I think of my pace almost as a heartbeat. It's a mode of being - this is me running at the pace. My pace is relatively slow - I run seven minute miles in a 5k, but in the marathon I ran nine minute miles - and it feels natural. Sometimes I feel like, as long as I run at the pace, nothing bad can happen. Pain will come up, and I'll see it, but I can drop into the Witness of the pain, rather than be captured by it. Anger will come up - I really hate those people who run the opposite way on the loop or the reservoir track and don't get out of the way - but it drops soon enough. And there are times when, with the mind truly quieted, the leaves and blue sky come alive in their own unembellished radiance.

Dan: I came to Roger Joslin's Running the Spiritual Path: A runner's guide to breathing, meditating, and exploring the prayerful dimension of the sport conflicted. Despite being an avid sportsman growing up, I always hated running. Likewise, despite being a practising Jew I always hated the woolly logic that promoted prayer over good behaviour. To me, the rationale for both was that they enabled you to be effective within a greater discipline -- but they were hardly virtues in their own right.

I don't even agree that running is a sport. Sport is playing a game -- competing and interacting with other people, testing yourself against them. Running is an athletic activity. I detest running; I love sport. On the other hand, as a serious sportsman I have had to rely on running for conditioning at a number of periods in my life, and in the most recent of those times I ran a number of middle and long distance races. As well as various half marathons I even completed the New York marathon a couple of times and know the paradoxically ecstatic experience of such a physical pursuit.

As with any physically and emotionally draining exercise, completing a marathon is a deeply emotional time, a transcendent time, an overflowing time. So much so that, recovering from the soreness of my first NY Marathon (the one in the aftermath of the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks), I wrote an essay describing seven distinct types of ecstasy which I had experienced. For those reasons, when we received Running the Spiritual Path I was interested reading it and in writing a joint review to see whether Jay, Richard Joslin, and myself might help one another in our conception of Divinity, of the practice of running, and of their combination.

[1]       2       [3]       [4]       [5]       [next->] Top image: Chad Stevens Lower image: Dan Friedman runs the 2001 New York Marathon