Why my running sucks these days
California is too cold to be hot and too hot to be cold. The temperature is awkwardly in between. So every morning when I pulled myself out of the bed, out of the heated room, and went outside, the cold breeze froze my motivation to move my legs. Plus the running trail here is no fun. Flat pedestrian roads, gray cement rocks, repetitive turnings, monotonous hills. With music I've listened too much, I do not want to run.
Recently I am training for a marathon in January. Short running becomes 6 to 9 miles and long running is just long. I've gotten to a point that I do not want to run anymore. Running is a task I have to complete instead of something I enjoy. I forced myself to run every morning, which is not my usual running schedule, so I could run at 5:30am on race day. Perhaps this aggravated the situation. But I've realized that I can't blame it on the weather, the training, the roads, or the music. It's rather, there are too many things on my mind that I could not sort out.
When matters start to tangle up in your mind, and the resulting knitted roll annoys you, avoidance adheres to your life. Void does not come in when I run and no matter how hard I try to force things out of my mind, they come back in different forms. Dispersed, ungraspable, they appeared for just one second before I can hold on to them and annihilate them. Then they vanished to somewhere I cannot reach, a place that I do not know where. I want, I want, they say no.
And so these troubles manifest everywhere in my life too. When I do work and try to concentrate, instead of seeking answers in the most direct way, I go with roundabouts. These twisted paths are not more fun or challenging, they are simply prolonged by moments of time. They mislead me and frustratingly, my mind will follow their lead. Random, trivial factors start to play a part in the question, and hypothesis becomes a complicated model with too many variables. Overthinking is overfitting. Thoreau has asked me to simplify simplify simplify my life, I've done that with technology and other distractions, but then I am left with my own consciousness and unconsciousness which appear to be more unsettling than everything else.
It is no good when life centers around few things. It is also no good when thoughts penetrate too much for a period of time. Excessive thinking brings out second-guessing, then hesitance and uncertainty. Perhaps I shall take a leap of faith, a pill of forgetfulness, and lace up my shoes to suck it up.