An ending is often a beginning, which is why school graduations are called commencements. When my marriage, my suburban life in Maryland and my job in Washington ended in 1974, I began running.
I had been working in Washington, D.C., for five years but never knew the city until I started running. I ran along the banks of the Potomac River and the Tidal Basin. I ran through the narrow byways around Dupont Circle. I ran past the embassies on 16th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, and the glass-enclosed law offices on Connecticut Avenue and the strip joints on 14th Street.
Most of all I ran along the overgrown paths beside the small, gurgling stream that gives Rock Creek Park its name. After a rain, the old oaks dripped on me and the soil gushed beneath my sneakers. In the hot summertime of the city that used to be a swamp, I ran in the quiet cool of early morning. In winter I ran in the warm afternoons, sometimes with flakes of snow melting beside me. Once I ran on the Potomac River when it froze all the way from Washington to Virginia.
I ran almost every day, usually for an hour, sometimes two hours. Several times, running on uneven dirt paths, I tripped over rocks or roots, and once I fell onto my hand and broke a finger. I didn’t see a doctor and it never healed properly; even today, when I grip something hard, that finger reminds me of those 40-year-old adventures.
Running day after day, I discovered the city I had never known, a different city from the newspaper and government offices where I had spent my working life, a city of mixed races and a babel of languages, of cheap restaurants and parks that unspooled forever. I discovered, too, a life that was different from the one I had lived and left. Running helped me figure out how to fill the hole that was left when that life evaporated.
After four years, I left Washington and moved on to a very different kind of life in New Mexico, but one thing stayed the same: I kept on running. I never quit.
As a metaphor, running is about as hackneyed as rain. When you see rain in a movie the director might as well hold up a placard, as they did in the old silent films, saying “Tragedy coming.” When a character in a story runs, you know he’s in trouble and is trying to escape.
But in arid places like the Sahara and New Mexico, rain is far from tragic; and many people like me run toward the life they live rather than away from it. I may have started running as an antidote to psychic pain, but I continue it because of the pleasure it brings.
It is pleasure on many levels. One is simply the chemical changes in the body from prolonged aerobic exercise, the same kind of high I get from swimming a mile. But it is more. It is also a chance to space out, lose track of myself, empty my mind and drift in a land equidistant from pleasure and pain, failure and success, a land of surcease. That the pleasure of a long run also requires pain is merely the irony of daily life. That running is not only an opportunity to escape from thinking but a chance to luxuriate in it, to think old problems anew, to plan and propose, is just piling more irony on top of irony. Running isn’t about theory or therapy; it’s a way of living.
Unlike biking, swimming, or a lot of stationary exercises, running requires no equipment more complicated than a pair of good shoes. Wherever you live, there is always a place to run, even if it is sometimes a bit dangerous, as last year I found the narrow, heavily traveled roads of Northern California, without shoulders or pedestrian paths.
Running is meditation in motion. There should be a book called Zen and the Art of Running, except that running is not an art. As long as your heart is stout and your knees strong, you can run. After they are gone, there will always be swimming.
Other people of some note have also discovered running. I just finished reading a slim volume called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by the fine Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Just as he is a better writer than I am, he is also a more serious runner. His marathons put my own few miles to shame. And though I tend to shun competitiveness, in running and writing, he relishes it in both fields, winning numerous prizes for his books and competing in two dozen marathons over a quarter-century. He adds, however, something I fully endorse: In writing and running “the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”
Running, for him and for me, is the perfect counterbalance to the sedentary profession of writing, a way to work out not only the physical but also the intellectual kinks of staring too long into the face of your own words and ideas.
Here are a few of the more interesting things Murakimi has to say about writing and running and living:
• “I’m getting to the age where you really do get only what you pay for.”
• “Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me.”
• “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.”
• “As you age you learn to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.”
• “In my own way, I’ve enjoyed my life so far, even if I can’t say I’ve fully enjoyed it.”
• “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”
• “One of the privileges given to those who’ve avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old.”
On a practical level, I have found that running is an incomparable way to get to know my neighborhood and to keep informed of its minute changes: a house for sale here, a garage built there, a corral transformed into a parking area, new kids on the swings and new flowers in the park. If you walk slowly in front of somebody’s house and stare into their yards and windows, they will suspect you of stalking if not casing the joint. But if you are running, you need no other reason for being there. “Ah it’s that crazy old man again,” they think and let it go. A reporter not just in my professional life but during every day that I live, I need to know what is going on around me, and running is like a cane for a handicapped person: It enables me to do what I must with the least possible fuss.
Many people run because it keeps them healthy, strengthens lungs and heart, tightens muscles and keeps weight down to a reasonable level. Sure, it does all that, but there are easier ways if your only goal is to stay healthy.
For me running is a thread that holds the universe together, in balance, in place. When my wife and I moved into our house in the mountains in 1990, we saw a tall, thin man running every morning on the empty gravel roads of our area. Many of those roads are now paved and no longer empty, but my wife and I continue to live in the same house. A few days ago, I finally decided to stop and chat for a moment with the runner I’d been observing for 24 years. He said his name is Bob and his old body is now “stronger on the outside than on the inside.” He used to run with his wife; but now aging, she walks. He runs alone, but he still runs every day. I hope he can keep at it for a long, long time, and that I can, too.
(Photo by Acid Pix)
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