I Run

I’ve never been one for directions. In the car I like to use my “intuition” as navigation — something that has led to many roadside stops, begrudgingly hauling out a map from the glove compartment. If I’m putting together a piece of furniture, I have little patience for the written instructions — I just want to see how the pieces fit together. Grocery shopping: I’ll wander the aisle for an hour in search of something rather than inquire at the counter.

Maybe this isn’t the best practice. It certainly isn’t the most practical. There’s more to this behavior than meets the eye, though — and at its core, it’s that you can make a staggering amount happen with some self-reliance and sheer will. In a quest to create something remarkable, all you need are a few tools at your disposal. A pen and a piece of paper to write, say, or shoes and an open road for running. What you then do with these tools is solely up to you. At its essence, it’s a true test of who we are as humans: how do you use what you have?

I started running when I was 17, during the spring of my junior year in high school. Junior year itself was rough: I was constantly harangued by the feeling of not being “good” at anything, or “special,” at an age when being just like everybody else is possibly the worst thing alive. I excelled in English class but discounted that; “everyone” was good at English, I remember thinking to myself morosely. I was on the swim team, but my main accomplishment in the pool was completing a lap of backstroke without gagging on water. I wanted to have something that was mine, to create something and be good at that.

The idea of running came after school one day. To be exact, I was at home sitting on the kitchen counter dunking oreos into milk. The swim season was over, and I wasn’t doing much after school those days besides...eating oreos and reading. The genius idea that I should get back into shape popped into my head. And running was the easiest way. I had shoes; I could run from, and then back to, my house. I didn’t need to go to a gym, or have fancy equipment, or drive anywhere. I could just go.

The going went slowly, initially. Running is a cruel beast to tame. That first week or so I ran about a mile — maybe ¾ of a mile — every day, on old beat up running shoes from 6th grade, huffing the entire way and ending red-faced and defeated. “This is just like running the mile in PE,” I remember thinking. “Humiliating and pointless.” The only difference between the two was I wasn’t running in cotton green shorts and a shirt that had my name written on it in Sharpie. Small victories.

I’m not really sure why, but I stuck with it. Eventually I expanded my route to a 2 mile loop that I could complete without feeling miserable. And one day, I ran the 2 mile loop and felt...nothing, really. The breeze felt like cloth I was tearing into and leaving behind, something to encounter and promptly forget. I could barely feel my feet hit the ground. It was the first experience I’ve ever had of my body as a pure machine. I did one loop, then two. Then three. I stopped at 4, but only because it was getting dark. I could have kept going forever. The realization that I had run 8 miles for the first time without stopping only dawned on me as I arrived back at my house. I half-expected someone to greet me at the door with a prize.

From then on, I was hooked. I ran at least 6 or 8 miles every day. I had finally found my “thing.” I was good at it, and I wanted more. I started thinking about getting faster. How to build myself so that I could be better. Thinking about how I could perfect my art — not art that anyone was able to hold, or examine, or display in their living room, but the feelings of sheer power and dominance. A brief sensation of immortality, created from almost nothing at all.

Sometime during my senior year of college cross-country, I came across this quote by distance runner Joan Nesbit: “I see myself as an artist. Running is the way I express my talent. I wish I could paint or write music, but running is what I do and I feel great joy from it.”

We’re all artists. I picture us as a montage, running on plains and busy roads, through forests and trails, our feet as paintbrushes or quills, dipping and gliding over the landscape, creating our different masterpieces; manifesting direction, manifesting whatever we want, from sheer will.