Meditating on the Miles

Apart from perhaps my first race, I’ve always been somewhat reluctant to jump up and down demanding sponsorship for running as most of the time, people know all too well that I’d have been running whether or not they saw that particular event as a reason to donate any cash. The activity wasn’t a challenge as much as hobby, and no, I wouldn’t sponsor you for stamp collecting, gardening, knitting, going to watch the football, baking a cake or generally getting on with things you enjoy doing at the weekend either. However, I’m equally unwilling to let slip an opportunity to make the world a little better, so I’ve normally contented myself to one or two bigger or more obviously challenging runs a year. This year, I rather failed to do very much to promote my (uncertain and injured) participation in the Manchester Marathon (photos to the right) which came and went without either the exultation of a return to Good For Age time as I had planned or the embarrassing disaster of a complete drop-out-flop; but it wasn’t long before I found an alternative, if slightly less impressive focus to fund raise for a really very impressive cause. Having recently relocated from Manchester to Leigh on Sea, I was keen to get running in the beautiful landscape and also to sign up for a local race, so when I heard about the Southend Half, I immediately booked the weekend off work and got registered.

At this time, I was beginning to make plans to do some voluntary work for a tiny charity doing work with very poor, oppressed and marginalised young people in Nagpur, India. You can probably put two and two together to see that it made sense to use the race (photos to the left!) as an excuse for a little fund raising, especially when the lady who runs the charity from her tiny Manchester flat had rather wistfully mentioned that she would like to send them another £800 ‘to open a new education centre’. Now, I’d never raised that much even running a full marathon before but felt fairly confident that if I really put some ‘oomph’ in, I’d be able to get them that £800. Cue Just Giving Page and sponsorship forms for the Southend Half! June 12th soon came round and though I’d been struggling to maintain anything like a training programme, or even as much running, thanks to a combined lack of affordable gym facilities, injury (groin strain, I’ll spare you the details) and an erratic new working pattern (ah, the joys of shift work in the hospitality industry!) I did enjoy the race. The donations gradually mounted up thanks to one or two anonymous but very generous donors we were getting really quite close to the £800 I was hoping to achieve. But we weren’t there yet. So the race was run and done but I needed more. What could I do?

I had been mulling on the fact that it was soon coming up to the middle of the year; summer solstice, the longest day and the anniversary of my longest run at the TrailBlaster Endurance event in Burnley. It seemed like a very distant thing and my physical fitness was no way anywhere near where it had been 12 months ago, in which time and awful lot had happened for me personally that had significantly impacted upon my ability to maintain this. But, I knew that while I did not, perhaps, have the fitness to bang out another 12 hour run, I still had gallons of sheer, stubborn, bloody minded sticking power and it would be a pity not to utilise this somehow to achieve my fundraising aims. About 9 months before leaving Manchester, I had started learning to meditate (a skill I have found indispensable in my gradual recovery from some difficult and wearing health problems). This had been quite a challenge, as I’ve never been known for my ability to sit still for extended periods. Yes, as a child, I was frequently teased for being ‘fidgety Phil, who can’t sit still’, and my mother often recounts how even during pregnancy she was sometimes given cause to believe she would shortly give birth to ‘an octopus on horseback’.

On retreat (a retreat is like a Buddhist holiday, imagine lots of meditation and even more cups of tea), I had meditated for up to 90 minutes, maybe four times a day and found the mental place this took me to really quite astonishing, but, I wondered, what would happen if I somehow found the strength of mind to meditate on summer solstice for the same length of time I had run for on the same day in the previous year? With no breaks? Could I meditate for 12 hours and, perhaps more importantly, would this be considered a significant enough challenge to inspire people to give the little extra I needed to get up to that £800? Once I’ve had an idea, I tend to see it through, even if it isn’t always a very good one, so, I began planning The Longest Sit to counterbalance The Longest Run. I knew a small local temple, with a lovely shrine room that seemed like a good place to do it and as soon as I’d vocalised the possibility and knew I had their support I was away. How on earth do you prepare yourself for a 12 hour meditation? I was, frankly, rather terrified. How long can you sit still for without getting up and fiddling with something, checking your mobile, opening Facebook? 12 hours? I thought not.

