running

For the first time in nearly ten years, I took a break from running. And for a time I didn’t miss it. I began to look at runners differently. They seemed not just incapable of slowing down, but incapable of appreciating. Runners seemed focused on pace, time, and form, to the exclusion of the life and landscape existing around them. At some point, the goals of a runner started to seem shallow and self-centered.

As someone forced to walk instead of run because of an injury, I grew critical of runners. It was easy to see how much runners were missing. How little they actually absorbed of the world, even when it was pressing in all around them. While I still believe all of these things to be true, I also know that I was jealous and maybe a little angry. What I really felt was left behind.

On Saturday, I ran a short race, but I ran it differently than before. Instead of weaving through the crowds, playing my own version of Human Tetris, I tried to keep steady. Instead of tagging people ahead of me--the man with the tattooed shoulder, the girl with the tri-colored tank and the red-hair —I let them go. And instead of watching the clock at every mile, I tried to ignore it. I was simply running to finish, and hoping not to stop.

It was hard, much harder than I thought it would be for a lot of reasons. But looking back, even an hour or a day, you forget so quickly just how hard any race is. The feeling that I might not make it weighed on me, on my legs, my eyelids, my lungs and my heart. That feeling of defeat and shame is indescribable, hateful, soul-crushing. And I remembered it from another race, where I'd the fastest possible time I could have run, only to find myself a mile off course in the middle of the night and faced with a hill whose slope made me want to laugh, cry, evaporate on the spot. I felt that very same feeling in this race, a much easier race. But somehow, both times, I did finish and I didn’t stop.

Now that I am healed, or healing rather, I look forward to those runs that are solely mechanical, where the outside world doesn't matter. Nothing matters, but the feel of your arms and legs slicing the air and thrusting you forward. Where pushing yourself until your heart is bursting is a good feeling, something to strive for. And while I want all of that, the independence, the exhilaration, the letting go of control, every so often I will remember this break. I will remember that sometimes I'll need to take a breath, to slow down, and to see what else I’ve been missing.