What was I thinking when I was running?
Physically, I experienced Jesus. At the age of 33.5, he was cruelly crucified, and the iron thorn pierced the bone. He said, "It's done!" "
What has become of the past?
Christians have Christian understanding, you and I have your understanding, but one thing is * * * knowledge (except Jews)-Jesus' redemption mission as savior was realized at the moment he died of human crimes.
To use our old saying, when Jesus was my age, he died without regret!
And I'm still running on the road of knowing my destiny.
Perhaps most people think my expression is a bit strange or vain: in my early 30 s, shouldn't I run on the road of getting married, raising children and making money? Even if you pretend to be B, you know what kind of fate. At least start with "standing" and "not being confused"! Old-fashioned at a young age, beware of being struck by lightning!
Is it vanity?
Maybe it is.
But I don't feel guilty writing this, because the focus here is not "standing", "not confused" and "knowing destiny", but "running"
When running, everything feels practical.
Coincidence: I started running at the age of 33. I recently read Haruki Murakami's What I Say When I Run. He also started running at the age of 33. He started writing around the age of 30, and so did I (although the foundation, degree of care and initial achievements are far from each other); He has run for more than 20 years and participates in a marathon at least once a year, so do I; Besides writing novels, he also writes essays about running. "Dang" is a collection of essays for decades, and I also intend to write some essays. Although I only ran for nine weeks, my body and mind were far less profound than Murakami's, I found * * * in the book and I also found the difference. I have my own experiences and opinions. ......
So, today's article will share with you my thoughts when running.
I remember when I was in college, the first class of physical education class was held indoors. The teacher is more like an artist, with long hair and shawl, thick beard and dark skin. The course content is also very unique. The teacher asked everyone to make sentences on a small piece of paper-"Exercise is like …". Because of anonymity, students can sincerely express their dislike or love for sports. After that, the teacher selected some reading materials for everyone, and the answers were varied, but they were all satisfied. One answer has exploded among young people in their late teens-"Exercise is like making love, which makes people want to stop". The teacher made a big speech and whistled under the stage. ......
When I was a student, I liked to try different sports, such as table tennis, football, basketball, tennis, rock climbing, billiards, baseball, volleyball, taekwondo, Sanda, swimming and fitness ... As long as the school can open physical education class, I almost enjoy it (of course, most of them have learned a little). I used to be obsessed with bench press and chest exercises, which led to the majestic "upper circumference" and even achieved something.
Bodybuilding is one of the few sports that I have been insisting on during my college years. My motivation is that I think girls like boys with big muscles, so I only focus on pushing iron. I hate running and warming up, and even fear. I participated in long-distance running in high school. Due to insufficient training before the race, I felt dizzy and vomited after running, leaving a shadow.
In short, although I had a good time, I never experienced the "climax" of sports.
It was not smooth for a long time after graduation. Went to several cities and changed jobs for a few minutes. I was in a daze and didn't know what to do, and my mood was once low.
It is said that my growth experience is very smooth to outsiders, with good grades and good universities. I have learned everything I need and passed all the exams. What's wrong?
Later, I realized that it is not enough for a person to live a happy life with peace of mind. Haruki Murakami wrote in Dang: "The most important thing we learn in school is the truth that the most important thing cannot be learned in school."
The school will teach you knowledge, but it won't teach you to be a man. There are too many things involved in being a man, such as emotional management, frustration tolerance, knowing yourself and acting appropriately ... The degree of complexity and subtlety is a big lesson that a person may not learn well all his life!
The knowledge of "being a man" is beyond words, because it is completely irregular and highly personalized: active people have active people's practices and honest people have honest people's practices; The degree of liveliness is different, and the honesty of honest people is also different; In the same way, Zhang said that Li Si was awkward; In the same way, this thing is talk.an excellent thing at this time, and that thing is absurd at that time; No matter how many "four books and five classics" or "yin and yang are thick and black" are not practiced, they will never understand. Therefore, a wise man will not easily show others the way. Buddhism says "export is wrong" and Confucianism says "the doctrine of the mean", which shows that the difficulty and degree of being a man can only be grasped by guessing in practice.
