An Ode to Running to Run
Brianna Le / V Mag at UVA
Trudging down the street towards my high school, a turtle toting her ridiculously large backpack, I watched the seven a.m. runners fly past me in a neon-colored blur, their name-brand shoes barely grazing the drab, damp pavement. Some of them, all gangly limbs and short-shorts and compression socks racing through the streets as if competing with the slumbering sun, brought to mind something my mother would always remark: “There comes a point, when people are just running from something.”
I didn’t understand this idea as I begrudgingly laced up my sneakers to drag myself through two hours of track practice, chest heaving and cheeks red with exertion after barely warming up. How could this – this gasping, tiring, humbling action – be relaxing? How could this tortuous activity be an escape so transformative that people line up to pay with hours of their precious time in hopes of uncovering freedom, relief, enlightenment, or what?
I’d never really been a willing participant in the world of running. It was always something I felt I should do – something productive, healthy, and responsible. My mom runs casually, knocking out ten-milers but never rising before the sun to find some meaning in the strides of her legs. She is, I believe, running for something. Perhaps her health, her happiness, or her sense of accomplishment. My brother was dragged deeper into the bizarre community than she was, running upwards of thirty miles a week sporting a constant rotation of new running shoes and striving for personal bests at community 5Ks. Still, he's not quite running from something. He’s somewhere in the middle, not yet an ultra-marathoner running from a fear of failure, of lacking achievements, of the paralyzing normalcy that accompanies typical mental and physical limitations. But me? I think I might just be running.
I don’t know when or why I started running. I’ve always played sports – trying my hand at softball, soccer, flag football, even pole vaulting – but I never ran, not outside of conditioning or competing. Bits and pieces of my journey come to mind, jogging up and down the boardwalk in preparation for soccer fitness tests or lacing up my sneakers to catch the sun lift its head above the ocean on early summer mornings. But when asked, I would always demur, insisting that I wasn’t a runner – oh God no. How could you think that, I swear I’m not fast. I could never run for the fun of it. Still, I found myself running around the asphalt path at the small park by my house, not the high school track and never possibly in front of people I may know. As I circled the soccer field and small playground dodging swerving kids on bikes and excited dogs in search of squirrels, I wondered: Why do I do this to myself?
When I initially started running, I hated it. I’ve always loved walking, hiking, and any form of wandering, really. But something about the intentional discomfort of running got to me. I would come back from my runs – my occasional jaunts around the neighborhood park – red-faced, wild-haired and exhausted. And yet I returned week after week until somehow – suddenly, without the slightest notice – my former personal hell became a place of refuge. I’ve come to realize that this transition might have something to do with philosopher Alan Watts and his belief that “existence is playful.” I discovered the work of Watts in my college writing seminar, as we dissected a lecture of his on “the playful universe.” Listening to Watts discuss the pointlessness – even randomness – of it all I began to draw a bizarre connection between my confusing relationship with running and Watts’ take on life.
I refuse to track my runs. I don’t wear a watch, don’t use an app, don’t time myself or plot routes or even know exactly how many miles I go. I run only to end up in the same place from which I left, having garnered distance yet no displacement. Watts says, “when you travel, you are trying to get somewhere,” but my runs don’t physically or efficiently deliver me to a destination, instead taking me in a meandering, pointless loop. Perhaps then, my running is more like dancing, about which Watts opines “when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room, that's where you should arrive. The whole point of dancing is the dance.” When I run, I’m not aiming for a mileage goal, a time goal, or a “particular spot.” I don’t run to go fast, or to train, or even to go far. Instead, maybe the whole point of my runs is the running – the shoes-on-pavement, heart-beating head-clearingness of it all.
I don’t know if this is the right approach, to be entirely honest. My brother is frustrated by it, urging me to run “all out” miles and see how fast I can go. And truthfully, maybe I’m scared. I’m scared to realize that I’m not so fast, or not running so far. Maybe that’s what I’m running from as I jog down sidewalks and up hills with my earbuds in, arms pumping and legs burning. Then again, as Watts says, we spend so much time telling ourselves that “it’s coming, that great thing, the success you’re working for,” that we begin to lose sight of the ridiculousness of life, the freedom we have to do everything and absolutely nothing at all. Maybe running is just that: ridiculous. Maybe I suck at running; maybe I’ve sucked all along. But honestly, I don’t need progress. In fact, I don’t even want it. If, as Watts says, the universe is “basically playful,” then my little times or miles are barely equivalent to a child’s toy, abandoned on the floor of the infinite galaxy. If lacing up my sneakers in the morning is barely a blip in the sonar of life, then I’ll keep pounding my feet against the pavement without reason. The seven am neon blurs can keep running from their fears, my mom can keep running for herself and my brother can keep running for faster times. But me? Well for now, I think I’ll just keep running to run.