Running for Your Life: When You HAVE to Take a Week Off

Sometimes I’m not running. Say after I blew out my hamstring in February 2011. Or for two days to rest my body, which doth protest, especially as I nudge the fringe of sixty, for days, no weeks, after I take it on the road for its annual punishment, twenty-six miles of running, hard and fast enough so that I manage a sub 9-minute mile pace, never many days am I away from running, until, early in December, a week to ten days were the doctor’s orders, not-running or exercising, my first significant time away since pre-training for the Boston Marathon 2011 left me with the blown hamstring, and for the past two years hence, I’ve done a 60-set of evening pushups and at least three days a week running, so what was I to do?

Funny, how when I read back these notes I’m struck primarily by hubris of numbers – nine-minute mile, 60-set pushups – and place, Boston, when the reality of my running is much less and then more than these details, how to “Geoff Dyer” the results, the outcomes, that while the journey is so seen and, thus, accomplished, that it yields to that one dimensional reportage, why I often find it dull to read non-fiction, just the facts, ma’am, and analysis that is so ordinary and lame in its ordinariness to fail to pass the GD test, What do you feel that is as transporting as a run, the runs I do, in any case, because, especially during that week of not-running, cannot for a moment imagine what it is to be in a group, one in which, say, you put bells on to run, the Jingle Bell Jog was held during my not-running time, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, with me the run is a quiet time, mine own, a form of worship without father, I’m a mile in, that’s nine minutes, thirty outdoor or twenty indoor to follow, those life-total minutes, near-countless now, I find myself in that space of no time, what David Grossman writes in “Falling Out of Time,” http://bit.ly/1gJcs1d, eventually, without apology, I could in rapture see myself enveloped in a hole in the ground, convincing me that inside are those who I’ve sought and are either in Toronto, Owen Sound, Chicago, Croatia, then those dead and gone, but I don’t have the words, they are nearly as alive to me in the solitude of my running than those who I’m with every day, M, K and T. “Geoff Dyer” the results; what are these photos of Victorian-era northern places http://bit.ly/1bfes9D taken by whom, that there is an inner feeling that comes off them, that they are not objects of simple age but rather embued with the spirit of those times and cannot be seen unless you’ve meditated solely on them.

          There is a holy act that takes you, often at great effort to launch from ennui or a general tiredness, out
          for a run on a cold day. Shake it off. Stride. Years ago, it was true. I could be faster. Not now.
          Now. I. Simply. Must. Run. It is what shapes my life. The air I breathe.

          Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race