Some people don't have this kind of understanding, and they can still be a man with ease. This is because they unconsciously mastered a clever trick in their daily life, which is related to their understanding and, more importantly, to the influence of their families. If you come from a knowledgeable family, your parents will lead by example, subtly shape your habits by example rather than words, and let you learn to behave correctly by listening to what you hear. This "childlike innocence" is very beneficial to a person's happiness in life. But if you happen to be born in a narrow, short-sighted, utilitarian or even confused family, then the "most important thing" is likely to miss you.
That's how I got here, so the confusion and confusion when I first entered the society is inevitable for me. Fortunately, I have the habit of reading, so I have to seek comfort from books in the chaos.
As mentioned above, there is no answer in the book, but the book can provide some methods or understandings to find the answer. If there are students and friends who are "obsessed with sage books" and are out of tune with their surroundings, I will not tell them such empty nonsense as "opening the world and embracing the world". I will tell them: read a dream of red mansions first if you like. You have fallen behind in understanding people, and then try to integrate into society with a simple and idealistic idea and a bunch of castles in the air. You won't break your head. A dream of red mansions won't make you sophisticated, but at least it can let you know that people are rich and complicated, and life is ups and downs, which is not completely controllable. At least you can know that "there are straight trees in the mountains, but there are no straight people in the world", and at least you can know that "if you don't believe in straight people, you must guard against cruelty". With this concept, after the injury, you will at least not be hysterical because of ignorance, but will be calm.
A Dream of Red Mansions was a later reading. What comforted me at that time was the Harvard Happy Course taught by psychology professor Talben shachar, which mentioned the important role of aerobic exercise in mental health. The professor's original words were: "If you don't exercise, it's equivalent to taking antidepressants!" Then a series of psychological statistics and experiments are cited to prove this view-people who exercise regularly are obviously happier than those who don't exercise, and the recovery speed of depressed patients through aerobic exercise is the same as that of taking antidepressants, and the recurrence rate after recovery is obviously lower. The professor also gave an explanation of the evolutionary mechanism: our ancestors survived by running and hunting. Running and catching prey have formed a circuit of dopamine secretion in the brain. Although people can get food without running, the brain needs running to stay healthy. So do other animals. Monkeys in the zoo don't worry about eating and drinking, and they are often depressed. Wild monkeys are hungry, so there is no depression!
This view had a great influence on me at that time. In the years after graduation, I seldom exercised. Although I know that exercise is good for mental health, I didn't expect that not exercising is as serious as taking antidepressants. So I decided to follow the professor's advice and run at least four times a week for at least half an hour each time.
What made me determined to run was an American drama called Homeland, which I watched at the same time. There is a scene where a man who is an American agent is caught sneaking into an enemy country to perform a task. In order to paralyze his will, the enemy locked him alone in an empty room without a toilet. He was only provided with food and medicine. This specially trained agent has a firm will, but no matter how strong his will is, he can't compete with the long-term darkness and isolation. After taking drugs, the man lost his mind. Until he was rescued by American soldiers, the man had become a walking corpse, surrounded by his own feces. His eyes were glazed over and he was dying. It is said that taking drugs like this is hopeless, but the army has its own way-running! The man's hands were tied behind a truck by soldiers, and the truck started. The man has only two choices, either to keep up with him, or not to run, or not to keep up, or to die, and the truck will not stop. In this way, in less than a month, the dying drug addict was forged into a spirited soldier. ......
Making up your mind and carrying it out is another matter.
