Why I Run
Friends,
I’ve enjoyed a few chilly morning runs of late, welcome reprieves from the placeholder slogs I do all summer while battling the heat and humidity.
I’d love to hear your own thoughts on running or fitness more generally, but I’m also curious: what essays do you have to write that might begin with “Why I ___”?
Josh
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 akin to
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.
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.
Read on to hear about how I discovered running as a coping ritual after traveling to South America in a futile attempt to reconnect with a college flame. Your support allows me to share more original essays like this.