Why Seven Miles Per Hour?

If what I hear and understand about Meditation is correct, then Running is meditation. Running is meditation, when for the first 20 years of your life, you have avoided anything remotely athletic like the plague. Having embaressed myself at virtually every sports try-out during my school years, I decided the most graceful thing to do was to duck, hide and scoot everytime anyone mentioned sports. Of course, there were the less graceful days when the PT teacher had to have me dragged out from underneath the benches, and brought kicking and screaming to the Physical Ed. class. But I am sure the fond memories of these times will remain close to his heart forever.

On my 21st birthday I realised that I had reached the point-of-no -return into adulthood. Out of the joy or fear, I don't remember which, I decided to turn my life around by going for a run every evening. Absolutely incoherant as this logic sounds right now, it did seem like a very 21st-birthday-thing-to-do then. I suppose I picked running because I figured amongst all sporting activities, it required the least skill and talent. Oh, the innocence of those days!!

Now when I started running, one thing became clear - it takes every last ounce of my physical and mental faculties to simply keep the 'Run' going. It is an unforgiving arena where the reward of covering one step is, that you have to muster up the strength to take the second. Step after step you pull your legs and command them to carry your entire body weight to a forever receding horizon. Stride after stride, all my organ systems threaten to cease one by one; the lungs leading the rebellion. It is only after a few hundred metres of coaxing and doggedly running at a laughable pace that the mind falls into accepting this fate and the body buoys the process with a grudging shot of adrenalin. It is at this pace of seven miles per hour, when all your effort and focus is devoted to running, that all the unimportant and unneccesary clutter occupying your thoughts leaves. The mind is just so overwhelmed, it won't stand to waste it's resources on something inconsequential. And if at this point something is still on your mind, whatever it is, it has got to be worth thinking about.
Here's what I think about at Seven Miles Per Hour.