Sadly, I wound up using nearly half of a vacation day trying to diagnose and fix the issue myself. The dalliance with DIY ended with an hour on the phone talking with tech support. (Though we failed to fix the problem, I will be given free service or a replacement watch.)
The incident has made me stop and think about the nature of time as relates to running. At this point in life, why should I care at all about my metrics, or the documentation that I ran at a certain place in the world?
“How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives,” writes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. A corollary perhaps is how we measure our time is how we measure how lives.
If you’re watching time tick away every day, well, that’s your life. Running without a watch for a while will be a good thing, even therapeutic I think. Maybe the moments will become more meaningful, more lasting, more full of life.
How else might one measure a run? Today, running watchless in downtown Des Moines, I had these thoughts that seemed to have bounded beyond the clock:
• This Iowa sky, and this Des Moines skyline, well there it is and here I am.
• This muddy Des Moines River water rushing to the sea. What a wet spring it’s been.
• There are too many people exiting the County Court House all at once. Off the sidewalk people!
• I can smell a cigarette from a greater distance than I can see the thing in hand.
• How many of these birds can I ID? Almost all of them so far!
• Could one dance around a rat in this alley at mid-day?
• Is the song in my head an original tune?
• I know that guy; I see him all the time; he runs darn fast for an older guy.
• What does it feel like to run today, in fact to exist at all?
I’m finished the day's run with no time clocked and no place plotted on a map--but I have had what it is, the thing itself.
Monkey brain in full swing! Give it time to settle down.
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