In the interval

"My name is Sybil, and I remember."

Sybil

Tomorrow, for the first time in about 27 years, I'm going to run intervals. Real timed intervals. For those of you who don't know, intervals are the grunt work of running. You stretch your body further than it would like to go for a (relatively) short distance so that you can build your ability to run faster at a longer distance. Five times I'm supposed to run hard for 400 meters, taking a rest of walking of slow jogging between each one. Intervals scare me.

I can remember doing them in high school. Quarter miles. Half miles. Six hundreds. Jog half a lap, run half a lap. I remember the aching sensation in my calves and thighs rising eventually to a kind of screaming for air in my lungs by the time I was done. The desperate slapping of my feet on the ground as I tried to pull myself forward. The tightening of my body, my muscles as oxygen debt and the build-up of lactic acid overtook me.

But the sensation was worse. The feeling rising in me as I approached the line before each interval began. My body moving slowly, anticipating, knowing that when I reached that invisible threshold I would push it into difficulty, discomfort, even pain. That anticipation, that fear, was the worst moment of each interval. It was the moment of commitment, or so it seemed.

Actually the commitment had occurred much earlier, had been rehearsed for days and weeks and months. Deciding to be on the team, to get up for morning runs, to build my after-school afternoons around practice and running. The moment at the beginning of the interval was only one of a host of decisions that helped to make the decision to run the hard 400 meters easier, however the difficulty of the task.

"Discipline," a minister friend of mine once told me, "is the art of remembering what you want." I'd say "of remembering what you love." It would seem so easy, remembering what I love. I love to run. I love the motion of my body when I feel healthy, when my muscles move together, fueled by my lungs, by the air, buoyed by the ground beneath me, cooled by the breeze my motion creates. But sometimes, when I am away from it, I dismember the experience. I imagine and amplify the sensation of pain. I get bits and pieces--in flashes: blisters, twinges, tightness. I extract all the elements that feed my fear.

That's how my fear functions. It breaks my life into pieces, into sharp dangerous fragments of disappointment and defeat. But love re-members everything. It puts them all back together: the pain and the joy, the difficulty and the breakthrough to a place when I'm running--really runnnig--that has no name, that has no words. When I sit here now and relax and breath, I feel that place through my whole body. I feel a calm pass over me like a cooling cloud pushed by the wind on a brilliantly hot day. The prickly response of my skin to the coolness envelopes me.

When, with love, I remember, it isn't just the running or my writing or being with those I care about. I am remembering myself, who I am at my deepest source, what I'm capable of when I am whole, not chopped into bits by my fear. So memory isn't about the past and discipline isn't about the future, about some person or some runner or some writer I'm going to become. It's about seeing the universe that every moment contains, all the possibilities and opportunities, and making a choice through love.

Tomorrow, when I stand at the starting line for each interval, I'll pause and I'll breathe and I'll remember what I love.