. In the natural surroundings, we see a string of metaphors that suit our particular situations. When the endorphins really kick in, those metaphors amble over to us like beneficient gnomes. The purpose-filled life blooms in front of our sweating faces.

During this whole time, we’re clicking off miles, knocking off pounds and toning bodies into shapes that we haven’t seen since college. Our souls, hearts and minds feel more open, more often, than we can remember. We run into a life in which magic, innocence and wonder visit us directly, often followed by their “oversoul” — transformation.

Sacred Sunday Runs

We’re all busy people navigating through a crazy world. Sometimes, finding 20 minutes a day to pray, meditate, paint, journal or walk in the park seems impossible. So, we ask ourselves, how in the world do we take anything other than a round-the-block jog or a quick spin at the fitness center? And where do these insane marathon runners find the time?

I live my answer on Sunday mornings. While millions sleep away their mornings prior to services (or not), others hit the roads and trails for their favorite runs of the week. Long ago, I nicknamed my Sunday outings “Sacred Sunday Runs,” because to me, they are filled with sacredness. Whether I’m race training or not, this is the one day in which I slow down the pace, drive to a place in space where I’ll commune in mind, body and soul, and spend the next one to three hours in pure presence. I run slowly, always breathing easily, looking for subtle movements, colors or energies in the surrounding environs. I sing spiritual songs in my head or aloud, and sometimes practice yogic breathing. Sunday is all about mind expansion and feeling good for me. The only physical strain I want is the natural tiredness of a body that’s just put out 10 to 20 miles—and pines for those six pancakes and four eggs that I’ll wolf down afterward! When the situation presents itself, I’ll also run with friends or find runners clipping along at the same pace—then make new friends. These Sunday runs are often loose and magical as child’s play, but deep as a nice meditation.

Sacred Sunday Runs provide peak emotional experiences on a weekly basis in our running programs. They also guarantee something far more important—a chance to air out our minds and hearts and feed them with the spirit of nature. I’ve heard someone call long runs “the dime-per-hour therapist,” apparently a mathematical breakdown of the cost-per-hour of a running shoe. Without Sunday runs, I never would have kept it up while I approach the cusp of turning 50.

The Community of Racing

For many of us, a few weekly jogs and a Sacred Sunday Run aren’t enough. Our competitive side decides to resurface. We want a taste of the old glory, or simply the thrill of a good race.

I know the feeling. Between the ages of 20 and 40, I never imagined entering another race. What for? I’d run swift times and won races in high school…what else was there? I confined my competitive wiles to the workplace, and spent my free time hiking or cycling at leisurely paces. However, once I strung enough runs together to get past leg soreness and feel some rhythm and flow, I entered a 5-kilometer (3.1-mile) road race in Sebastian, FL. The result was predictable: A decent finish for my age, but a stark reminder of the difference between 40 and 17 on a stopwatch. It took me almost 24 minutes to complete a race in which I once ran 15:50 in high school.

However, I witnessed something else in this race: the thrill of participating in the faces of people my age and older. They didn’t enter to win. They entered to run their best, but also to share stories, trade jokes, run with their friends, engage in community. The strong sense of community at the pre- and post-race scenes reminded me of those I’d experienced in surfing, intentional and artistic communities, and church congregations. I wanted in.

I entered another 5K, then another. A year later, in 2000, I tried a 10K Turkey Trot at beautiful Dana Point (CA) Harbor. Two years after that, I ran the half-marathon in New Mexico in a time that would have been respectable to my high school win-at-all-costs self.

While basking in the afterglow of New Mexico, an old dream popped into my head as a triptych of questions: Could I run the Boston Marathon? Could I qualify for it? Could I even run a marathon? I’d first cultivated the dream during three teenage summer visits to my grandparents in the Boston area during America’s early 1970s running boom. I even ran Commonwealth Ave. in Newton, part of the Hopkinton-to-Boston course that is legend to any knowledgeable runner. Then the dream faded with childhood.

