Eyes up...

When I was working at a horse farm for a  year (don't ask), I learned one thing about riding horses. Only one thing. You have to look where you want them to go. I have no idea why this works, but it works. The rider is sitting on the back of the horse, and they train their eyes on an object, and somehow the horse (who clearly must have eyes in the back of his head) knows where it is to go. Of course, there are some other physical things involved with getting the horse to go where you want it to go, but if I heard my equine-oriented friends say it once, I heard them say it a thousand times, "Eyes up! Look where you want him to go."

So I ran eyes up today. 11.51 miles. 2:12.45. And I'm a jackass for not running an extra .11 because that would have put my overall mileage at 70 for the month of January. But that's beside the point. (I'm running 3 on Tuesday, the 31st, that will put me over the edge). The point is that I ran eyes up today.

I tend to look down when I run. I'm guessing that if you saw me moving alongside the road, you might even call me a jogger, although you would likely have no idea how just how offensive that term is to me. I don't have a beautiful stride. My knees don't come up. My heels don't kick back and up. My shoulders aren't back. My arms don't swing the way they probably should. I don't look like any sort of an animal that you'd associated with running. When I run, and I don't see my reflection in the glass or my shadow on the ground, I feel perfect. I feel fast and light and amazing. But if I look at my reflection, I see all the imperfections (and can almost forgive someone for thinking I'm out for a "jog" since most of the world doesn't understand that running is as much a mentality as it is a physical event).

But today, I left the house and decided to look up. I kept my eyes on the horizon for the entire run. One  drawback to this. I like to give cars the ole three-finger, "What's up?" wave when I'm running. I do this largely to get them to make eye contact with me in the hopes that if they make eye contact with me, they won't hit me. It usually works. But running eyes up meant that I couldn't look down at every car that passed.

A positive? It meant that I wasn't looking down to see my shadow so that my uber-critical inner voice could harass me for my running form. I don't know. I'm thinking that if I want to correct my form, I need to start by making some small changes. I strongly doubt I'm ever going to run Kenyan (and I mean that in the most respectful, "Man, if anyone ever told me that I run Kenyan, it would be better than someone telling me that I look like a supermodel" kind of a way. But I did notice when I ran with my eyes up that it kept me much more oriented on where I was heading than dwelling on every ache and pain I was having in that moment.

Maybe the horses know something I don't.