Beth’s Note: Meet Hal. I have been inspired by many (like Lynne is my previous blog post who lost 50lbs) this past year.
My hope is that by Hal, Lynne & others sharing their stories you too will be inspired. Hal took on the challenge to run for 365 conservative days. The take away isn’t to lace up sneakers and do what Hal has accomplished. But ask the question, “What can I commit to for a year that will improve my health and physical/emotional well-being?”.
Here is Hal after his 100th consecutive day of running. He has completed 365 consecutive days.
I didn’t really think there was any technological solution available for improving my physical-spiritual life—unless it included a technology fix for removing technology. I had dreamt of other changes to better align myself with my perceived better life: stop driving, run more, work from home (heck, I even daydreamt about the potential benefits and challenges of a daily trail-running practice, known in the running community as a running “streak”). That sounded dangerous for an aging gent.
Prana, the well-known yoga life-style retailer, promoted a challenge right before everything (except imagination) got shut-down for the pandemic: quit your job, the company said (or even threaten too, or in pondering it buy these hipster pants here, see?), a selected winner would get 100k to quit their day job and follow their dreams. It got me scrambling. Not that I don’t love my day job, I do, often…and the good we do, the lives I get to become acquainted with. And yet…aren’t I supposed to be strideling up and down a trail somewhere, every day in fact, breathing real outside-air and uniting with nature? I failed to verbalize and monetize my best-case life for the challenge, I had no happiness-contingency-plan, and I was deeply ashamed.
Nevertheless, and despite the gyms shutting down all around, I figured that I was pretty well prepared for a pandemic-era-fit-life. After all, I’d spent years doing quiet fitness R&D, carried out in basements and spare rooms, in membership-spaces both sketchy and polished, some elite, others skuzzy, located in rural and urban spots across a few American states and several decades. I had all my fitness “implements” and workout hacks at the ready.
After purging my gym membership, I thought I might miss Beth’s class most, it was a touchstone in my week that made all the other duties bearable (the car-commutes, the ridiculous desk-contortions, toxic over-head lighting, the universal drone of office…I digress). I entered into a corner of the reduced two-dimensional yoga space of my living room laptop more warily than I had Beth’s real-life yoga class some five years ago.
And yet, over the weeks I came to see that virtual yoga class, to which I was at first so leery, as a kind of revolution, a quietly democratizing, ego-leveling alternate yoga dimension. The down/upside: I could drink coffee and go to the loo; up/down-side: I couldn’t show off or be showed off too. Upside/upside: I had to think about what doing yoga MEANS, what it meant to my life, what it meant in spite of the pandemic or because of it. My carbon footprint was also severely reduced by not driving to class in a car, which, let’s face it, always felt a bit hypocritcal, like rolling out an oil slick to get blissed out on.
My answer wouldn’t have been uncovered without last year’s vexing corporate challenge—which I now interpret as something like the question “what could make you happy?” And my answer was simple: run, run every day outside, run for a year if necessary (I guessed wrongly that I might not have made it past like 50 days). The few Saturdays when Beth was unavailable to teach I realized how crucial she was to my goal(s), and to running in particular. She was my “fixer”, and without her even my resolve couldn’t make these hips and ankles and rhomboids behave in order to finish whatever “this” was that I was trying to finish.
I’m happy to report that I completed running every day 365 times in a row. But more than that I’ve learned about life and fitness and people and processes and how doing what works, well, works. And I have Beth and her openess and the inspiration of my classmates to thank for that. And frankly those jeans would probably look better on now but I no longer feel a need for new hipster pants.
