Last December, after resigning a faculty position in Iowa and moving to Pennsylvania with my family, I began calling myself an independent writer. I didn’t really know anything about pitching editors, so for the first two months I did the only thing I knew to do: submit my work to literary journals. But most of those magazines won’t get back to you for months at a stretch, sometimes for nearly a year. It’s a lonely business, and this Substack newsletter was born out of that void.
Happily, the rights revert back to the author after publication in most literary mags. And some are beginning to offer non-exclusive publication agreements, which is why I’m able to share today’s essay with you just a few weeks after it first appeared, in slightly different form, in The Los Angeles Review.
As you’ll see, running has been an important ritual for me more than twenty years. It’s something that anchors me wherever I go. Just as gardening helps me feel that I’m consciously making a place my home, running has been one way that I’ve tried to map myself onto Pennsylvania. Running routes become part of my muscle memory. Sometimes that’s how I fight insomnia, imagining a favorite out-and-back from start to finish until my thoughts quiet down.
But there’s much more to it than that, as you’ll see if you read on. I should say that this essay includes some discussion of mental illness and suicidal ideation, so reader discretion is advised. If you are a runner or if you have a personal practice or ceremony that anchors you in a similar way, I’d love to hear about it in the comments or in a personal note. This essay might also serve as a useful test of my ethics for writing about others. Did I get that balance right here?
Why I Run
1.
A friend of mine wears a shirt on our weekend runs that says, “I run so I can eat.” It’s a fair reason, though most of us would need at least a dozen shirts to explain why we venture out onto ice-caked sidewalks on dark winter mornings, why we run the same four or five routes every week in every season, why the repetition loses no more of its luster than lovemaking or morning coffee. I have come to think of running the way my mother thinks of prayer. She, too, rises in the dark to complete her ritual, walking the mountainside behind my childhood home when the weather permits, interceding for me and whoever else she carries in her thoughts. I will never understand how prayer works for her, just where she goes within herself to enter that state, whether she hears an answer there or only her own voice crying out. But I understand that my mother prays out of need, not obligation, the way I lace up my shoes because I must. I think of her in those early hours as I step from the garage into the cold, and it is a comfort to know that despite all that divides us, we share the morning.
2.
My body always recoiled from church gatherings. Guilt was a stone I carried within me, a heaviness beneath my ribs and a cloud cast over my sight. Tobias Wolff recalls, of his Catholic childhood, that trying to isolate a particular sin from his general unworthiness “was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you’ve snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.”
It is a mercy that just as my body awakened to sexual desire, which threatened to crush me with shame, a neighbor introduced me to bodybuilding. He had sold the gym he owned in California but still kept a set of free weights and machines in his attic. “If you’re old enough to shave, you’re old enough to lift,” he said. I wasn’t convinced until my youth group traveled to see John Jacobs and the Power Team, a group of evangelical strongmen who toured the country and whipped young people into a frenzy by smashing huge blocks of ice with their fists, bench pressing insane weights while lying on a bed of nails, and other daredevil stunts that ended in an altar call. The show left me dazzled, and I called my neighbor the next day. In my heart, I believed my commitment would fade, the way it did after every other revival once the adrenaline wore off. But there on the bench press, straining for the final rep, or curling a dumbbell until a vein rose along my bicep, I found a new way to step outside the world without ever leaving it.
Burning out in the gym brought a simplicity that I accepted gratefully. The last pushup of the day required total focus from my trembling thighs to my core, on up through my arms and chest. There was no room left for guilt or lust in that space, just the radiance of pain, my metonym for judgment. The cool wave of blood that followed when I fell back to the mat was as close as I’d ever come to hearing God say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
3.
By the time I entered college, weightlifting had taken a toll on my spine and my joints. As the weights grew heavier, the barbell bouncing on my neck as I waddled back from the weight rack, I began worrying that my knees might collapse as I bent and strained back to standing. After a time, not even a hot shower could melt away the aches that had rooted themselves deep in my shoulders. I mostly gave up on fitness and surrendered to the endless supply of cheeseburgers in the cafeteria and the five-dollar special that brought a Papa John’s deliveryman to the dorm. My college friends introduced me to Jägermeister, Jim Beam, and Bud Ice. After enough alcohol I could almost reach the stage of obliteration I’d found in the gym. But the hangover brought back the doom that washed over me in church, where I saw salvation in the faces around me and knew it would never be mine.
In truth, there never was any redemption in the gym. The results might have seemed better on the outside than they might have if I’d been slicing my arms, but the intent was the same. To control pain by inflicting it on myself. Three years before he took his own life, David Foster Wallace said that those lost to suicide were dead long before they tightened the noose. That all they wanted, in those desperate last moments, was for the pain to stop. “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms,” Wallace said, “almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master.” I have never felt the chill of a loaded gun against the roof of my mouth, but I have walked the darkening road that leads there. And for one long stretch of it I convinced myself that one kind of pain could replace the other.
4.
