The source material for this essay reached for something that is not mine to reach for. This is what I am doing instead, and why.
The draft this essay replaces was built on hózhó, a Diné concept usually rendered into English as beauty, harmony or right relationship, and it was going to offer it as a frame for how to hold your training.
I am not going to do that, and the reason is worth setting out rather than quietly skipping.
Hózhó is not a mood or an outlook. It is central to Diné religious life and is embedded in ceremony — the Blessingway among them — conducted by people with standing to conduct it, within a whole cosmology. Gary Witherspoon’s scholarship on the concept is substantial and the Diné scholars writing on it are more substantial still. Lifting a sacred term out of that and offering it to a general readership as a way of thinking about their running is precisely the operation that Native nations have objected to, formally and for decades.
The fact that it would make a lovely essay is not a reason. It is closer to the opposite of one.
So: the word exists, it is Diné, it means considerably more than any English rendering carries, and if it interests you the thing to do is read Diné writers rather than me.
Underneath the borrowed frame there was a real observation, and it survives without it.
Most runners are, in a low-grade way, at war. At war with the body, which is treated as equipment that keeps failing. At war with the conditions, which are an obstacle rather than the weather. At war with the clock. At war with the version of themselves who did not go out yesterday.
The adversarial stance is so normal it is invisible, and it has a cost: it makes everything a contest, including things that are not contests, and it burns attention on a fight nobody is having with you.
The alternative is not softness. It is noticing that the hill is not opposing you, that the wind is not personal, and that the body reporting fatigue is giving you information rather than letting you down.
Not softness. Noticing that the hill is not opposing you.
Sometimes the relationship really is adversarial and should be.
A body with an injury that needs managing is not a partner to be in harmony with; it is a situation requiring decisions, some of them unwelcome. Illness is not a relationship. And there are conditions — heat that will hurt you, ice, traffic — where the correct stance is wariness rather than acceptance.
There is also a version of this that becomes passivity: the person who has made peace with everything and no longer pushes at anything. Non-adversarial is not the same as non-demanding, and the good version still asks a great deal.
The distinction I use: fight the things that are actually opposing you, which is a much shorter list than the one most people are working from.
Note — not everything is a partner
An injury requiring decisions, heat that will hurt you, traffic. And a person who has made peace with everything has stopped pushing at anything. The list of things actually opposing you is much shorter than the one most people work from — but it is not empty.
Mostly noticing, since the stance is invisible from inside.
This series discusses running practices belonging to specific Indigenous nations of the Americas. Where a practice belongs to a named people, it is named; where a source is an Indigenous author, runner or organization speaking publicly about their own tradition, that is said. Ceremonial and religious specifics that those nations have not made public are not discussed here and are not the author’s to convert into technique. General claims about running physiology and psychology are cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.
This essay declines to build a practice out of hózhó, which is central to Diné ceremonial life and is not mine to convert into a training frame, however well it would have worked.
What is mine to say: most runners are at war with the body, the conditions and the clock, the stance is invisible from inside, and the list of things actually opposing you is much shorter than the one you are working from.