All runners should make their runs reflect their uniqueness - typically called “running one’s own race”. I’ve found this to be crucial to reaching your goals and, importantly, to actually enjoying the pursuit of those goals. “Running your own race” sounds pretty intuitive and obvious. Who wouldn’t? Well, it’s actually very challenging to do.
How so? I run into obstacles daily. Sometimes, I beat myself up when my pace is too slow. Or when I can’t get in the magic number of miles a week. Or when I get injured and have to change everything. Or, when I get passed by someone who seems to be in better shape than I am. All this leads to irritation, being in tension with life, and not enjoying running. I’m not running my own race, I’m running someone else’s.
I’m going to sit down and engage in self-therapy - explain to myself why responses like these are not healthy. I assume this experience is pretty common - not just in running, but in life. So it is worth it to take a breath, reflect on the bigger picture - on plans, goals, and keeping things in perspective. To assist, I’ll going to use four concepts from Daoism - Dao, Ming, Wu-wei, and P’u - to explain how one can stay on a healthy path.
Dao (道): The Way To Run Can’t Be Described
The philosophy of Daoism is found in a number of texts, the most famous of which is the Daodejing (fourth century BCE). On one reading, the Daodejing offers advice on how to harmonize with Dao, a term that means “way” or “road” but can also mean life, existence, reality, or “how things are”. Seen in this broader way, our task is to figure out how reality is, so that we can learn to harmonize with it successfully.
This approach to Dao can easily be applied to running, and so Laozi’s advice in the Daodejing can be helpful to us as we struggle to learn to run our own race. As I’ve noted, it can be a struggle because we often apply harsh standards to ourselves, or feel out of place in what seems like an elite athletic club. So we question our membership - asking “is this slow pace really running?” or “if I only run 5 miles a week, am I really a runner?” or wonder whether running for five years means one is a runner - yet.
Clearly, we also ask these kinds of questions about living, wondering if this or that way of living is the right way, or whether our attempts to do this or that better mirror what a meaningful or good life should include. Laozi, the (purported) author of the Daodejing, takes these kinds of questions head on, although the first line of the very first poem points us in an odd direction. It says (poem 1, Daodejing):
The Dao that can be articulated is not the true Dao.
I know what you’re thinking - how can this help? Not only is Laozi not planning to offer us a schematic blueprint for Dao, but he is claiming that any attempt to draw one up is an immediate #epic-fail. Surely it is reasonable to ask how we can possibly answer the questions we have about living correctly if we can’t say what life (Dao) is. Relatedly, how can a person who wants to really run answer those nagging questions about pace or miles or time under one’s belt if running has no actual description?
Although it is perplexing, this famous first line is insightful. What it suggests to us is that instead of figuring out what reality (or running) is so that we can better harmonize with it, we need to see how attempts to articulate and then harmonize with reality lead to problems - the kinds of struggles that prevent us from running our own race or truly living our own lives. The solution to our dilemma in the Daodejing is thus partly a negative one - by showing how things go wrong, we can learn to do things better.
With that insight in mind, let’s turn to an analysis of the root problem - words.
Ming (名): Being Imprisoned by Words and Names
Laozi would say that questions like “is slow running real running?” presume that the message of the Daodejing is wrong - that if running is a Dao, it has a clear description. This is evident - only if we are armed with such a description could we answer such questions. But if Laozi is right, these questions are meaningless. Thus, we should understand why we ask them, since they signal lack of harmony with a shapeless Dao.
This reveals an insight: if we no longer needed to ask those questions, we’d be closer to harmony. Unfortunately, Laozi knows we seek to reduce Dao (life, running) to a unique description, so something is amiss. He’s not surprised - societies shape individuals to see each thing as not only having a correct description, but as having the specific description it dictates. Once indoctrinated into these descriptions, we then evaluate how things are, or how they are going, by whether they match those descriptions.
Essentially, societal descriptions (how a thing looks) are disguised prescriptions (how a thing ought to look). Laozi thinks the words and names (ming名) we use to describe things actually function as norms. For example, the phrase “one-eyed” is a neutral description of a person with one eye. It makes no judgment. But in an ableist society, the meaning of the phrase is dictated by a norm that says having two-eyes is good. So, ableist words and names lead us to see the one-eyed as “disabled” (the Daoists were the first to criticize talk about “disability” - check out this great NYT piece on it).
Although “fast” and “slow” are just different ways of moving, like “one-eyed” and “two-eyed” are simply different ways of seeing, with no natural judgments, in our society, “fast” is a sign of “ability” as “slow” is a sign of “disability” because in our society, running means speed. This is problematic for Laozi, since he thinks no description of Dao captures what it is - Dao is (as he says) “nameless”.
This doesn’t mean that names are bad. Daoists see names as effective pointers - the term “fast” or “slow” or “one-eyed” or “two-eyed” help us point to those states in the world. But names are a problem when they point to norms, and as a result we wrongly see a person with one-eye as lacking value, or use, or ability. Similarly, terms like “slow” are problems when they cease to me simply descriptors and instead signify to us that what we are doing lacks value or use, or a sign that something is wrong.
When we ask “what is the right way to live?” or “what is the right way to run?” it is thus not surprising that we assume that these things have articulable descriptions (which then function as norms). But when we ask these questions, we suffer from what Zhuangzi (a later Daoist) called “minds cluttered with meaningless trivia”. Essentially, our heads get so stuffed with societal “names” that presume false norms that those who employ those names can only see things from the view or perspective dictated by the social norms that govern the words they are using.
Cluttered minds are imprisoned by words and names. And when your mind is cluttered, and imprisoned, it is not in harmony with Dao (life, or running). So, what do we do? How do we reach harmony?
Laozi says: we must know when to stop.
