Nada suele ser más difícil que no fingir comprender.

Nicolas Gomez Davila

Balance is attained, kept, lost, regained. If there’s no struggle then you’re probably fooling yourself: you’re not balancing, you’ve missed the point. 

Running is about balance. It’s not an explicit balance like you’d need to walk a tightrope. Eight kilometers pass easily because I’m not paying attention. My mind is wound up. Once in a while I remember Kabat-Zinn, a voice imprinted in memory: focus on the breath, back to the breath, register your mind has strayed; note where it is, focus on the breath. 

A bit of tiredness kicks in, the weight of focus changes. The mind focuses on resistance. The resistance is in the activity now. The thoughts that seemed so important unravel as trivial pursuits.

Running mid-week inverts the normal pattern. The normal pattern is the pattern on days when you’re relaxed from the start. It begins with focus and attention and ends in conscious distraction. In contrast, the mid-week pattern begins with distraction and ends with focus as the body re-emerges.

The goals are different. If you begin in a relaxed state you’re focused on the activity itself. When the activity becomes ‘too much’ you need goals to address the bits of physical discomfort.

The remedial pattern goes the other way:  the discomfort is what you aim for to reset disordered attachments.

Have you not heard of the young fellow from Shouling who tried to copy the gait of the people of Handan, and who not only tried in vain, but at the end did not even know how to walk the way he had originally? He had to go home on all fours. Be off or else you’ll forget what you used to know how to do and will lose your livelihood.

http://www.eastasianhistory.org/sites/default/files/article-content/09/EAH09_02.pdf

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