I had of course, as a runner, come across various articles and books linking the mind of the runner with the mind of meditation  even writing a piece myself following a successful workshop in which I had led runners through various mental training techniques that might be utilised when distance running. I wasn’t so sure I could apply these to not running though. After all, one of the reasons I run is to afford myself some distraction from troublesome thoughts, not carve myself time to sit down and endure them. There though, that was the key, endurance, and I knew I could endure, so I sat myself down on June the 12th and I meditated.
A common tactic for mentally tackling longer runs is to break it into chunks; ‘I’m not running twenty miles, I’m running five miles four times’ etc. This maybe sounds odd to non-runners but it works. I decided therefore to take a similar approach to meditating. The Triratna Buddhist Order that I am seeking ordination into and from which I receive my teachings, popularly promotes two main meditations, the Mindfulness of Breathing and the Metta Bhavana (cultivation of loving-kindness). I have also found benefit from ‘just sitting’ and ‘body scan’ meditations, which gave me an ‘arsenal’ of four approaches. If four times three is twelve, I reasoned (Yes, I really did get an A in GCSE Maths only a few years back) then all I have to do is an hour of each, three times. I know how quickly an hour can disappear in meditation, so suddenly that seemed a bit more possible. I knew anyway I’d have to leave the shrine room at some point to use the loo (my teacher’s bladder is out of practice after all) and I thought I might slip into a bit of ‘walking meditation’ to give the legs a stretch if needed. In addition, I had invited people to drop in and join me at times. Though I wouldn’t exactly be breaking my sit to have a chat, I knew I’d be aware of their presence and that would give me a much needed boost.

Meditation Ultra Marathon!

So, I was only a little apprehensive at nine thirty when I finally sat down after saluting the shrine and making my offering (flowers and incense) and not completely terrified as I had feared I might be. The temple founder, Jo, was keen to meditate with me for some time and had a guided meditation she was using daily. We started by sitting together for the first hour before she had to leave and begin her tasks for the day but this was a much appreciated launch and a very enjoyable hour. Only eleven to go. It’s hard to know at exactly what time various other things happened but throughout the day I was immensely grateful to become aware of different friends and supporters dropping in to sit with me. I used a timer to keep track of the different stages of each sit and shifted my position to cross legged from kneeling and back again from time to time. At about lunchtime, I stood, slowly approached the shrine and lit some more incense. At some point in the early afternoon I began getting quite a stiff lower back so, lay down for an hour or so of body scanning, before returning refreshed, to a seated position.

That evening, there was a special devotional ritual at the temple because as well as summer solstice, it was also a full moon (very auspicious, if you think of the world in those terms!) and I think the hour or so of this in which Jo and many of the temple regulars performed chants, mantras and drumming, was probably the time I found most enjoyable of the whole day. Following this, probably about seven O’clock, there was a meditation class in the temple room, so I was then able then to gently follow the teaching and the guided meditations with the group. When this finished, I then had ninety minutes remaining. I listened to the ticking clock. Time, which had until now been surprisingly tame, began doing odd stretching things. An hour passed. And yet only fifteen minutes. A few minutes ticked by. But suddenly only twenty remained. Jo came back into the shrine room (poor lady was probably desperate to go home!) and quietly told me that with a quarter of an hour left, she would sit with me. Tick. Tick. Tick.

It’s a common phenomenon amongst runners that the mind often reaches the finish line some time before the body and the last mile or so of a longer run can sometimes seem the hardest mentally, regardless of the condition of the body, as it begins to move on to the post-run plans and whine like an impatient child ‘are we nearly there yet!?’ So too it seems with meditation. I had been in a meditative state for eleven and three quarter hours and if I’d planned to sit for fifteen, I’d probably have felt relaxed and serene at this stage but knowing how close I was to stopping made it increasingly difficult to sit for the remaining time.

At the temple shrine, after the Longest Sit!

Muscles began twinging, mind began wandering and limbs twitched, aching to be free for movement. Tick. Tick. Tick. Finally, I heard the smooth rustle of fabric as Jo stood and approached the shrine, softly striking the meditation bowl to signal the end of the sit at half past nine in the evening. And it was done. I didn’t feel ravenous as I might have expected. Once I had moved, I didn’t feel stiff or achey (though my hands took a while to function with their usual dexterity!). It occurred to me that it might be quite pleasant to use the toilet (turns out you don’t need to wee every hour if you’re not glugging cups of tea every twenty minutes!). I turned down Jo’s kind offer of a lift home and enjoyed the mile or so of gentle leg stretch that took me home.

The next morning, I was delighted to check the just giving page and see we had indeed reached our target, in fact, we then made it to £900, which was just as well given admin fees from the donation service and a less favourable post-Brexit exchange rate. I didn’t become enlightened, nor did I experience the depth of meditative state I have enjoyed when sitting in a room full of other meditators on retreat, but I did achieve what I set out to do and, I think, demonstrated that chucking miles at your legs isn’t the only kind of endurance that can facilitate a move beyond the comfort zone. I also know, listening to others who came along on the day that I’ve introduced maybe one, maybe two people to the possible benefits of meditation and I think that in itself is a pretty good thing if it can help them as much as it helps me. Ah. Yes. Also it seems we’ve funded the next stage of building that new education centre. So that ‘to do’ list? Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.