Lyric of the Day: “You were my lesson, I had to learn…”, Madonna, The Power of Goodbye
Today my body told me to stop running. Stop. Stop? Seriously? But this will be my first training post in two weeks! My mind squawked and kicked its toe in the dirt before remembering the point of this blog, that is, to listen to what my body is telling me, especially when I am running.
Right.
I stopped, and I noticed the remarkable disconnect between what my mind thinks is realistic and what my body feels is fair. Before I started today, I had a plan. I was going to run a pyramid of intervals: 500 m, 1km, 1 mile, 1 km, 500 m. I saw myself running these distances effortlessly, loping easily deer-like. Not even close. I made 500 m, 1 km… and then it started, a twisting ache low, low, low in my gut. I gave myself a short break, tried to shake it off, but no, it was not to be. I cut my last attempt short and headed into the house for water and a, uh, potty break.
Should I add here that I am scheduled for my 5 year colon cancer screening test this week? That this is probably not a coincidence? Sigh. How can it be that I am starting off my new blog on this low note?
Actually it makes perfect sense, because this is the apparently the home of my root chakra. What? Your what? Chakras? I don’t know anything about chakras, but inexplicably the word popped into my mind as I sat down to write after my run, so I googled it, read a few online articles and then ordered a book from a sensible sounding woman with a PhD. I even took an online test that told me, that of the seven chakras (more on this later), my root chakra, the lowest one, is seriously stopped up.
Huh. No kidding.
Accordingly, I`ve been given some homework:
(1) a simple meditation focussing on my the physcial location of the root chakra (let`s just say it is at the bottom?) while chanting the sound l-ah-mm. I am trying very hard to keep an open mind about this.
(2) a grounding exercise, simply standing, feet shoulder with apart, and dropping my weight inot the earh. Um, yeah, I have done this exercise before in my kung fu training. Somehow it isn’t surprising that this is an exercise I had a lot of trouble with.
(3) a muscle contraction exercise that sounds an awful lot like Kegels. OK, I will concede this point, but what woman who has borne children doesn’t need Kegels, I ask you?
Is this training? Well, this is supposed to be a journey, is it not? More on chakras tomorrow. Wish me luck.