Swimming with a Whale Shark in the Sea of Cortez 2016.
Just a quick summary of the year-to-date. Ran five Ultras and four Marathons this year. Set new PRs in a range of distances and completed my first 50 miler. Took a couple months off after my last training cycle to recover and enjoy life. Including a two week trip down the Baja coast to explore and feel out a more permanent move to Cabo.
I am back up to 172lbs. which is my preferred non-competition weight. Went all the way down to 158lbs. for the Bizz Johnson race which makes me look skeletal. Overall the healthiest year I can remember. My immune system and metabolic systems are doing well, but even better may be my mental state.
Looking back at 2016 the one thing I am really aware of is how happy I have been. One of the great mysteries of life for me has been how I frequently I have seen happiness in places you would not expect to find much of it. Doing the collection in Kenya was the first time I became acutely aware of extreme poverty and I was surprised to find villagers that were, despite their circumstances, singing and dancing while gathering wood or preparing food. I found the same thing in the Amazon Basin and in Copper Canyon. People living on less than a dollar a day and they were just in a better mental space than I was.
Compare that to the richness I would commonly find in Southern California and as often as not I would discover, for all their wealth, miserable/sick people. Not to over-generalize, there was certainly misery in some of the places I have done my field work, but it just seemed different to the general malaise I see in so many people living with unimaginable abundances. I would include myself in the latter category with the exception of this last year-and-a-half.
This whole experiment has made me realize that putting the life back in my intestinal tract has made me happier. One of the things I frequently experience when I am running out on the trail is a state of flow. I can be running and a whole hour can just disappear and it is a very restorative feeling. Other runners have described it as a complete immersion in the moment. Others have described it as optimal experience. You are not thinking about the past or the future but just completely present in the now. I never used to get that. Running was just a means to an end; now it has become something different and much better.
What I realize is that I should be trying to find that flow in other aspects of my life (or maybe I am just being greedy). So much of the modern world in designed to keep us out of the moment and fearful of the future. I am becoming more and more interested in the Tarahumara concept of Iwigara. There is no perfect translation but it could be described as breath or soul. The Tarahumara attribute illness to a broken Iwigara and when that happens they have a saying, "pe mukureke binoi" or "He is dead just a little".
2016 was the year I may have unbroken my Iwigara or at least made giant steps in getting it fixed. Looking forward to building on that base in 2017. Happy New Year!