On Running

I used to run a lot as a teenager, but it became one of the many things I stopped doing in university. I could put the blame on a lack of time or on the stress of adjusting to somewhere new, but truth be told, I spent plenty of time looking at screens and felt at home much more quickly than I thought I would. So I don’t really know how or why the change occurred so abruptly. After all, you’d think that a person would feel a considerable physical and mental difference between jogging every day to being completely sedentary, but I suppose that moving away meant categorizing activities into a ‘things I don’t do anymore’ box, and then storing that box away somewhere dusty.

It’s quite unfortunate, of course, because I absolutely adore running. I was only able to remember this old love because we reconnected over the summer. At first it was painful; my heart literally hurt. It felt like my arteries were rusty pipes trying to pump a sudden influx of water after years of disuse. The disconcerting taste of copper kept climbing up my trachea and the pits of my stomach became so knotted I was sure I was going to vomit. It was gross. I was wheezing. When I was ready to keel over, I looked at my watch: only ten minutes had passed since I started my run.

The tragedy! I couldn’t believe it. My fifteen-year-old self would’ve shook her head in disappointment, and fifteen-year-old-me didn’t exactly expect much from future-me anyway. What’s a girl to do.

After getting home from a brief walk of shame (in neglected running shoes instead of high heels, but still), I got the strange urge to experience all that again, even though most of my leg muscles felt like jelly. After going out to run again, I became clear-headed for the first time in a long time. Usually I’m scatterbrained and can never finish a thought before it disperses into fractals. Yet a strange thing occurs while running: your mind becomes lucid. Sharp. Paradoxically, that only occurs when you think of nothing at all, except for breathing.

I’m not exactly the fastest or the fittest, but I enjoy running precisely for this feeling. I’m sure that everyone experiences noise and chatter in their heads, but running offers a reprieve from that. Thoughts become streamlined, and you exist totally in your body, in the present – not in some far-off daydream, imagining conversations or encounters that’ll never occur, or in the future, overthinking all the ways a certain path could diverge. Running’s an activity that screws your head back onto your shoulders after it’s been bobbing around disembodied in the clouds for a while. Your breath, your pace, and your heartbeat all synchronize to become a metronome, and for that moment, everything’s put in order.

View from the route in Charlevoix. Other pictures from Charlevoix here.