Running

I spent an embarrassing amount of my childhood running laps around a gym. My elementary school had something called the fifteen-mile-club, where if you ran fifteen miles over the course of a school year you got a medal at an unnecessarily hyped-up ceremony at the end of the year. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I’m bad enough at most sports that most days mindless running forty laps around the gym was a fair tradeoff. There were rumors when the club first started out that if you made it to the fabled seventy-five-mile-club, you got a used Gameboy Color. The system was hopelessly obsolete by the time I made it to that rank in sixth grade, but I was still a little disappointed when I finally I got there and found out that the gym teacher had stopped making up new reward-tiers at the sixty mile club. 

I signed up for cross country in middle school assuming that, as the St. Paul’s Elementary School all-time mile club champion, I’d be top of the team no problem. But it turns out seventy five miles over the course of a year really isn’t that impressive (in contrast, seventy five miles each week is my goal for this summer) so, like most of the important choices that shaped who I am today, signing up for cross country was born out of misinformation and incompetence. 

This semester I read a book for my education class that claimed that affluent children who have the privilege of participating in organized activities learn skills that subtly place them ahead of their working-class peers in the job market. I thought it made a good argument, but it made absolutely no sense in the context of my life. The only organized activity I ever participated in was cross country, and while I sure learned skills (how to navigate Edina, if you sing when you get side pain it goes away provided you don’t run out of breath, if you whisper something in latin to another person in a race they usually get thrown off and fall back), I’m not sure that any of them will give me a boost in my employment search. Still, I’m glad I did it. Some of my strongest memories from my adolescence were spent on a cross country course or a track, pumping my legs as hard as I could in the last stretch of a race. And I’ve always been hooked on that rush of euphoria you get after stumbling over the finish line, when you feel like collapsing to the ground and vomiting but know that the pain in over and you pushed through and accomplished something. 

But I think what I’ve really gained from years of running have come from the smaller moments, not the race or workout that come twice a week at most, but the everyday long runs at conversational paces. Cross country and track are unique among sports in that the majority of the training is social; we the run talking. Usually not about anything particularly important: school work, gossip, an unsurprisingly large amount of talk about running. I’ve spent quite a few long runs listening to extended summaries of movies, books, and TV shows (I’ve had the Dark Tower series, the Leviathan series, and all of Dragonball Z spoiled for me this way, though the last one doesn’t really count since I didn’t  understand a word of it). In my (admittedly biased) experience, cross country and track teams are closer than other sports teams, and I think this is why. If you spend so many miles together, talking just to fill the air, you can’t help but get to know someone.

And you get a real connection with the land running the same routes over and over. In a different class I read about a Native American tribe who could have entire conversations just listing off landmarks, speaking through the stories connected to them. I wouldn’t say that runners have that kind of connection, but maybe something similar. Often when I’m running a route I can remember something different about an earlier time I ran it with each footstep. The first thing I do when I arrive in a new town is go for a run, and afterwards I always feel like I know it better.

I get that same sense of euphoria from the end of a race trudging from the library to my dorm late at night, everything aching from the miles I put on my body that day. Despite the emphasis on speed, running is a slow sport in that everything good you get out of it comes in frustratingly small increments. The personal connections, the memories of the places I've run, it all grows day-by-day in the same imperceptible ways as building strength or endurance. That gradual progress makes the soreness in my legs feel almost pleasant at the end of the day. It’s the same gradual progress that kept me going back in the fifteen-mile-club, chuckling with each lap at the idiots playing basketball, when all I’d have to do is run seventy-four more miles and I’d have a pre-owned Gameboy Color all to myself.