Running Track

It takes a few minutes of lengthening your yoked limbs and joints to rev your engine enough for a good run around the winter track. You get no benefit from the daily weather in New England, and you lose nearly all motive. Lubricating my muscles, breathing in the dense air, I stretch more than I can stay alert for. My stamina feels lower than ever, and I push myself as little as possible at the start of the jog. Once I feel a bit of agility, I dance in and out of the lanes drawn with chalky paint.

I average a nine minute mile, nothing impressive by anyone's point of view, and I don't exude the charisma of a winner. Even getting to the track, a hop, jump, and trot from my home in a small Massachusetts town, becomes a regretful experience. I swear, the weather deserves the blame for my impropriety. The track is at fault, too. It's too perfect. In flatness, spaciousness, length, the track has far too much going for it while I am a lazy, fragile, sentient man with feelings and thoughts. Anyway, I still make it to the track on time. The time isn't set in stone, but arriving is all it takes to be on time. People overthink that.

I sometimes translates to we, if I decide to bring someone or meet someone. But usually I arrive alone, and I get my work done alone. The track stays receptive to my plans in all its perfect stillness, and I give the track my half-awake self, as much of it as I can share. There have been days when I feel energetic, and days when I feel as foggy as the morning winds. We laugh and talk when there are two of us, and we barely exercise when there are a lot of us. Maybe we exercise an incredible amount while it doesn't seem that way. Conversation makes all the difference.

Now, the passage of time, from start to finish, from leaving the house to getting back home, runs better when there is stillness in my mind. If I have a hectic schedule ahead of me, the time stomps. If I have had a grand dream, or a workday from heaven the day before, the time floats. Sometimes, sunrise and a run carries a rhythm of both dense head rushes and blood-pumping, light-headedness. When it rains, I become a windshield.

If it snows, as it does in January, I don't look forward to cleaning off my car with the snow brush. I miss the sight of rain, and the sound of each drop. I miss the sweat, the insects, and the thunder. I miss my sweat. The shoveling is inhumane, and the loss of trails, yards of sidewalks, and the track is detrimental. All the power-walkers that give me the courtesy-wave and quick smile vanish, and my inner resilience forces me to workout indoors, or (worse) rejoin my gym. Slipping on the snow and catching myself works my abs, shoveling reactivates my circulatory system, so I forgive myself a little early and go lay down inside.

I can't stay in indoors like this. It's got me captive. The bedtime gets later, the screen-time gets excessive, and the great-outdoors come morning gets so white that it is blinding. I hide inside and gain back all the weight I've maintained or lost, and then I solidify my rank as a nine-minute-mile-runner. I ought to run south. It's really driving me mad.

I contemplate where I would live if I had made the right decisions, met the right people, or skipped the right meals. I freeze with the trees.

"A cold, haggard young man with high blood pressure, and low-level skill, grunting in the middle of a snow storm lives here in the hills of Massachusetts, but they say not to go near in the cold months."

"That's when he recalibrates to his miserly, ne'er do well self."

"He sounds so pathetic."

"At least, as local lore would have it, he does things other than shovel out parking spots in the warm months."