Explorations

Few people will fully understand the understated importance of this post’s title. I am indeed a runner. I have been since as long as I can remember. Growing up, my Mother was almost always training for a road race or marathon, and instead of sticking me at home she let me ride my bike along side her. These bike ride/runs with my Mom still stand poignantly in my childhood memories; they were and are remarkably formative and critical to who I am.  Once I was old enough I became apart of the youth track program, and then elementary and middle school until I started to run in high school. Up until high school I was a sprinter, I liked the short distances and strict form it required. As I entered my freshman year I ran on the Cross Country team. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. In addition to transforming into a distance runner, I learned so many valuable lessons and pushed myself to a very new place.

I would say it was a pretty big deal. And one that I can’t fully describe. Running and being a runner has been such a big part of my life, that I wrote my college essay on the topic. That’s half of what inspired this post: I found my college essay today, tucked away in lost files and it explains this feeling far better than this post could:

The Importance of the Sweet Betweens

It’s 6:00am and the night clouds are already beginning to burn off as I lace up my Asics and grab my jacket. This Saturday begins like most every other, with a run. It’s the type of morning where I dread my run, the regrets of three ice cream sandwiches sit heavy in my stomach and my calves are laden with pain from yesterday’s hill workout. But I push past my own excuses and set out of the hilly, narrow road ahead of me: Rattlesnake Hill Road.

My house shrinks with each stride, and my calves slowly loosen. I pass the pond and water fall, the housing construction and the remnants of the sewer installment. In the distance I hear screeching birds, allowing me to recognize that the world is waking up. With the first few miles behind me now, my breathing becomes easier. In the middle of my run, past the miles of loosening up, beyond the doubts and self-recriminations over yesterday’s ice cream sandwiches; I can think. I can really think. Heavy breathing and  the tenderness in my knees still a good four miles out, the opportunity allots me plenty of time to think. I call these miles ‘the sweet betweens’; and sweet they are. My mind begins to wander and soon the dialogues begin; with myself, my parents, friends, teachers, authors of my favorite books and poets.  My thoughts catch up with me, refusing to lose step-what I owe to myself, to others, my broken resolutions and what really matters to me. I try to lose them on the uphill, but they are far stronger than I am.  Anyplace else I would have given the back side of my hand to such idle musings, but out here they are as inescapable as the yellow dash that divides this narrow road.

The driveway ahead with the peach mailbox offers me a chance to turn around and head home. I decline. The mailbox just steps before me, presenting itself as a compromise, a place to say ‘far enough’. But I’ve learned over the years to use these seductions to my advantage. I tell myself that I’ll run to the mailbox and then decide whether or not to turn around, knowing full well that I will draw sustenance from reaching it and then refusing it’s invitation. The midcourse of my run is not unlike the course of my career and my life at large, where I’m tempted to accept the distance already won.

Eventually I set my eyes on a green house a half mile or so ahead, there a dog comes charging out, offering me the perfect chance to cross the road. I begin the wide arc of a return and head back to the pond and waterfall and the housing construction. From the opposite side of the road, even a road so narrow as this everything looks different, transformed by having become a part of my past. The sweet betweens have taught me more about myself than any other event in my life. It’s a lesson I learn every time I run. And at 18 I realize how lucky I am, blessed really to be on this road, even knowing that where the down hills once welcomed me, the up hills now rise in their stead.

Running has provided a remarkably important outlet for me. Yesterday, I sweated it out for a good 45 minutes to Cher and Mika and Say Anything and Eminem.  Everything just melted away: stresses, midterms, shows, meetings, homework, bad grades, people… they all to a backseat to a new found clarity. Looking back on this essay, written some years ago now, there is still one very true statement: It’s a lesson I learn every time I run.  This undefinable, near unknown lesson that resonates with me each run contains a clarity, or illusion or clarity that makes everything else seem so simple and organic.