Sipping scalding black coffee, before leaving for the track, I watched a few classical dance videos – the dance and movement entirely unknown to me other than conjecture – but as EH Gombrich said in his magnificent The Story of Art – no doubt speaking of the visual arts but apt enough to be applied anywhere – …. a voyage of discovery … there is no telling what one might bring home from such a journey.
I was determined to see dawn this morning. I had been arriving to run well before the light changed colours but each time I was lost in thoughts (probably; how could I know?) and before I realised it the sky had changed and I had missed that magical transition.
Today, I kept looking towards the East, turning my head on occasion to look at the sky, the scattering of clouds – perhaps Altostratus. First the night sky Yellow, golden slivers and shards of light had begun to pierce the broken clouds. Or was it the broken sky? The colours, the painted sky, seemed to remind me of the textures in Atul Dodiya’s pandemic series and Richter’s Clouds. Both entirely different, but the sky was ever changing. First it was Dodiya, then a couple of laps later, the Richter.
It’s always an exercise in restraint to run easy loops on the track without the angst of interval training breaking the run into segments. But it is always incredible – at least to me – the understanding of time – in effort and in patience – that a 400m track brings to the fore.
Writing about Running 