Honest Yet Respectful Dialogue

Looking back, I marvel at the timing. About three years ago someone moved into our neighborhood from Hamburg—a Hamburger, I think is the correct term—and introduced me to what was to become the single most sustaining spiritual practice during the numerous challenges life has visited on us since then.

Our new friend liked running. One misty October morning without fully realizing what I was doing, I accepted his invitation to join him for a loop around the village. That first morning I struggled mightily to complete one kilometer. With little running experience, I wore khaki cargo pants and boat shoes, my gait similar to that of the lovechild from an ibex and a Percheron. But for some reason I understood that I had happened onto something important, that a kind of lifeline had been thrown to me, and week after week I came back for more. In the words of Forrest Gump, from then on if I was ever going somewhere, I was runnin-g.

Now, 3 years and as many pairs of runners later, I still have to shave off 2 minutes to achieve the gold-standard 20 minutes in our local 5k park run, but I have made satisfying progress nonetheless. (And yes that was a humble brag.) I have experienced runner’s highs that must have been every bit as exotic and transcendent as the high from marijuana, or from flying a plane over the San Francisco Bay at sunrise. The last 2 miles of an hour-long run where you are totally warmed up and running as fast as the ground allows you. . .truly, running has the best cost-benefit ratio of any activities known to featherless bipeds.

And really all you need is a functioning human body, although good running shoes and a little determination are also helpful. Indeed, the experience in general has put me in touch with my body ; one thinks differently about one’s hamstring muscles when running than when watching Netflix.

Actually, running puts you in touch with a lot of things. I read somewhere—Wendell Berry maybe, but I don’t want to name drop—that riding in cars alienates us from our physical surroundings. It’s true that while running I feel in touch with my hunter-gatherer ancestors and with Tony, the black quarter horse that pulled our buggy when I was growing up in an Amish community in Iowa. For me, running provides the clarity that can come only when a creature’s feet makes repeated and sustained contact with terra firma.

While running I see the lay of the land—an individual terra cotta planter, a gilet-clad pensioner in his flower garden, the full-bosomed jackdaw on a fencepost—and feel connected with our terrestrial ball again. I may have all but lost contact with my brother who lives six time zones away in rural Missouri, but when I run I realize my brother and I are both standing on earth whose molecules are intricately and instantaneously connected and I am somehow comforted.

Also, and this may sound a little Marxist, but running is refreshingly uncommodifiable. How can you monetize amateur running? It is the ultimate protest against consumerism. No crass advertisements scream out soul-destroying messages about running being ‘UP TO 70% OFF THIS WEEK!’

Also, I would like to shyly point out that becoming a runner is a momentous achievement. And yet it doesn’t end up as an important part of most CVs, though it would probably be worth employers’ while to ask. It is hard to imagine someone who is lazy or irresponsible in the workplace who also runs.

Finally, if you have read this post and it pushes you to take up running, my advice is that you observe the Rule of 3 three’s: run at least 3 kilometers, at least 3 times a week, for 3 months. See if it’s for you. If it’s not for you, you can always learn origami or bonsai or become a musher for the Iditarod, and if by happy chance it is for you I predict you will run as long as your hamstrings allow it.