At first, I planned to run before breakfast. Summer is fine, but winter is too cold. Getting up every morning is a hassle. The idea of running away turned trouble into torture. If I don't keep a good schedule, such as staying up late at the theater the night before, I won't get up the next day and I don't want to run when I get up. And I haven't exercised for a long time, so I want to adopt the method of increasing gradually, starting from 3 kilometers and increasing 1 km every week. As a result, I occasionally relax for a few days, starting from 3 kilometers. So I ran off and on for several months, but I didn't experience the "refreshing" in the book once. On the contrary, I feel tortured most of the time. Sometimes your feet are too heavy to listen. Every run is like a war, the choice of mobilization, flight or battle before the war, and its significance. The only comfort is that I can finally walk and finish another task.
I can't stick to this task. I often go out. I haven't run much in recent years. I sometimes wonder if running isn't suitable for me and I should change to another sport.
Later, three things in my journey strengthened my confidence in running.
The first thing is that when I climbed Huangshan Mountain in 20 19 10, 165438+, I didn't take the underground cable car of Xihai Grand Canyon. Bypass Xianqiao and climb to baiyun hotel on foot. I don't know how many kilometers I climbed, nearly five hours. When I was buying water in a canteen in baiyun hotel, the clerk asked me where I got it. She was surprised by the route I said, saying that few people took this route. I guess it may be more than ten kilometers. Although I am very tired, I am a little proud of my physical strength.
The second thing was in June, 2020, 5438+065438+ 10. I just climbed Wudang Mountain in Hubei in the evening and Huashan Mountain the next night. I climbed from eleven o'clock in the evening to five o'clock in the morning, accompanied by a Henan guy in his twenties. The next morning, after watching the sunrise in Dongfeng, we turned to the south, west and north peaks on foot. On the way, the young man couldn't keep up physically, so he had to walk for a while and have a rest. My physical strength is still left, which makes the young man admire him very much. I am modest, but I am also a little surprised. It seems that I, a person who doesn't exercise often, still have some endurance.
Later, I saw in a popular science article that people's endurance will increase with age, and the peak value will be around 30 years old. Maybe it's not my excellent health, but my age.
The third thing is that when Gang Rinpoqi went to Tibet by car last year, he walked nearly 40 kilometers on the first day. From sunrise to sunset, his legs were cramped in the second half. I was walking while massaging, and my muscles trembled with pain, but the idea of running a marathon flashed through my heart-I can run 40 kilometers on a bumpy and steep mountain with my light bag on my back, and it shouldn't be a problem to run 40 kilometers lightly!
So after returning to Qingdao in June165438+1October last year, I began to collect marathon information.
According to the experience and lessons of running before, I know that if you want to do something for a long time, you should first attach importance to it and don't regard it as a dispensable "leftover material". I searched the time of Qingdao Marathon, marathon training plan and so on, and made a half-horse training plan. Running is the same as playing the piano. I'm going to keep doing it, so I'm not in a hurry to reach too high a goal, let alone Frank. I will start with half a horse and finish it within the specified time. The Qingdao Marathon will be held in April or May for half a day, and the training plan of 10 and a half weeks is enough. If the race is cancelled because of the epidemic, I will run half a horse regularly and then prepare for the whole race. We can't control the game or not. It is up to us to decide whether to run or not!
In this way, I started the half-horse race.
After running carefully, I found that I was not serious enough. Running two steps seems simple, but there is still some learning. From the first week to the fourth week, the distance of each run increased from 3 km to 10 km, but I ran slower and slower. At first, I can finish it in about 6 minutes on average. Later, the legs became heavier and heavier, and it took 8 minutes to walk a kilometer, just like walking! There is also ankle pain and knee pain, which is a bit embarrassing to say-egg pain-literally means egg pain.
This is just the beginning of the exercise. Why is there so much pain? I checked online, knowing that it is very important to warm up before running and stretch after running, and the right shoes are also very important. Knee pain has little to do with wearing knee pads. Egg pain is something that many long-distance runners have encountered. When running 10 km, the inner thigh and balls should rub tens of thousands of times. Abrasion bleeding is common, but it's not painful. The solution is to buy special running underwear or medical vaseline and apply it on the inner thigh. I have always been very frugal. The so-called "heavy" means that both economy and energy should be invested, so I will change my shoes decisively, buy vaseline, and warm up and stretch carefully according to the running distance. Sometimes it takes 15 minutes to warm up and stretch after running for half an hour.