When: 2000. Where: Uruguay. What: a teaching job. Who: a college friend, the one who got away. Why: a gap year before the Ph.D. The real why: love. How: boarding a plane with blind trust.
5.
I met my friend Ana, as I’ll call her, in Spanish class, where she worked as a language assistant. None of us knew the difference then between a crush and true love. I only knew that what I felt ran deeper than carnal desire. Ana laughed easily, teased me often, and sometimes told me her troubles as we smoked at a picnic table near her dorm. I never saw her on the mornings when she lay in bed, paralyzed by fear, or the nights when she paced the golf course near the dormitory trying to tamp down her manic thoughts. Years later I would blame Ana for hiding that part of herself. I would accuse her of luring me to Uruguay without this knowledge, revealing it only after I had arrived, using me as she had always done. But I see now that she was grasping after anything to quiet her pain. I was a solution that worked for a time, a kind of ballast against the bad boys who drove her out to the woods on their motorcycles, held her down in the weeds, and then, for the thrill of it, cut their headlights on the way back to campus. All these years later, when I remember my shock at stepping off the plane and seeing Ana again, half the weight she was in college, her head shaved like a monk’s, I still believe she told the truth when she said, “I need you here.”
6.
Ana had a young child and a teaching job and lived a few blocks from her parents, but the highs and lows had become too much for her then. It might have been a few weeks, maybe more than a month, but all I remember is that she was there, for a time, and then gone. She left with her father one day while I was napping, and once the hospital door slammed shut she might as well have traveled to the other side of the world. No one could visit but her parents, and the only news I heard was secondhand. The rumors of electroshock treatment gave me nightmares where I imagined Ana strapped to a chair, execution-style, behind an armored door which I approached from a distance, peering through a greasy window as her body seized and spasmed with each jolt.
7.
It seemed that the least I could do was stay out of the way, let Ana’s parents tend to her without imposing my own demands. But even after my classes began, even after I moved into a hotel room that the school subsidized, I struggled to fill the void that Ana had left. It is hard to overstate the seismic layers of culture shock, a language barrier, the demands of first-time teaching, and the rupture of support that I’d imagined would see me through. People who survive upheavals like this often create new rituals for structure and meaning. Running became that ritual for me, even if it followed the old script of leveraging pain to silence my terrible master.
8.
From the moment I woke every day in Uruguay, I kept a dirt footpath in the back of my thoughts. I ran that trail so many times that it springs into memory without effort. The yellow arches over the bridge that I crossed at the edge of town. The brown grass where the pavement ended. The undulating hills that rolled out into the country, where gauchos herded their cattle and sheep among the eucalyptus trees. Sometimes in the middle of a lesson, when my sixth-graders were kicking each other under the table or making farting noises with their armpits, I would summon that footpath and imagine myself there until the clock struck the final bell.
After school I walked through town to the bridge. It is always winter in those memories, the grass always brown, the sky overcast. The goal every day was to run past the pain threshold to the point where I imagined myself lit by a white-hot flame and to hold that intensity longer than I believed I could, and even then a few moments more. Some days I retched in the bushes at the edge of the path and then kept going. Other times I’d fall to all fours, blinded, until my breath returned.
9.
What I discovered after the pain had lifted was that running brought me more than a pressure-washed mind. It brought a euphoric glow. As I walked back to the hotel, I imagined champagne bubbles bursting against the inside of my skull, and sometimes I could scarcely fall asleep because my body was still buzzing with it. Whatever the day might bring, whatever tortured dreams might wake me in the night, I could rely on the footpath to zap my brain back on track. It was a crisis plan, not a blueprint for health. I knew even then that running so hard every day could only end in injury. But my body held up for six months, long enough for me to finish my work, say goodbye to Ana, and fly home.
10.
Perhaps I’m still a sucker for the before/after stories in Men’s Health or the Nietzschean cliché about growing stronger from what nearly kills you, but I find it difficult even now to separate the physical transformation of those months from my picture of good health. My routine shaved fifty pounds from my body, and I came home thinner than I’d been as a high school freshman before I began lifting weights. But the hidden truth about those before/after stories is that obsession is no way to make the self whole. When I look at photos from Uruguay, I see myself standing alone by a seawall in Montevideo, waves crashing against the cement far below. My face is hollowed and lean, and fear disguised as resolve is etched over my brow. It is the look of a hunted man terrified of his cruel master, a man who might, if stripped of his one sacred rite, cradle a gun in his mouth and end his running for good.
11.
More than twenty years have passed since my last ragged run along that footpath in Uruguay, but the ritual is as strong as ever. I call it mental hygiene if anyone asks, and it’s still a good way to clear an argument from my head or reset my mood. A day that begins without that surge of blood seems darker, the horizon a little less limitless. But beneath all this is the knowledge that I can’t count on running to save me, that I must study the difference between pushing my limits and lapsing back into self-harm. There aren’t many words for this in fitness. The mantra of every online trainer — I can do hard things — isn’t much help. It is useful to know when doing one hard thing enables avoidance of another hard thing.
12.
