“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” –Eleanor Roosevelt
Triathlons? Wait, aren’t spiritual people supposed to be into yoga and tofu and deep breathing and meditation and snorting incense and chanting and floating away into Nirvana on magic carpets and…?
I used to think stuff like this and get discouraged about my lack of spiritual fortitude. Sometimes I still do. Sometimes I think to myself, “This is wacked out. I can’t possibly be spiritual! I live in a suburb! I drive a car! I’m more likely to show up at the gym than at the yoga studio! I occasionally drink Gatorade and eat bagels after I work out! I drool over Agent Mulder, and even more over Agent Scully! I get mad at my cats! I don’t volunteer for a soup kitchen! When I eat tofu, I usually deep fry it! When I float away into Nirvana, it’s usually because ‘In Bloom’ is playing on the radio! How the hell can I possibly be truly spiritual?” Then I get over it and come to my senses, because I do enjoy snorting incense from time to time.
When I come down from my full-scale freak-out, I’m able to notice that my spirituality has to do with the way that I relate to the world (or the universe, or the greater whole, or Spirit/God, or some combination) and to myself. It has to do with responding to a deep level of inner knowing or recognition that doesn’t really have to do with analyzing stuff to death, nor does it have to do with making a completely impulsive and hedonistic decision. Sometimes it just has to do with following a gentle nudging in a certain direction, then following another, then another, until you find that your world is a completely different experience than it was just a few short months ago and that you locate abilities and resources within that you either didn't know you had or forgot you had. This nudging happened for me. One day, I was running to help myself deal with fear, and the next thing I knew, I was crossing the finish line at my first triathlon. Believe me, this is something I thought would never happen.
Last summer, when I was dealing with the surprisingly intense, stubborn fear I had of traveling to another continent on my own, I began to run. I had always thought of running as a great exercise but had always loathed it. One day, the fear had gotten to be so big that all I wanted to do was to find a space in which I didn’t have to be afraid of anything. Running turned out to be perfect, because all I had to do was put one foot in front of the other and breathe. There wasn’t anything frightening about that, as far as I could tell.
It quickly turned out to be the easiest part of my day and led to a multitude of epiphanies, not the least of which was that I was quickly becoming healthier than I had been in a long time. Shortly after that, boredom struck, and I stumbled upon another epiphany – I’m more likely to maintain an exercise program when I have something to work toward. Preferably something that involves the potential for me to embarrass myself in front of other people, so that I HAVE to really, truly work at it. This led me to keep running during the winter so that I could train for my first 5K, which I ran in April.
My friend S heard that I’d done a 5K and she suggested that I do a triathlon. I think I told her I’d do it, but felt really non-committal about it. I decided that I would just train and decide later if I was actually going to do it. I trained. My motivation flagged. I got back on the wagon, because if I did decide to do the triathlon, I didn’t want to come in dead last. I got sick. I got back on the wagon. I bought goggles. I briefly revisited Bikram Yoga, which helped me to remember that there were far more challenging things than trying to breathe in the water. Four weeks before the triathlon, I got a message from my friend saying something about the triathlon and I thought, “Oh, I guess I’d better decide if I’m going to do this or not.” So I registered.
At the end of July, I got up at some God-awful hour with The Spouse, our resident sleep-camel, and headed 30 minutes south to participate in my first triathlon. I got into the water and thought I was going to die. I got on my bike and thought I was going to die. I ran and was sure I was going to die. Oddly enough, I crossed the finish line without meeting the guy with the oppressive black cloak and scythe, although I did meet The Spouse and my friend L, who had driven out from Western Massachusetts with pipe-cleaner triathletes to catch part of the race.
It wasn’t until several hours later, while The Spouse was in the grocery store getting lunch ingredients and I was quietly sitting in the car with the air conditioning that what had happened settled fully into my awareness.
I cry about almost anything, and I cried at that moment, because a few months ago I had completely doubted my ability to do something that I realized in retrospect that I had passionately wanted to do but feared I couldn’t do. Being a triathlete hadn’t been part of my self-concept, but now it was. I had thought of my triathlon training as spiritual in some respects, but I hadn’t realized how much it was about me forming a relationship with parts of myself I had forgotten were there and thought I had lost for good. I was able to rediscover my athleticism, my competitiveness, my self-discipline, and my ability to acknowledge and work through challenges to the other side. I noticed that I was bigger than I had thought, and I don’t mean my waistline.
Some might say it’s too bad I couldn’t relearn these things about myself in a less physically laborious way. To all of you – you have a point. But I did manage to do them without snorting incense, and that has its benefits.
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