Review of Running Is A Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

Book Link: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08RZ4PTSF/

Every once in a while you find an music album, musician, tv show, movie, friend, or in this case a book that meets you at the perfect time. This book was that for me. It has been a very difficult past few years and has gotten more difficult recently and I have consistently turned to running as a form of meditation where I can spend hours in the mountains in my own thoughts while burning off anxiety and nervous energy. Things feel better after a long run before slowly creeping backwards as time drags on. Although I did not experience the depths that J. M. Thompson decribes here, I can absolutely relate to the feelings, emotions, and impact to your physical and mental state and how the act of running alleviates those impacts. I don't think this book will resonate with most people, but those that are having a difficult time and those that enjoy pushing their body through type-2 fun to better understand and appreciate their own abilities will likely find a deep connection.

Some highlights from my reading: 1. There is a path ahead of me. Nothing is ever altogether lost. There is a ground beneath us that never goes away. 2. It’s chaos, in a container: a kind of organized insanity that can help keep you sane. 3. I choose my GU flavors carefully. I think I can say that I choose everything in my pack with quite a fanatical measure of care. Head out on a really big adventure, and it pays to sweat the small stuff. 4. The unwritten manual of the human species lists certain items essential to survival. You need a good survival blanket—something or someone that reflects warmth and love and caring, a blanket you can crawl under a tree with in the depth of night and wrap around you until the sun comes, a way to feel held and seen and to believe that you deserve to survive. 5. I think of my muscles and tendons and ligaments as a family on an epic road trip. There’s a limit to how much the little ones can handle. 6. In our youth, Jordan argues, you contemplate infinite and impossible questions. You acquire more knowledge. But knowledge is futile unless it inspires action. Thus, you must act. Without action, you fall into pessimism. And the nature of that action is of the utmost significance. “The thing you do should be for you the most important thing in the world,” writes Jordan. “If you could do something better than you are doing now, everything considered, why are you not doing it?” 7. To understand the whole meaning of a book or historical period, you need to examine its component parts. Know more about the parts, and you expand your perception of the whole. Know more about the whole, and you see the parts in a new light. This cycle from whole to part and back again—what the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger called the hermeneutic circle—constitutes the process of historical understanding: the loops of remembering and reinterpreting through which we understand the meaning of the past, whether collective or personal. 8. It was hard to know which was worse, the sadness or the terror. The sadness was a constant. It lurked in the background, underneath the fear, moving into the foreground of awareness when I went to bed at night, and in the lulls between the waves of fear. The fear came along with the inchoate perception that something was going very badly wrong. 9. Earth seemed to conspire to keep me alive. The island manifested marvels of almost comic-book images of natural enchantment. One afternoon I paddled out in giant surf and looked back toward the shore. A rainbow formed above a tall green mountain. Giant waves crashed all about me. I wondered if the surf was big enough to guarantee death by drowning. A double rainbow formed above the mountain. 10. When you know how far it is to the end, and there’s still a long way to go, that can be a tough kind of knowledge to bear. Fixate on some future that isn’t here yet, and the present is a bad place to be. Drop that fixation, and the present is neither good nor bad. It just is. 11. all things being equal, an ultramarathon is essentially an eating contest. 12. Type-one fun is sex and ice cream: you like it when it’s happening. Type-two fun you like looking back on. what a relief it was to embrace the fire that ignited in my chest and heart and folded me within it, as my legs hammered the ground, and I absorbed the knowledge that the ground communicated of the earth’s stable presence underneath me and the solid feeling it gave me inside. With every step forward, the house fell farther behind. And I knew that this solid feeling would always be there for me: all I had to do was put on my running shoes and get outside. I ran to build a foundation for the formless feelings inside me that I didn’t understand. I ran to persuade myself that one day I would leave all the madness of my family’s past behind and never look back. I ran to remember what was real. 13. We cannot step in the same river twice, Heraclitus told us. A little boy turns into a man: Were those two selves not likewise mutually distinct, separated in space and time, unlike in mind and body? And even in the present, it occurred to me, Am I not this very moment a crowd of conflicting thoughts? Is there really a still point in all this flux, a core me? No, I was a fiction too, so it wasn’t at all clear to me that my mother was any different, rendering my loss of her all the more confusing: I was mourning somebody still alive. 