Running and the Monk

Buddhism, attachment, and the Cascade Crest 100

In the basement of Seattle First Baptist forty people are attending a talk by a pair nuns from the Karuna Buddhist Vihara in California. The city grew up around the old church and now its spire and stained glass are dwarfed by high rises with windows that mirror a small pool-blue sky. My best friend during college, who has now been a monk named Nisabho for ten years, is hosting the talk. He sits to the right of Ayyā Santussikā, the senior of the two visitors; Ayyā Cittānandā, her junior, is a silent presence to her left. The audience is old and young all at once. A man in the middle row with black hair in a bun and a disfigured leg checks his phone. He is thinking about ordaining, he says.

I am not moved by the dharma and have never thought about ordaining, but around the time Nisabho was I began running seriously, and our conversations then were marked by the search for parallels. For both of us the discovery of a daily practice in our early 20s felt like we had been let in on a secret. We would talk about suffering, about enduring hard things, and say that it was important to live in the present. Then Nisabho left for Thailand for the better part of a decade, taking the precepts, staying on the path. We talked on the phone a few times, and saw each other once, in 2015. We became as familiar strangers.

I continued to run. As for most runners it has meant different things to me at different times of my life, though I have always enjoyed competition. Once in a while I take a plunge and prioritize experience over performance by attempting a distance I struggle with. This year that meant entering the Cascade Crest 100 Mile Endurance Run, held annually in the mountains an hour east of Seattle. During a race of its length the most important thing you can do is to perform a sort of vulgar mindfulness. You can focus on eating, or drinking, or lifting your feet higher during rocky descents. But as soon as you think about the miles ahead—as soon as you stray from the now—your problems begin. To finish you must simply accept how things are. You accept that you hurt, and you keep going.

I mostly managed this and finished the race. At Seattle First Baptist I am still bobbing in its wake, my eyes lingering on a potted orchid next to the speakers long enough to betray a deep fatigue. Ayyā Santussikā is answering questions from the audience. She is warm and a little severe, speaking in sentences that blend Buddhist formalism with a midwestern folksiness. “What we have to watch is that attachment,” she says. “That’s just suffering. We don’t want any of that.” I had been unusually receptive to the meditation session at the start of the service, but I feel an old secular irritation spike at the idea of life without bonds. Then the monastics lead the congregation in chanting sadhus, words of praise. I hear Nisabho bend his voice the way he used to when he would play guitar and sing, and I relax a little.

The weather for the race was fine: clear and almost hot during the day, with blurred stars and enough chill at night to keep you moving through it. In any truly long run there are periods when you feel better and periods when you feel worse. It’s the fact that the bad periods eventually end that gives the sport its narrative power and tempt you to reach for metaphors it doesn’t always deserve. My own low patch was was two hours of a debilitating sleepiness not long after midnight. When I snapped out of it the startling cold of Mineral Creek was flooding my shoes, and I realized that there was hot soup and coffee waiting for me on the other side.

In the carpeted basement of the church Ayyā Santussikā is saying that the goal is to let feelings roll off you like drops of water on a lotus blossom. The service ends soon after and Nisabho and I walk to the north end of Cal Anderson Park to sit and talk. I am surprised by how quickly we get to around to the old Buddhist saw of impermanence and the changes in our relationship. “We had a really beautiful friendship”, he says, his use of the past tense stinging a bit. Someone out of sight is yelling and I can smell marijuana smoke. “I had a lot of anger when you left,” I say. “But it wouldn’t have been so hard if I didn’t really get it.” For a moment it looks like he is blinking back tears. Then he lightens the mood with a joke, the way he used to, and tries to convince me to move back to the Northwest.

The last three miles of Cascade Crest are on asphalt. You skirt the airstrip, cross the highway, and run back through town to the fire station where you began. When it’s over they give you a sweatshirt, a belt buckle, and a chair to sit in. What you take away from it beyond that is up to you. I’ve found that discomfort peaks a few hours after finishing, when the gift of stillness begins to wear off. In the past this has been hard for me: how do you manage pain when there is no longer something to push through? This time I find a creek, flush with snowmelt, and soak my legs. Water rolls off them too, of course. But the valuable thing is the immersion.

When it’s time to leave I drop Nisabho off on 3rd Street. Nursing a foot injury, he crutches his way towards the ferry in saffron robes. I merge onto I-5 heading north, on my way to see another friend, to begin the long trip back to a very different life. Behind me Rainier hangs in the sky like a dream, a poem someone else has written. “We might think that if we get far enough down the path, we don’t feel these things,” Ayyā Santussikā had said earlier. “I don’t think that’s the way it works.”