Right here, Right now
I was down at the Cape out on the rail trail in the morning on my long run. It was a hard workout.
You know it’s a hard workout when it scares you a little. You see it on the schedule and think about it all week. It hangs over you like the sword of Damocles.
Hold on…
We throw that saying around a lot, but do we even know what it is about? Who the heck is Damocles and what’s up with the sword?
It’s from a classical Greek tale that is supposed to teach you something. Like all tales it is apocryphal. Probably didn’t happen. Just a story made up by the Greeks, who loved telling stories, who understood the power of storytelling, to make a point.
Here’s the tale.
Damocles was an official in the court of King Dionysus of Syracuse. Damocles was flattering the King so much that the King said “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you be King for a day? See how you like it?”
Damocles, said, “Yeah Baby” and leapt at the chance – specifically he leapt onto the King’s throne.
But all was not roses, rainbows and unicorns for Damocles, because Dionysus had suspended a very sharp sword, hung by the pommel by a single hair from a horse’s tail over the throne and precariously threatening to lop off Damocles’ head at any moment.
Damocles got to be king and sit in the throne, but the whole precarious sword hanging thing, was a bit of a bummer and kinda made him nervous.
What was the point that the king, (and the story), making?
When you are king you are constantly under threat from others who envy you and want to unseat you. You can never relax. You always need to be on the lookout for attackers and betrayers.
Power is a precarious, moment to moment, thing.
That sharp sword taught Damocles what it was like to always be afraid, to never know when the sword would fall, to worry about an uncertain future.
The punch line is that Damocles begged to step down from the throne. Turns out, on second consideration, he didn’t want to be king.
But I digress.
This long run was to be 2 hours and 45 minutes, with 3-minute surges up into zone 3 every 15 minutes and close the last 15 minutes in zone 3. For my current abilities that works out to 18-19 miles.
A good purposeful workout for marathon training. Not only time on the feet but race specific. Teach the body to finish strong when tired.
I got out early in the morning, but it felt hot. It always feels hotter down Cape, because the Cape sticks out into the ocean – it’s surrounded by water – so the humidity is always high. And since it is basically a big sand dune, there isn’t much tree cover.
So even if the temps are coolish it’s always high humidity and full sun.
I ran the workout in two laps of around 1:30 each, because I didn’t want to carry too much water.
It was hard going but I stayed with it and paced my surges and executed on point to the workout specifications.
Then the part I was worried about, those last 15 minutes at pace and effort, rolled around.
I was tired as I got towards the end. I had that 15-minute high-effort finish looming over me.
I started to falter.
Not just physically, but mentally.
It seemed like such a long way to go. It was hot. I was tired. I was thinking about walking as it got harder and harder to maintain the effort.
But then I thought about it, like you do, and I thought, ‘you don’t have to hold this pace and effort for the next 15-20 minutes. All you really need to do is hold it right here and right now’.
And that became my mantra. I stopped thinking about the finish. I stopped worrying about how I was going to cover that ground with my body tired and hot.
Every time my body started to whisper to me that I should really just walk a little bit to recover. I refocused on “Right Here, Right Now.”
And it worked. I chugged through those last miles and held that effort.
It was hard. But it was only too hard in the cumulative. In the Right Here and Right Now it was manageable.
All this may sound oddly familiar because we have talked many times about managing races and long runs by collapsing the effort down to a scope you can manage. The next water stop. The next telephone pole. The end of that fence.
Refocusing on where you are snaps you back into observation mode. You can do form check, a breathing check, and relax into the effort.
But mentally, there are echoes of the meditative practice of ‘living in the now’. Just like in your meditation, you focus on the breath to calm your mind. You can’t control the future, and you can’t change the past. No matter how much your monkey mind wants to run around in circles screaming. All you have is the now and your breath.
The only thing I could control in my long run was what I did right here, and right now.
And when you get to that place it is empowering.
It gives you the power of choice. You can make any decision you want, right here, right now.
You don’t have power over a decision in the future. You don’t have power over a decision made in the past. But what happens right here, right now is entirely under your control. Entirely your choice.
Everything else is an illusion.
Being in control of your decisions in the ‘now’ empowers you and protects you. It is a shield of power. In this case it protects you from yourself and your monkey mind.
If you are a visual person you can see this as a shield, or a force field, providing energy and protecting.
And now, apologetically, we need to return to the Greeks again for one of my favorite words, “Aegis” .
The Aegis was a shield or protective skin that was worn by Zeus and Athena.
So when some pretentious, narcissistic, over-educated, ass-hat, like me says ‘I have the Aegis to do something’ it means I am protected and empowered.
Like wearing a magic shirt.
Zeus and Athena are kick-ass gods. But, if you have some other god or gods, who you’d like to visualize providing you aegis in this here and now, go for it.
Right here, right now, the decision is entirely yours whether to take another step.
Right here, right now, you have all the power.
Right here, right now you are protected by magic of your own making.