14. Almost any trail or trial in life is traversable when you have that feeling of sanctuary. Someplace that feels like home. The place doesn’t have to be physical. It’s a state of mind. Someone who feels like home. The person who really knows you and loves you and you can lie on the ground with and hold and you know that everything is going to be fine. 15. Something like this experience is the origin story of many an ultrarunner. You start out thinking a regular marathon sounds pretty far enough. There is an infamous low point around mile 18 when you get low on glycogen and feel like you can’t keep going: the so-called wall. But eat something, drink something, and you keep going. You hit another wall, like I did at the midpoint of that fifty-mile race. You eat something, drink something. You keep going. You can keep on going on like that for a really, really long time. 16. Knowing this has an amazing effect on what seems possible not just in running but in the rest of your life. I’m going to do it. I can do things. It was a stunning revelation back then, the state I was in, to discover this. 17. It’s one thing to understand the arithmetic that a fifty-mile run is in reality a bunch of one-mile runs, stacked end to end, and another thing altogether to screen out all the messages that say that something like this is i...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions. 18. I go into the bathroom to splash some water on my face and clean my teeth. I see the man in the mirror: me. English male, disheveled . . . I’ve seen and thought and felt more in the past two days than the previous forty years. But there’s one thing I haven’t seen, because it’s invisible: Me. When I look in the mirror, my perspective flips from inside looking out to outside looking in, from I to me, between the world as it shows up in my awareness and the way I show up to others. They’re so unlike each other, this mirror me and I, it’s almost hard to believe we’re the same person. 19. There were others like her, the man said. The ultrarunners. They were crazy people. Crazy in a good way. They took their crazy and put it to use. They ran until they were on their knees and puking up their guts and crying and then they got up and kept on running. 20. Namu kie Butsu. Namu kie Ho. Namu kie So.” It was Japanese that referred to the Three Refuges of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Butsu is Buddha, the possibility of liberation. Ho is Dharma, the teachings about that possibility. So is Sangha, the community of people who aspire to live by those teachings. Namu kie Butsu: I take refuge in the Buddha. Namu kie Ho: I take refuge in the Dharma. Namu kie So: I take refuge in the Sangha. 21. Some years ago a group of neurobiologists assembled a group of mouse depressives.14 When a mouse is hung upside down by its tail, it tries to wriggle away. If the mouse soon abandons its escape attempt, it is understood to be depressed. The scientists put the sad mice in a playground. They had never dreamed such freedom might be possible! The mice skipped and scampered about. Their depression faded away. The scientists looked inside their brains. They were interested in a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. It helps new cells grow in a region of the brain called the hippocampus that underpins the capacity to learn and remember. After the mice ran out to play, they had more BDNF in their brains. Further research has shown that running has a similar effect on human brains. When you run, you remember what it feels like to be free. 22. We fall down, but we get up For a saint is just a sinner Who fell down And got up. 23. The closest term I could find to describe the feeling was what the Japanese call mono no aware, literally “the pathos of things,” a bittersweet awareness of the transience of all phenomena. 24. But I had no illusions about some bright dividing line between the healthy and the sick. We are all vulnerable. In the words of Hindu guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, “There are no others.” 25. Can ultrarunning, like psychedelic drugs, induce the entropic brain? Proof awaits confirmation through empirical studies. Eighty-four hours into the Tahoe 200, I sure felt like I was tripping on acid—though for a while not in a positive way. I was in Dysnomia: a state of psychological anarchy, on the verge of breakdown.