At this point, it is the beginning of the road.
The longest run in the fifth week 13km. At first, my legs were still heavy. After 3km, I am getting better and better. I feel lighter and lighter, and my muscles have adapted to the intensity of exercise. It gave me a refreshing signal. I felt dissatisfied after the first run, and I felt that it was not a problem to run 13km again.
Then 13 km is a turning point. When I am away, running is a painful task, and I can even enjoy it most of the time.
Today, it has been nine weeks, the longest time is 19 km, and the pace has returned to the original 6 minutes per km. In less than two hours, running half a horse is more than enough.
Occasionally, my knee hurts, but it doesn't last long and it doesn't affect running. I think this is just as Haruki Murakami mentioned in his book: Running is a game between you and your body. As soon as you relax, your body immediately degenerates. If you push too hard, your body will collapse. Only by constantly exerting patience can we improve steadily.
I think running is not only a power game between me and my body, but also a mental game between me and my brain: when my strategy goes wrong, my brain sends a signal that I am not suitable for running, trying to induce me to give up running; When I get better with patience and seriousness, my brain encourages me to stick to it with dopamine. When I persist, my body and brain will give me more rewards.
Mao Mu said: "Any razor has its own philosophy."
What he means is that as long as you repeat something long enough and many times, no matter what it is, you can learn something from it.
Haruki Murakami has been running from the age of 33 to nearly 60 (the age of writing Dang, in fact, he still ran and participated in triathlon), running for 6 days a week, with an average of 10 kilometers per day for more than 20 years. Not everyone can do this.
I've only read "1Q84" in Murakami's novels, which I read when I just graduated from university and worked as an experimenter in a pharmaceutical factory in the suburbs of Beijing. At the same time, I also read the popular online novel Panlong. At that time, I didn't read many novels, and I could feel that Murakami's words were different, beautiful and disappointed, fresh and smooth, but the original tragic story gave people a clear and gentle feeling. Now I have read some novels by other writers, but Murakami's writing style is still unique.
Murakami graduated from the drama department of Waseda University and managed coffee shops and bars until he was 30 years old. Although he began to write seriously after the age of 30, the accumulation of knowledge during this period was undoubtedly of great significance, so that his first novel, Listening to the Wind, won the Japanese Literature Prize, which was an opportunity for him to become a professional writer.
Writer is a lonely profession. In order to alleviate loneliness, some writers often develop bad habits, such as excessive smoking and even taking drugs. Stephen King, an American novelist, was addicted to drugs and was in great pain. Haruki Murakami has never stopped smoking since he started writing full-time. However, Murakami reflected on his unhealthy lifestyle and creative rules in time-he is not the kind of writer who is so talented that he can become a masterpiece with a flick of his finger. He needs to diligently seek and collect inspiration, and good health is the basis for his diligence. So he decided to quit smoking. If he doesn't smoke, he has to find a way to fight loneliness. The way he found was long-distance running.
There is a tricky place here, that is, for ordinary people, long-distance running is also a lonely sport. Non-professional athletes basically do not compete for fame and prizes, but compete with themselves. Then use lonely sports to hedge the lonely career. Is it difficult to be "negative and positive" when you are lonely?
Actually, this is easy to understand. For a person accustomed to loneliness, the best way to solve the corrosion of loneliness is not to socialize, but to transfer, that is, to shift the focus of mental loneliness to the "pleasure" of the body through exercise or other appropriate means. This is the only way for lonely people to keep alive. Loneliness is not a problem, let alone a disease, but you must let a lonely person participate in meaningless social activities. At most, he will become an extroverted loner. "Extroverted autism" is really a disease!
So many prodigies with amazing creativity in history are marathon lovers, such as Turing. Creation needs loneliness, and loneliness needs running.
