He hadn’t
planned on going out that night. It had become a day off after two afternoon
beers that he also hadn’t planned on. But hey, a 13-mile day yesterday and a
race in a week, what was one day off anyway? His wife was at a girlfriend’s
house. He tried to get out of the empty house, going to Borders for a cup of
coffee with a splash of whole milk. Somehow, a semi-crowded Saturday evening
café would be better than lying around with three dogs snoring around him.
After 37
minutes of reading, and flipping through the new “Fahrenheit 451” graphic novel, it was
time to doddle along somewhere else. After all, the semester was going to start
in two weeks and he was already putting work off that needed to be done soon.
Ever the procrastinator he couldn’t start anything on the computer without
first checking his email and Facebook. The notifications substituting for the human
experience would distract him a little while longer from his work.
And, then
right there, his night changed. Two status updates that fired up the guilt that
only an empty box on his training log could conjure: one of his friends had run
a 4:24 mile and the other had done a six-mile tempo run. And, what had he done
today? Not a thing. Maybe it was the reading he had been doing that summer or
the Catholic upbringing telling him he should feel guilty that his friends and
former teammates had put in their work, but he went straight upstairs and
slipped on a pair of his favorite running shorts.
Out the
door three minutes later, he was already cruising at 6:50 pace. He thought
about the mistake this might be with four slices of BBQ chicken pizza sitting
in his stomach from not two hours before, to say nothing of the coffee. But,
from what he had learned about his body in December, the qualms of the machine were
meaningless when his mind was in this mood. He was practicing running down game
like his homoerectus brethren from
many hundreds of millennia ago. The human body had evolved itself into an
endurance machine; he knew in his heart what so few did. Distance running had
made humans human. This five-mile excursion was really nothing but it had to be
done at this point. It paled in comparison to his former teammates’ efforts,
but it was better than the nothing he had practiced all day. The Tallahassee night was
calling him.
Only his
stomach complained for the 34 minutes, wishing he would stop for long enough to
lose his dinner at a crosswalk. No such luck. Not on this night. Everything
else was moving in harmony with the full moonlit night. His legs which had been
designed to place soccer balls just out of reach of sweepers had shed all that
power for lean muscle. And, while he could no longer get close to dunking a
basketball and his 5’11’’ frame was still a ten-spot too heavy for a pure
distance man he had gotten it down as close to the look of a distance runner as
possible for now. His body was that of efficiency, sliding across the sidewalk
of a quiet capital city neighborhood. Maybe it would try its hand at a marathon
or beyond again one day, but for now, this was pure joy moving along at a nice
and easy 9 miles
an hour.
His mind
wandered through the decade he’d spent running. A few years ago even, he would
not have left the house after a dinner that size, but his mind was in control
now. It truly was mind over matter. He knew what he was capable of. His body
had been voted down for a long time, but those were merely the battles…this
time his mind had won the war for good. He floated along like the meaningless
headlights passing in the midnight cool. Bliss? Perfection? It mattered not.
He moved
through the shadows, and they moved through him…
Author's Note: This is a bit of auto-biographical fiction from my grad school days a few years back. I hope to have pieces like this throughout my manuscript; little snippets of life in the moment.
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