run it down

By my best estimate, I have circumnavigated the globe on foot 2.95 times to date. Let’s imagine that’s starting in, say, San Francisco, and heading out all the way to New york City, continuing straight on across the Atlantic, picking up in France and heading east, through all of Europe and Asia, tipping back into the ocean at Japan and heading across the Pacific and then doing it twice more, stopping just short that third time about a hundred miles offshore.

I started running one day when I was 14 years old. It was hot, a sultry southern California summer day. I had been left home like always with a little list of chores and I wasn’t working at my bakery job that day. Early teenage depression hung around the sickening, quiet edges of the day. I watered the lawn with a little worm of water, hot from the sun. I ate bowls of cereal and watched reruns and soap operas. I could feel a pit of blank grayness in my gut. Jesse, my older brother, was a cross-country running star. I was the pathetic kid in PE class who could barely finish a lap.

Somehow that day it struck me to put on shoes and I left and walked up the big hill near our house, about a mile, and then I jogged back home. I had never jogged somewhere intentionally and unforced in my life. I felt different when I got back. I had accomplished something. I felt proud of myself. I did it the next day, and the next. Jesse noticed and invited me to train with him; took me on a run. Jesse never did anything but ignore me so to have him welcome me into a part of his life felt very special. He told me I had to get running shoes because he said I was going to get injured. He also reprimanded me when he saw me putting on makeup before a run. He said, “this is not a vain sport”. It forever became the one thing I do without any makeup and never any attempt at anything beyond functionality. It was oddly profound, at the age of 14, to have a part of my life that was only about the function of my body and nothing to do with its appearance.

I fell into a routine. Every other day I would run a three-mile hilly route. There was a particular tree with a crooked top that I would salute every time I passed it. I ran in the early dawn. My salute meant, “I am showing up for myself, again, and there you are, Tree, hello.” I started to feel like an athlete. If I was late for something, I could run the whole distance to get somewhere. I was strong; so much stronger than before. I started to live in my body instead of just in my head. My route took me past the cross-country coach’s house. She was a jovial redheaded lesbian. She would see me and call out how I needed to join the team. I had no interest in joining a team. This was simply my thing, and I had no need for it to be competitive or to involve other people. But in my senior year in high school, I did join the team; I’m guessing because it struck me a person should do a team sport once in their life. And we started to run longer distances, and every day. My friend Gabrielle, with whom I had always been competitive academically, ran marathons. And by god if she could run marathons so could I so I started to train for the LA marathon in April of my senior year. Three mile runs turned into six miles turned into ten turned into twenty and ultimately the full 26.2. I remember my first run over 20 miles. My arm got sort of frozen somehow, and I couldn’t really move it. Some kind of limb stiffness lactic acid dehydration thing. I kept going; it is a sort of altered state that allows a person to just keep going.

I got into the routine of running every day. I clearly remember the day I realized what that meant. I had a biology assignment I hadn’t finished and I realized it at the time I would normally have to take my run. I decided I’d forego the run and instead do the assignment. The rest of the day, I was itchy, anxious, felt “off”, unsettled, vaguely nauseous. From that day to the present, a total of over ten thousand days, I have missed probably fewer than ten days of running. Including two pregnancies and a couple surgeries, multiple accidents and broken bones and foreign travel and all kinds of illness.

Running is a compulsion, an exercise, an identity, a salvation, a tyrant. Best friend and jailer. I cannot not do it. If I leave on a plane at 5 am I will get up at 2 and run first. I have run in weather 40 below when it struck me, suddenly, a couple miles from home in Wyoming where I was living, that I in fact might die before getting back. In San Salvador, I ran through the neighborhoods, realizing that almost every other business was a funeral parlor, so murderous were the streets. When I stayed in the hotel locked up against criminal gangs in Tegucigalpa I ran up and down the stairs for an hour before the bus left. Driving through Mexico for four days nonstop on a bus I used our smoke breaks and ran, barely avoiding being left behind. Every day of pregnancy I jogged until I transitioned, enormous, to an elliptical machine. The day of my scheduled cesarean section with Violet I went at four am to the gym, and the ladies there asked when I was due, and I answered, “in an hour!”. When my water broke with Simon I went first to the gym and then to the hospital, dribbling amniotic fluid onto the pedals of the exercise equipment.

I have had ecstatic runs: sunrises over the Capitol building in DC or the Vatican in Rome; oh god so many exquisite, hidden, surprising places. I always know the lay of the land as well as any local because I have traversed forty of its miles on foot within the first three days of arrival. I can tell you where the pharmacy is, the good tacos, the ferry dock, the restaurant we read about in the travel guide, the secret path to the top of the hill overlooking the beach, the back route to the bus station, the underground tunnel by the Seine that pops up by the Rodin statue, the road to the cemetery where your grandfather is buried.

I have had terrible runs. Hot, sick, excruciating, shitting myself. Anxiety like a vise and depression like a fucking hammer. Ruminating thoughts, desperate and enraged. Terrified and despairing. Hungover, nauseous, close to passing out. It has hurt relationships; times when I have chosen it over being with others in vulnerable moments; times leaving the house when kids were crying or a partner looked at me in disbelief.

I know running as well as anyone on the planet. I’ve never won a race; I’ve never been anything close to competitive or had good form. But I know this one thing with the deep intimacy of doing the same thing every single day of one’s life. Every day it is different, every day it is the same. I think things on my runs. Thoughts and feelings have exactly one hour to play themselves out, up and down the steep hills of my neighborhood. Sometimes clarity comes like David hitting Goliath “pop” right in the temple. My mind sorts and jostles. My heart cleans up my blood like a kind of dialysis; I start out feeling fuzzy and a kind of dirty; come back feeling like a whole crowd of Downton Abbey scullery maids went through my bloodstream and flung open the curtains and dusted the throw pillows of my whole body.

There is nothing that is more fully mine than this one ritualized behavior. I am formed and grown around it like a vine on a trellis; I have no sense of self without it. God is present to me in the space of the solitary run and in the promise of yet another one tomorrow, and the next day, and the next; unceasing, until some inevitable end.