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Meditative Jogging
By Paul | March 2, 2008
I jog each Sunday at some time between 7am and 11am. I’d been immensely surprised that the jogging since January has not decreased my energy during the rest of the day - up until now. In fact, prior to today, I was happy to feel full of energy for the whole of each Sunday. When I’d taken to jogging in the distant past I always found I had a jogging “high” for about an hour afterwards and then felt a slump in energy - perhaps even sleepiness.
Today, however, was different. It may be unrelated to the jogging, but I was definitely extremely tired in the late afternoon and I still feel pretty tired now at about 9pm. It may be other factors or it may be that the distance has become significant enough to cause noticeable fatigue. I suppose I shall just have to see what happens during the coming weeks.
Nevertheless, from a mental and spiritual perspective, the jogging is proving to be a wonderful habit. The act of jogging has itself become meditative. I find myself contemplating my future - in a very positive frame of mind - thinking thoughts (some might say prayers) of gratitude and enjoying the changing surroundings. I even found myself - entirely unintentionally - delivering a speech!
As I have resigned from my teaching post (officially as of the end of August, but in all important respects at the end of the Summer term), I will be expected to give a farewell speech to the entire school in the year’s end assembly. Pretty much all staff and pupils are present and it could seem a daunting occasion.
I was amazed at my own eloquence and humour as I delivered this speech to myself (without any prior rehearsal and without any forethought whatsoever). I can scarcely imagine I will be so eloquent on the actual occasion, but if I continue to spontaneously rehearse during my Sunday jogs, who knows?
Given that I’d like to become a better public speaker, I think my jogging could provide a great opportunity to play things through in my head.
In general, I have been amazed at the clarity of my thoughts while jogging. The very act of jogging and the affirmations I recite from time to time during the jog induce a heightened state of positivity. Consequently, I have a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas that I only wish I could retain and come back to later. I think I could use some kind of dictaphone to record some of my thoughts. . .
On a related note, I’ve found a couple of GoogleMap-based websites that allow me to create jogging routes (essentially for the purposes of seeing how far I’ve run). I’m beginning to test these out, but I’m not sure editing previous routes is particularly easy to do. Given that I’m adding more and more diversions to the middle of my route to increase its length, I’d like to be able to insert new waypoints to (or delete old ones in) the middle of a route but I’m not sure if I can do this. The utilities I’ve found so far only appear to enable me to delete points from (and add points to) the end of a previous route.
I’ll hopefully link to the two jogging route utilities I’ve found in the next entry.
Topics: Fitness, Health, Jogging, Meditation |