I would not have said that I was avoiding the trials of parenting a toddler when I signed up for a marathon. If pressed, I could have offered a recent family crisis or grief or the American bucket list as my reasons. But it was true that my training regimen cut through the better part of the year my eldest daughter turned three and that I was unavailable to my wife for two or three hours during the longer runs. The summer heat often left me so depleted I wanted nothing more than to watch baseball afterward, and so I cannot say that marathon training made me a better father. An alcoholic can also sit in a chair with his daughter playing at his feet and be as absent as I often was during those months.
The marathon year turned running into a chore. Vaseline for bloody nipples and thighs. Pickle juice to ward off cramps. Rubbery legs and a pressure cooker in my brain on humid mornings. For a single person with a willing friend and a whole day to kill, dropping water bottles and energy gel along a twenty-mile route and then running it might be a lark. For me, the faster plan was to stack the water and gel in my driveway and circle back every five miles, which was about as much fun as having my teeth cleaned every forty-five minutes.
13.
In the end, I never conquered the cramps. There were warning signs. One morning I joined a group of friends for a sweaty breakfast after our run, and my hamstring locked shut as I tried to slide into the booth. I have a dim memory of the comedy of errors that ensued, but the other customers undoubtedly remember that my panicked efforts to straighten my leg toppled all of the waters on our table, and that once I’d freed myself from the booth, I performed something between a chicken dance and a seizure as cramps rippled up my back and then through my groin.
By the time race day rolled around in early October, I’d been training for six months. The weather was cool and pleasant, and I felt good as I jogged through downtown Des Moines and up to the Drake University campus. But a telltale twinge snaked up my calf around mile twelve, and three miles later my quads spasmed every time my feet made impact. By mile seventeen the cramps had rolled into my groin, and I was forced to walk. I’d been running for nearly three hours, and I still had nine miles left.
I imagined my wife and daughter waiting at the finish line. I thought of the seven hundred miles I’d logged over the past six months, the vacation days I’d sacrificed to the regimen, and the certainty that I could finish eventually if that were all that mattered. I tried a slow jog, then a shuffle, and when the cramps cinched down over my groin once again, I flagged down the next Sag Wagon. In that moment, I became what marathoners call a DNF, or a Did Not Finish. It’s usually a badge of shame, but I recognize it as a sign that I’ve achieved something closer to balance in my running life. It’s often a choice between one hard thing and the harder thing. Gutting out nine miles with crampy legs is nowhere near as hard as quitting something I said I would finish, but stepping away from the race was the right decision that day.
14.
Sunday morning. Late January. The sky is a piercing blue made more blinding by ice crystals in the snowbanks, tiny mirrors throwing back sunlight. Fifteen degrees. Feels like seven with the windchill. I’m nearing the end of my run, just crossing mile nine, when my route takes me through a cemetery. My eyes are watering from the wind, and my nose is running like broken pipe. I flush each nostril with a snot rocket and feel a little badly about disrespecting the dead. A red van sits up ahead. A woman with white hair kneels in the snow, brushing ice from a headstone.
I like the calm of the cemetery. The leafless trees trembling in the breeze. The clean lines of snow and monuments. De Jong. Van Ruiter. Scholte. All pillars of this Dutch town standing in their orderly rows. I wonder if any of them are suicides who never found a way to inhabit their skin, if some of them grew up in this churchy community with the same sense of doom that I felt as a child, or if others killed themselves slowly with liquor, making the pain go away, go away, go away, until it finally was gone.
Maybe my feet found this cemetery because running feels like death, stripping away energy and breath, paring down to the last reservoirs of strength. At the end of a hard run, I beat against a threshold of pain that I know cannot be endlessly sustained. Beyond that threshold a radiant hallway stretches out to a black curtain that opens into silence.
15.
I don’t know when I began imagining this, or if it was something I felt in my flesh before it rose into words, but when I turn into that Dutch graveyard, something within me says, This is the truth. This is the truth forgotten when bundling my children off to daycare, searching for the missing shoe or the matching sock. A lifetime of routines and headaches all end here. The headstones say it’s not leaving the house exactly on time that matters. It’s not finishing every race. It’s holding my children close at whatever hour of the day or night they need me. Sleep, endless sleep, will come soon enough.
Why do I run, I ask myself as the gravestones slide past? Because I still have the breath and the strength. Because this side ache is proof that I exist. Because every last soul in this place would rise up and join me if they could.
Another excellent essay - thanks for the consistent quality and depth! I always take away a great deal from them. As for the careers programme you did on the Apple - in the early 2000s it was my homeroom's turn to do one of these, but as I wasn't sure how it worked I decided to test it before subjecting the kids to it. There were always four answers to every question, so to speed through I just hit C for each one. The result: border/immigration agent ... or clergy. Which I found eerily similar!
Incredible story.
I used to be a distance runner. Then the knees gave out. Then I tried to be a walker. Boring. Then I bought a farm and became a raspberry pruner. Same sort of ritual as running, just as long in time, only productive. Now the ritual is to brush my Maine Coon cats. Same sort of ritual, shorter amount of time, and two beings enjoy it.