MOMMAS, DON'T LET YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO BE TRAIL RUNNERS

People HIKE trails, and JOG on roads or streets. Everybody knows that. When you're in the woods, you supposed to take your time and stop often to enjoy the Great Outdoors. Trails are littered with rocks to trip on, and roots to snag your toes. If you're running on a trail, you can't see the snakes or bears,  and if you get bit or eaten miles from the car you'll just die alone in the wilderness, doing something other people neither understand nor care about. Most important, you don't want people you meet on the trail to give that look that says, "Slow down, bud, you're way too far ahead of your keeper."

I told momma to stuff it and ignored all those objections, of course. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to start this second paragraph, and give you the truth about America's Last Great Undiscovered Fitness Activity.

 I discovered trail running about a decade after buying my first jogging shoes.   First thing I noticed was the reduction in road shock when compared to running on pavement. Dirt is hard when you fall on it, but it's not as hard as concrete, asphalt, or even hard-packed gravel when you run on it. Your joints can tell the difference.

Next thing I noticed was the Meditation Effect.   Running trails, you are free from the stress and distraction of running with vehicles. This is no small thing. Road runners can never safely forget the next Lexus that approaches from behind may contain a demented old lady who, because of senility and macular degeneration, is absolutely certain not to know you exist until she has applied you to her front fender.  Country roads don't have as much traffic, but can you still end up being just another dent in Bubba's pickup fender, or a tasty treat for that Rotweiler-Pit Bull cross that  bit through his chain when he saw you jogging over the hill.

Truth is, when you're jogging on streets or highways, you never know from one minute to the next if you're going to be a road runner or a road kill. This anticipation of being damaged in one way or another creates stress and detracts from your enjoyment when you run in civilization. On trails, you have none of this (unless perhaps you're jogging south Florida canals, or bear trails in the Rockies). And because you don't have to keep looking over your shoulder, you can concentrate on what's in front of you.

What's in front of you, unless you're in the desert, is likely be an unending variety of rocks and roots. Momma was right in observing you can trip on them, and sometimes you will. However, rocks and roots are responsible for the Meditation Effect in trail running. Rocks and roots are Our Friends.

The First Rule for successful trail running is Never Look More Than One Step Ahead. Focus on where your next step will take you. Concentrate on the real estate exactly beneath your next footfall. In the second or so you have available between stride-start to stride-finish, extrapolate where your shoe is going to end up, and if it's the wrong place make corrective adjustments.

The more you concentrate, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the more your mind detaches itself from the  worries, stresses, fears, unproductive projections, and ruminations it was busy with when you locked your car door at the trail head and took a leak in the bushes. After 30 minutes of concentrating on your next step, and only your next step, you will find that you have lost the world and found that exact moment in which you are alive. In that moment, there are no scary thoughts of the future or sad regrets of the past. There is nothing but a square foot of earth and your descending foot. On the periphery you may notice other features of the landscape, or you may not. Eventually, even the awareness of your foot may fade until you are no longer watching anything. You just are.

If all the turmoil, bullshit, and nonessential clutter that normally reside in one's head disappear, what remains is a state of calm that is pleasant, restful, and restorative. That is the Meditation Effect you may find in running trails.

It isn't likely to happen the first time you go out. Quite possibly, it won't happen for several months and many miles of running trails. In the beginning it will most likely be just a minute or two, after which you have the strange thought, "damn, I was just somewhere else and now I'm back."  I had quite a number of those thoughts the first year I ran trails. Sometimes they were amusing, or puzzling. Now and then—when I had really lost the world and didn't know yet what was going on—they were eerie.  But they never felt bad.  

Truth be known, trail running is a great fitness activity and I don't know exactly why more people don't do it. I can run a whole summer on popular southeast Missouri trails and never pass (or get passed by) another runner.   Maybe inconvenience is part of the answer: most runners have to drive some distance to get to a state park or recreation area. Or maybe it's that lots of runners really do believe what their mommas taught them about how you should and shouldn't behave outdoors. I believed all that stuff once. Looking back on it though, it felt kinda nice to tell momma to stuff it………