Wu-Wei (无为): Flow, and Knowing When to Stop
As I’ve noted, it is undeniable that the words we use to talk about running are dominated by social norms. Our social world portrays fast as better than slow. Sees more miles as better than fewer. Sees more time running better than less time. These norms come from a lot of places. Strava, for one, highlights pace - it is right there, in your face; when people give “kudos” a lot of times it’s due to fast pace or big miles.
Ultimately to harmonize with Dao (or running) is to free ourselves from the hold norms have over our thinking and over our engagement with life’s tasks. For Zhuangzi, an “uncluttered” mind moves freely and at ease - harmony, would be a state of mind, and not a specific description of physical movement. As a runner, you would engage a specific style of movement as valuable right here, right now, while also realizing that value as completely contextual. In another context, a different style will be valuable.
Which means: there’s no correct description of running. Can you run like that?
If so, you find harmony; you move in way X while remaining open to non-X alternative ways of moving as all equally valid. Society tells us “fast” is better than “slow”, but running is sometimes fast, sometimes slow - depending on the context, needs, and uniqueness of the entities. Running can involve lots of weekly mileage, a few miles, and not one mile. Running is done by long time practicers and by new beginners.
Laozi explains this dual mindset (run in style X, while remaining open to all non-X) as a kind of complex engagement that leads to an embrace of simplicity (poem 28):
Know the male, but safeguard the female; You become the valley of the world. Being the valley of the world, eternal virtue will never desert you, and you become like a little child anew.
One way to read his claim that we know the male, is to see that Laozi recognizes that we do move or act in ways that words can be used to describe. As we move forward, we’ll likely associate some type of definitive description to it. When we are running, we’re making a kind of (masculine) assertion - we’re saying run this way! While this is likely inevitable, the trick is to do it while safeguarding the female - remaining open to the validity of other forms of moving more in sync with what changing experience brings.
The ability to do this is called wu-wei, which is sometimes called “going with the flow” but is better read as “non-coercive action”. You act, or move, but you do so in a way that reflects the uniqueness of your nature and your context, and so in a way that does not project that specific way of moving or acting onto the nature of things (which in endless other situations does not have that same unique context or nature).
In acting wu-wei, you are not generating, enabling, or strengthening norms. You run fast now, ot quicker than you did yesterday; you run slow tomorrow, for reasons that are particular to you and to the features of tomorrow. It’s all running. In doing so, you use words - but as descriptors. You’ve learned how to stop. Moreover, you’ve learned to simplify. You’ve learned to listen to your own uniqueness about what works and doesn’t work, right now. You’ve tossed off the oppression of names as prescriptions.
To wrap up, let’s consider this simplicity, or being like a little child, a bit more.
P’u (朴) - Harmony Lies in Being Simple
The last piece of advice the Daodejing has for us follows from the first three. It reminds us that we are unique, as are our contexts and situations. Thus, names and words - and the societal norms that can follow from them - do not capture what we are or what we should be. To be ourselves, we must return to an intuitive awareness of our unique simplicity (p’u), to allow our actions and behaviors to flow from that base awareness.
If social words are norms, as Laozi points out, we feel the pressure to “be fast” or “run faster” when we are not thinking of ourselves as unique, or as p’u. Instead, we think of ourselves as the generic average person, since this is the entity that the norm is trying to capture and shape. “Run faster” is not, as a result of a norm, a directive to this or that unique person. It’s a directive to anyone running. It’s all the same to the norm - run faster. Context and uniqueness are entirely ignored.
So, norms suppress uniqueness (of nature and of context).
Since we are highly unique contextual beings, we need to be careful about thinking of ourselves in terms of names. Our nature is always p’u, which is the “little child” from the last quoted poem, but which means “un-carved wood”. How so? If I do not allow names to “carve” me in terms of some norms and functions, my nature remains open to adjustments as contexts suggests. In using words to describe what I am doing, I “know when to stop”. Laozi says (again, poem 28):
He returns to the state of the Uncarved Block.
Now when a block is sawed up it is made into implements;
But when the Sage uses it, it becomes Chief of all Ministers.
Truly, “The greatest carver does the least cutting”.
So how do we do this? I’m 54 - I’ve been running for three years, I am injury prone, and I like to run competitive times in races. I teach, I am married, I have two kids, and a cat. For me, all of this (and more) means a certain running plan makes the most sense. As it turns out, since I am injury prone, a zone method - in which I run slower than usual - makes the most sense.
What I am not, is a twenty or thirty year runner. Which means that when I get passed on the trail by someone running 6:50 pace, they run faster than me but not better than me. They are running their race, I am running mine. I don’t know who or what that runner is; all I do know is who and what I am. And what my goals are. Moreover, sometimes I get hurt. And sometimes life gets in the way, so I can’t run.
I harmonize with running when expressing p’u allows me to adapt to the uniqueness of my world. When I do so, I run well. When I reject my uniqueness and conform to norms, I refuse to express my p’u and lose wu-wei - I instead project certain ways that I think I should run onto the nature of running itself, because I’ve fallen under the spell of words. I become aggressive, coercive, and overly competitive. I saw this the other day online, and it reminded me of a perfect and comical example of not being wu-wei:
Yeah, don’t do that.
When you are wu-wei, you don’t fight running, don’t fight your own condition, your life, and I fight the world. You are out of harmony with Dao. You do not enjoy what I you are doing.
So: remember Laozi’s wisdom. It’s okay to have goals, and to set up plans, which use words to describe what you are doing. It’s okay to want to run faster, or longer. But as you do this, and you use words to describe your plans, do the least cutting. Do not let the words and descriptions define you; they are tools usable to express your uniqueness, and to harmonize with Dao. But know when to stop: don't let them become oppressors that blot out your uniqueness and sap your enjoyment and your harmony.
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