songs of experience

New year. New entry. No guilt over not writing. I am reading Volume One of Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles” and I came across a paragraph that captures what I have been trying to explain to athletes for decades:

“There were a lot of better singers and better musicians around but there wasn’t anybody close in nature to what I was doing. Folk songs [or, in my case, RACES] were the way I explored the universe, they were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say. I knew the inner substance of the thing. I could easily connect the pieces. It meant nothing for me to rattle off things like “Columbus Stockade, “Pastures of Plenty,” “If I Lose, Let Me Lose,” all back-to-back just like it was one long song. Most of the other performers tried to put themselves across, rather than the song, but I didn’t care about doing that. With me, it was about putting the song across.”

With me, it was always about putting the race across. At the peak of my running career, I was able to train myself to almost disappear into a race. I would often hear afterward from someone watching the race that I was “on fire” or I “made it look easy” or that I inspired them to want to run fast too. It was never me - Joan - they saw (because, as I said, I was nearly invisible); it was the race, itself, they witnessed. And, most importantly, they felt the glorious invitation to join the race too.

A friend - and training partner, Nnenna Lynch - once said of me, “You are our folk hero, Joan” because I didn’t care about a big shoe contract or being on the cover of Runner’s World magazine. I didn’t have a coach or an agent or connections. I think Nnenna came to train with me in Chapel Hill because she was a purist. She desperately wanted the race for its own reward.

In my training, over the course of the year, I would work up to completing my work-outs with one complete mental motion so that the start of the race and the finish of the race was one, single moment … rather like the tesseract in “A Wrinkle in Time” where Madeline L’Engle explains that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. If you take ahold of the two ends of the line, one in each hand, and BEND them back toward each other, the shortest distance is when the two points touch - one moment. IF you can do this in a race, it is a perfect moment. Time stops.