Murakami describes the relationship between running and loneliness (which he calls "loneliness"):
"To some extent, I may be actively pursuing isolation. For people in my profession, although there are differences in degree, this is the only way that can't be bypassed. This feeling of loneliness will be like acid overflowing from a bottle from time to time, unconsciously corroding people's hearts and melting them. This is a sharp double-edged sword, which protects people's minds, but it also hurts the inner wall of the mind intermittently. We have probably tasted this danger and are very clear about it. Only in this way, I must constantly exercise, exercise, and sometimes even run out of physical strength to eliminate the loneliness of internal load. It is better to say that it is intentional than to act on intuition. "
Murakami running begins with intuition, but as Mao Mu said, once you run for more than 20 years, you will eventually become philosophical.
Can you imagine what it's like to run to your leg and feel nothing? Can you imagine what it's like to feel nothing in your hind legs after running, but your arms are swollen and painful? Can you imagine what it's like to run to "no self"
Without Murakami's sincere sharing, these feelings are impossible.
Murakami once ran a 100 km "super horse". In the second half of the game, his legs stopped moving. He can only try his best to increase the amplitude of swinging his arm and drive his legs forward. Later, he said that his mind was empty, his thoughts were gone, and the surrounding scenery could not be seen. He has completely become a "running machine" with only the road in his eyes, mechanically swinging his arms and striding his legs.
This is one of the most painful running experiences in Murakami. Coupled with other painful experiences, Murakami realized this philosophy:
"It is because of the pain, because I deliberately experienced this pain, I found myself alive, at least in part, from this process. I now realize that the quality of life is not fixed things such as grades, figures and rankings, but mobile things contained in behavior. "
Murakami also ran a marathon along the legendary route of the Greek marathon town. It was a hot day. On the way, he longed for the cold Amstel beer in town, but when he really finished it, it was far less wonderful than when he longed for running. He wrote: "The beautiful illusions held by irrational people are simply false in the real world."
In addition to profound philosophical thinking, the book also records relaxed experiences. For example, when the author prepares for the competition in the United States, he often hears "on your left!" Because this is a feature of Marvel comic films, I think it rarely happens in reality, but in fact, when the unrestrained beauty runs ahead of others, it is impolite in words, perhaps it is a kind reminder, and it is more likely that the US team shows off the falcon. From here, we can see the cultural differences between East and West. In China or Japan, even if you run faster than others, you will feel better at best, and rarely express it so impudently.
Murakami's running feelings are sincere. When recording a triathlon, because of frequent competitions, he had many unexpected ideas: "Maybe running, unpredictable thunder will fall on his head;" Maybe the golden wasp, driven by unprovoked anger, will attack me; Maybe my wife, who should wait for me at the finish line, will find unpleasant facts in my private life (there seem to be several) ... "
I really don't know if Mrs. Murakami will point to the page after reading this paragraph and ask Murakami what unpleasant facts are there.
Murakami loves running anyway. At the end of the book, he wrote:
"If there is my epitaph, and the words on it can be chosen by myself, I hope it will be written like this: Haruki Murakami, writer (also a runner), 1949-20**, he at least ran to the finish line."
The above is the running concept of Murakami, a runner for more than 20 years. I have only been running for nine weeks, and I have some feelings.
The reason why I can express my admiration for Murakami's philosophy is because I am a "loner" like Murakami. I think that most of my friends who are engaged in creative related occupations should be "loners". If you are the same, then you should not deny that inspiration is at its peak in the dead of night. Thinking is like a flood, thinking is like an erupting volcano, which can't be closed.
And running, including the previous self-driving, let me find other hotbeds of inspiration. When you drive alone over mountains, or listen to music, or watch the beautiful scenery, the muse will dance in your mind; When you run alone in the forest, or walk the dog, or take a few breaths, enlightenment will knock your heart inadvertently. ......
Murakami compares himself to a miner who works hard in the mine of inspiration, and running not only exercises the muscles needed for running, but also is the mine of inspiration itself!
Well, without further ado, I'm going to change my coat and shoes and go out to "mine" ......