The Art of Slowing Down
A sense-able approach to running faster
By Edward H. Yu, CFP
Prologue
“Try to forget everything you’ve learned as an adult: the things that limit your view of the world, your fears, your prejudices, your preconceptions. Try to rediscover what it is like to be a child with a sense of wonder, and innocence. And don’t forget to laugh. Remember, children are strong—they are resilient, they are designed to survive. When you drop them, they tend to bounce.”
-Terry Gilliam
For those of you who are in a hurry to improve your running and don’t have time to go through the philosophy and methodology contained in this book, please skip “Life,” “More life” and “The rest of your life”—that is, Part I, Part III and the Epilogue of the book. I suggest you read Part II (“Practical Matters”), or simply go straight to the lessons. There are 20 of them and they are listed in Appendix II.
As you continue to do the lessons regularly, you will begin to feel differences in your body that you may not have felt before, and you will rediscover a certain vibrancy that you long ago forgot existed inside of you. Each new feeling will have the potential to make a profound impact not only in the way you run, but in your posture, gait and the way you perform other sports and activities and indeed everything involving movement. Each new feeling, in short, will transform the way you live your life.
Some of you will discover that rather than living life, you’ve been trying to get it over with—as if living were more of a chore than a wondrous journey to be experienced fully, deep down inside ourselves. In this discovery you will realize that living itself is not the chore, but rather it is hurrying through life—what I call, “not-quite-living”—that makes our days seem harried and senseless. When you awaken to this, you won’t be able to resist soaking in the rest of the book. It will be like basking in the warmth of the sun on a cool autumn day.
For the rest of you, be playful—for it is in play that we learn the most. Skip pages and even chapters, or start at the end of the book and go backward if you want. Most of all, please slow down and take your time. I hope you will savor the newfound feelings and sensations in your body that come from doing each lesson the way you might savor the sunset, a good piece of chocolate, or perhaps a fine wine. This way you will do three things at once. First, you will actually enjoy yourself. Second you will learn more. And third by enjoying and learning more, your running will improve faster. Yes, you read it correctly: by slowing down and enjoying yourself, you will run faster, and you will run faster faster—or in other words, you will improve more rapidly. Conversely, if you plow through the lessons as if they were something to get out of the way, you will not only enjoy them less, but you will improve less—if at all. Going too fast, in other words, will slow you down by hindering your learning.
But to tell the truth, getting you to run faster is not the real reason I wrote this book. There’s something much deeper waiting for you between the pages. It exists in the pauses between sentences and in the wondering that will emerge between chapters. It’s the gift that you may long ago have forgotten about.