A five minute bike ride from our Stuttgart apartment brings you to a simple forest, about 100 acres in total. Since I'm typically the only one running its crisscross of trails very early on a weekday morning, or a bit later on a weekend, over the past year I've come to think of this sylvan spot as my own, a treasure of trees and the animals, seen and unseen, that attend. We'll be leaving Germany at the end of this week, and the mental and emotional withdrawals, preceding the physical, have consistently ranked the forest as the biggest loss for me in our move. I'm already in mourning.
The forest has taught me, again, of the importance of daily outside time, of just being quiet with self in nature. Bike commutes can help, and after dinner walks with family are special, but nothing compares with an early morning run in one's own forest, the birds ever chirping, the occasional fox, deer or jack rabbit scurrying, and all of it presided over by the ever watchful hawks in the high trees adjacent the fields.
As I've found over the past forty years of competition as an endurance athlete, when training, developing a sense of attachment to place is important. A good pool with a consistent masters swim program, a strong cycling group with regular rides of varying length and speed, a nearby track program with weekly speed workouts - all these can help the triathlete. Yet developing a personal, visceral connection to one's own natural environment is equally if not more important, at least from my perspective.
When I did my first triathlon in 1981 while still in college, the campus arboretum adjacent the college was my personal cathedral, a place I could run and mentally recharge. A mental map of its running trails is still ingrained in my head. A few years later, now in Ann Arbor, it was another arboretum that gained my spiritual favor, allowing me to experience its many hills and trails while working my way through graduate school and to a podium finish at Kona in '84, a tricky two-step if ever there was one. Following Ann Arbor, NYC beckoned, and with it the many treasures of Central and Prospect Parks, both of which I came to know intimately while dedicating myself to running and launching a teaching and coaching career. Funny, but the trees and trails of New York City linger longer than the many buildings and people. After NYC, Seattle, home to more than 200 parks, was the next stop, two of which, Green Lake/Woodland Parks, just up the hill from our Ballard home, would become the source of much running and ski-bounding satisfaction in our nearly two decades in the city before leaving for teaching jobs overseas.
Yet none of these can compare with the attachment I've come to feel for the simple collection of trees just down the trail from our apartment here in Plienningen. In the morning, there is no greater feeling than to achieve a steady pace on a run and be surrounded by trees, this city's lungs. In the distance, the A8 autobahn churns away, or up the hill I may hear the U3 ubahn whir by, but it's the music of nature that truly envelopes and transports me to runs in the '70s, when woods near home and school snared me forever as a runner and set me quite literally on a life quest of paths less traveled by.
I may never return to these woods again, yet my soul is enriched for having treaded its trails. Here's hoping many more wooded trails await, wherever life transports.
The forest has taught me, again, of the importance of daily outside time, of just being quiet with self in nature. Bike commutes can help, and after dinner walks with family are special, but nothing compares with an early morning run in one's own forest, the birds ever chirping, the occasional fox, deer or jack rabbit scurrying, and all of it presided over by the ever watchful hawks in the high trees adjacent the fields.
As I've found over the past forty years of competition as an endurance athlete, when training, developing a sense of attachment to place is important. A good pool with a consistent masters swim program, a strong cycling group with regular rides of varying length and speed, a nearby track program with weekly speed workouts - all these can help the triathlete. Yet developing a personal, visceral connection to one's own natural environment is equally if not more important, at least from my perspective.
When I did my first triathlon in 1981 while still in college, the campus arboretum adjacent the college was my personal cathedral, a place I could run and mentally recharge. A mental map of its running trails is still ingrained in my head. A few years later, now in Ann Arbor, it was another arboretum that gained my spiritual favor, allowing me to experience its many hills and trails while working my way through graduate school and to a podium finish at Kona in '84, a tricky two-step if ever there was one. Following Ann Arbor, NYC beckoned, and with it the many treasures of Central and Prospect Parks, both of which I came to know intimately while dedicating myself to running and launching a teaching and coaching career. Funny, but the trees and trails of New York City linger longer than the many buildings and people. After NYC, Seattle, home to more than 200 parks, was the next stop, two of which, Green Lake/Woodland Parks, just up the hill from our Ballard home, would become the source of much running and ski-bounding satisfaction in our nearly two decades in the city before leaving for teaching jobs overseas.
Yet none of these can compare with the attachment I've come to feel for the simple collection of trees just down the trail from our apartment here in Plienningen. In the morning, there is no greater feeling than to achieve a steady pace on a run and be surrounded by trees, this city's lungs. In the distance, the A8 autobahn churns away, or up the hill I may hear the U3 ubahn whir by, but it's the music of nature that truly envelopes and transports me to runs in the '70s, when woods near home and school snared me forever as a runner and set me quite literally on a life quest of paths less traveled by.
I may never return to these woods again, yet my soul is enriched for having treaded its trails. Here's hoping many more wooded trails await, wherever life transports.
No comments:
Post a Comment