It’s a fair question. In May 2015, in Prospect Park,
Brooklyn.
In February, not so much.
Did I miss the memo? Perhaps, as my friend Marty Holski says, running is like skiing – or baseball, or hockey, or you name it, in terms of sports. It has a season. If Prospect Park is any guide, that season roughly corresponds with professional baseball; in a good one, you’re out there 162 times, as in the count of regular season games. That’s plenty, isn’t it? One hundred and sixty-two runs? Then it’s cold, and the runners are gone. Where, is anybody’s guess.
Now, though, everybody is running. Mothers and sons.
Hipsters and creatives. Afghanistan vets and Vietnam vets. Dog owners and their
dogs. They lope, they sprint, they shuffle along, alone, and in groups. You’d
think every sunny Sunday in Prospect Park was a running of the New York Marathon,
without the sideline crowds and festive mood. But in the park, so many faces
read pain and discomfort, as if the strangers, because they are strangers
to me, an all-year runner in these parts for the past twenty-three years, are
here, few that show the simple pleasures of the outdoor sights, the leafing
trees, the birdsong, from magpie to mockingbird to robin and redwing blackbird,
and flicker, and the other day in the far, far treetops, an oriole.
I feel a stranger in the company of these runners in the
park. Unless it is cold and wet, a storm coming on, that keep most of them at
home, I don’t join them. Instead, I go to the gym. Run hard on the treadmill
and meditate on this. Is Everybody Running? Yes. And each to his or her own beat.
Next: Running for Your Life: Next Race!
