Moving and meditating.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: Up Front - Positive aspects of running - Column

Scullers glide along the river. Their oars reach out and skim the surface like the gangly legs of water striders. I wonder as I watch how someone can balance on a boat so thin. Coaches, chugging alongside the rowers in johnboats with outboards, bark through megaphones.

Here on the river's banks, bikers, wrapped in motley Lycra, zip by on their shiny titanium and carbon-fiber machines. I'd say they looked ridiculous if I didn't dress the same way when I go for a ride. (OK, they do look ridiculous.)

I'm running on the asphalt path at the edge of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. It's 8 a.m. on a Saturday in August, and it's already hot. I'm shirtless, streaming with sweat. A heart-rate monitor is strapped around my chest, and the number on its wrist-mounted readout rises and falls with the terrain. When I head up an incline, even a gradual one, it spikes. Watching the monitor keeps me from running too fast and risking injury. Before I got it, my tendency had always been to go as hard as I could. Inevitably, I'd end up lame and stir crazy for a few weeks or a month each year.

I've heard folks say that running clears their heads. While I'm doing it, my worries do slip away. But once I'm done, showered and changed, the same old anxieties creep back -- deadlines at work, family obligations, bills. For me, it's more like a form of moving meditation. My mind drifts. It's as close as I'll ever come to the "living in the moment" that philosophers blather about. It's also a channel for the nervous energy that my colleagues love to rib me about; I'm the guy who annoys people at meetings by shaking his leg like a jackhammer.

God blessed me with a light frame and long limbs; people kid me about my chicken legs when I wear shorts. But long, skinny legs mean longer strides and less weight, so I'm able to run relatively fast. My times in 10k races are respectable, if not...