nothing at stake

I’m training to run a half-marathon in five weeks. Now that the first spring flowers are blooming and I’m sometimes able to run in shorts, I’m grateful for all the miles I ran on the many days in January and February when the temperature stayed below freezing and the need to log miles was the only thing that got me out the door and to the park. I haven’t run a half-marathon since 2018, and before that I hadn’t run one in more than a decade. In 2018, my long training runs depleted me so much that the idea that I could ever again endure the training for an actual marathon (which from time to time I consider doing) seemed impossible. In contrast, these past few weeks my long training runs have mostly invigorated me.

The difference between then and now, I think, is that in the past two years I have been running more frequently and regularly than I had since I finished my last marathon in 2004. Instead of writing the equivalent of King Lear through the first months of the plague, I just ran a lot. I couldn’t get away from the pandemic, not in those early weeks when the streets were nearly empty of traffic and on each run I’d pass one or more ambulances parked on the curb while others screeched past me. But at least I could get away for a half hour or so from the relentlessness of family, the four of us bristling against each other hour after hour in our two-bedroom apartment.

I didn’t run far—at first usually a 3.15-mile loop down to Avenue H, up to Albemarle Road, and back home again—but I did run often enough that as the months passed, those short runs added up to hundreds of miles of running. Maybe I haven’t run very many hundreds of miles, but I’ve run enough to support my efforts to run a half-marathon with ease.

I wish that I could find such consistency in other things—things that matter even more to me than running, such as writing and meditation. One difference between running and those other occupations, though, is that to run I leave the apartment and the many obligations and distractions that reside with me there. Another difference is that in running, nothing is at stake. I would like to show myself that I can still run 13.1 miles in less than two hours, but whether or not I do so doesn’t matter at all. Whether I’m racing, training, or just running for the sake of running, the only person who cares or benefits is me.

Or maybe everything is at stake. I turn again to Virginia Woolf’s diary entry of Saturday, February 27, 1926, when she wrote :

Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say ‘This is it’? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it—that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it.’ It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. . . .

Running, for me, is a way of seeking, and sometimes finding, a discovery in life. What is the discovery? That I am alive, that the daffodils are blooming, that in the seventh or eighth mile of a long run I feel that I could go on running forever. . . .

Last time I said to expect a post every other Monday, but that was before my sister-in-law died and I needed time to grieve and travel—thus the long delay. She was an avid runner, and just a few months ago I got to scream my head off her her as she finished the New York City Marathon. She didn’t live nearby, but I dearly miss her all the same. I am dedicating my half-marathon to her.