I don’t remember when this feeling came over me, but I noticed something was missing from my life. As a lifelong drummer (who currently does not own drums), I assumed what I needed was music. Or writing, and the hopeful accolades that can come from it. But even after writing new poems and playing drums in a garage on a hilltop neighborhood of Cincinnati, there was an absence that was still noticeable.
“Maybe you should start running again,” she said. This was a helpful note, especially in the aftermath of being governmentally unemployed. But I felt resistance. Or just the overwhelming curiosity as to why?
My relationship with running over the course of the last twelve years has been distant, only falling into it as a necessity of good health. During the Covid-19 Pandemic, in 2020, I ran for the first time since quitting my college cross country and track team seven years prior, and I remember liking it. The streets of East Los Angeles were empty still, and we lived in a hilly neighborhood. Something about that combination reminded me of when I first started running. But my body was not the same.
We moved to Hollywood and I stopped running. A new neighborhood, without hills, and more traffic and streetlights, made running seem impossible. It was almost three years before I ran again. Once I figured out a route in our residential yet chaotic Hollywood neighborhood that felt safe and allowed me to run without too much stop-and-go, we were moving again. This time to Joshua Tree, California in the High Desert. Out of fear of twisting an ankle, or suffering from potentially lethal dehydration, I never ran a step while we lived there.
Last summer, after we bought our first house, I started running the country roads of Eastern Illinois. It was simple: I wanted to learn the lay of the land that was our new home. I kept at it for a few weeks, but when the weather changed, and I was hired to work in an office a half hour commute from home, I lost touch with this practice. I couldn’t get past why?
Ten days ago, I was overwhelmed with the desire to read. I am embarrassed to say that reading has never held a substantial part of my life, at least in recent memory. I made a joke that the last book I read, I didn’t finish.
“Why not?”
“Because I got a job.”
Holding both, let alone running too, was not something I understood how to manage. So without a job, and a noticeable absence in my life, I decided to pick up where I left off and finish the last book I ever started: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I will speak more on that experience later…
What is important is I finished it. I can recall many titles of books I have started and not finished and for that I can only blame myself. But finishing a book, and maybe in particular, this book, changed something in me. I knew that If I wanted to write, I had to read. It was no longer advice from someone older and wiser and more academically impressive. It was a truth. A truth I understood in my bones.
I grew up in a family of “academics” which I put in quotes for a number of reasons. My father went to medical school. My mother graduated high school early. I grew up saying she was a nurse, but the truth was she stopped doing that almost five years before I was born. I never knew her to have a job, which did not stop her from belittling me and my siblings for various inadequacies she found in our jobs, personalities, attitudes, or our studies.
I was told I was not good at reading, and even further, that I couldn’t read. So it was no surprise to me that I just stopped reading. In high school, I shied away from advanced classes and drama, thinking I had to meet a certain standard of reading comprehension that I was told I was not capable of. In college, I fell behind in almost every class. Thankfully, my stubbornness came through and I spent most of my time enrolled in English classes, theater, and film studies. All places that required I read or, at the very least, understand what I was reading.
When I finished Motorcycle Maintenance, I already had a book queued up: Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I do not know how I came across this book, but something, or some being, required that I buy it and read it as soon as possible.
“If I am going to start running again, I am going to read this first,” I thought.
The same day I closed the book on Zen, I opened Murakami’s meditation on running, writing, and aging. Four days later, a few minutes before midnight, I finished it. And today, I woke up and ran two miles for the first time since last September. To say that this book changed me is an understatement. It inspired me wholly; it made me want to write, to read, breathe, and listen to my record collection. It made me want to move to Japan, or New York, or Hawaii, if only for a season. It made me want to travel roads I never knew existed and drink espresso on the Mediterranean. This memoir awakened something in me. It made me want to cry. But above all else, it made me want to run.
Before I set out this morning to run my planned two miles, I made a decision: I am going to run a marathon. I remember training for cross country in high school and college, running in the early morning all summer long, then working days managing the snack bar of the local private swim club. I was a swim coach, too, for the same club. I’d run from 6:30 to about eight in the morning, then make my way to the pool to teach kids thirteen and younger how to do flip-turns and relay starts. By eleven, I’d open up the snack bar and grill burgers for moms, dads, babysitters, teens, and lifeguards alike.
I remember being asked what I was training for, since local moms and dads saw me running on their way to work, then grilling burgers at the pool when they came to join their kids.
Proudly, I’d say cross country.
“Not a marathon?”
This response bothered me then. It wasn’t that I understood these two versions of running to be different, but the way he said it left me unnerved. As if training for a singular event was to be viewed as better or higher than that of a year-round, sustained season. Anybody can run a marathon, I thought.
At eighteen, I remember thinking I would never run a marathon. Years ago, I remember saying I had no interest. Even when my former teammates and friends started to get back into it, started to run faster times, qualify for bigger races, I held my ground. But right now? It’s as if I had been wandering around in the darkness of a cave of my own carving, searching for the tips of my toes. And someone (in this case, Murakami) turned on the lights.
And then I was confronted with another truth: it was always with me. I needed to rediscover running on my own. And in doing so, rediscover myself. I am one day into this journey, so it is impossible to know what I will find in the back roads and trails of my new home, but today, I found this.
These bones are what remains of a deer that probably died last September, hit by a car, and tossed far from the road in the high native grasses, only to be revealed after a new path was mowed, crushing the skull and ribs of what must have been a beautiful mother deer in the flesh. I picked up the jaw bone, and these two bones of what is probably the hind legs, to remember what it means to be alive, what it means to run, and what it means to be a part, albeit small, of this natural world.
I am excited. I am going to run tomorrow. And I am going to start a new book.
I wonder what I will find next.
-Brian