A Marathon is Like Writing a Book

What followed were some of the greatest experiences imaginable. My quest for healing and renewed purpose, new adventures in writing, life and travel, new friendships and depth of spiritual communion dovetailed with my attempt to scale the summit of recreational running — Boston, the world’s most hallowed 26.2-mile race, and the most difficult of the “Big Five” majors. The course is like golf’s U.S. Open, a real test of skill, wits and patience. I cranked up my weekly mileage to 40-plus, treated hills as allies instead of adversaries, picked through a dozen training approaches to craft one that worked for me, e-mailed my old track coach and a friend who’d run Boston a dozen times, cleaned up my diet, increased yoga and core exercises, and incorporated my favorite visualizations and affirmations into training.

Most of all, I had fun.

Still, my first attempt to qualify was dismal, the proverbial first novel the author throws in the back of the closet. It was so painful and harrowing that when I finally crossed the line and received my medal, I found my friend. She was poking her head in the medical tent to see if I was splayed on a table. My mother and sister, who came to watch the big day, gave me looks about which we all laugh now: “Why are you so crazy?”

While walking stiff-legged for the next few days, I hit an epiphany that defines how I approach my work now: Marathoning is like writing a book. At the start, the physical preparedness (research, characters, outlines) and emotional excitement are sky-high. Then the gun goes off. Those who blast ahead soon find themselves dropping off, or dropping out. That’s what I did as a neophyte author—pored 12-hour days into those first weeks, then wondered why I couldn’t finish. Those who run that first mile slower than the goal average pace not only finish, but often surprise themselves with the time. More experienced marathoners also break their races into equal 5-mile pieces with a 2K (1.2-mile) dramatic climax – the finish. Author Henry Miller extolled this same philosophy, never writing more than four or five hours of original first-draft material per day. He finished more than 50 books. I extended this approach to my life, and learned the patience, energy conservation, depth of purpose and perseverance needed to sustain the ups and downs of long-term friendships, writing books and enjoying life to the fullest.

I also learned how to run the marathon.

The second time I tried for Boston, I made it. Throughout the qualifier, I implored myself to hold back when my legs wanted to accelerate. I never bit on that speed morsel, tempting as chocolate but deadly as hemlock to a Boston dream. I spent the middle miles in Sacred Sunday Run mode, reveling in the high Arizona desert and the snow-capped Catalina mountains. At the halfway mark, I exchanged high-fives, hugs and kisses with my friends. A few runners and I got into a spirited discussion about someone who tried to buy his way into Boston (what a sacrilege! we would-be qualifiers agreed). At 20 miles, I drew deep within and pushed the final six miles with all remaining energy. I closed with my only nonsensical moment, a 200-yard sprint against another runner. “I made it!” I gasped. Meanwhile, my heart wanted no part of me after that little display!

Since then, I’ve enjoyed two magical trips to Boston. “The Marathon,” as Massachusetts locals proudly call it, serves as an apt metaphor for life in the 40s—a lot of ups and downs for the accomplished marathoners who culminated years of very committed training to reach a life goal, and a million fans cheering your achievement. There are also the two great unknowns: the weather; and how your body responds to Heartbreak Hill after 20 miles of racing. There is nothing more overwhelming to a recreational runner than standing at the start of Boston. Nor is there anything more fulfilling than hearing the cheers of a packed city when you run to the finish on Boylston Street three or four hours later.

I take that back. The feeling of the journey, of experiencing life to its fullest as we run alone, with friends or into rising suns, does match Boston in one way — the sense of physical, emotional and spiritual achievement we feel within.

Two-time Boston Marathoner BOB YEHLING has enjoyed his greatest runs and successes after turning 40. “The biggest kick is sharing stories and cracking jokes with people you’re supposedly racing against,” he says. A Science of Mind contributor, he’s the author of Writes of Life and Coyotes in Broad Daylight (both Koboca: 2006) and the forthcoming Write Deep Heal Deep due in Fall 2007). His e-book, Sacred Sunday Runs and Other Tales of Mid-Life Marathoning, will be available on www.wordjourneys.com in April 2007.