Anywhere
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For the nigh 38 years I wasn’t a runner (much of that time thinking I couldn’t be), it was something runners all loved to tell me about: You could run anywhere, just about anytime. All you needed was the right shoes, or at least not the wrong shoes.
By contrast, I once spent a couple of hours during a trip to Prague just finding a gym with a day fee where I could steal 40 minutes on the elliptical machine, echoing a search I’d made for a swimming pool in that city as a student. Both quests turned up thinly adequate results, each an illustration of how good I had it back home. The irony of those not-a-runner days was that around me sprawled a contagion of pedestrian-friendly alleys, gardens, riverscapes, and architecture to delight the eye for days. You could never walk all of it, but however much you could walk, you could run at least twice as much. Whenever I return to Prague, I will.
Running has catholicity, in the sense of being universal. You can run, and I have, on dirt trails or concrete or asphalt or wooden slats or cobblestones or rubber or recycled plastic or sand. (Sometimes even fallen leaves form a surface, with its own nefarious physics.) Weather can either invite or deter running, but only at its extremes does it forbid it. You can run a flat route, or on rolling hills, or up a mountain or down one. You can run alone, with another person, with a group, with an unaffiliated critical mass of other runners (as on the streets of New York on several fall Sundays preceding the marathon), or as part of a horde. You can run in circles, in place, out and back, or point to point. You can run at a conversational pace or a breakneck one, or alternate between those, and you can run with earbuds in or not, with sunglasses on or not, wearing a cap or not, eyes stinging in sunscreen or not. You can run while speaking in any language. Most people I know run wearing some kind of synthetic fabric, but you can run in merino wool or jeans or tights, shirted or skirted or tank-topped or shirtless, legs shaven or un-. You can run with your head teeming with thoughts or easefully empty, weighed down with a supply of water or sports drink or just with an encroaching thirst, having had breakfast beforehand or with brunch beckoning or sucking down a sticky multisugar gel in 100-calorie doses at 20-minute intervals. You can run as punishment, restoration, and reward.
I ran last week in Amsterdam, and thought about how useful it’s been this year to run anywhere—to slide out directly from what else I was doing, no seam. Runners have a loose, disengaged invisibility in many places, there and gone without being much more remarkable than a fire hydrant or an awning. But inside the runner’s point of view, it’s the opposite: For whatever span of time you’re running, running is what you’re doing—so all of it is remarkable, all of it present, all of it saturating. This is a feature to recommend any kind of focused embodiment, that it thins down conscious experience, reduces the bitrate so you can really comprehend the content of your senses. But the thing about running anywhere is that the “anywhere” is a participant—that in running you commune with place.
James and I ran twice this week back home in Williamsburg, on streets and paths I’ve covered hundreds of times. You might think your neighborhood of 13 years has nothing new to show you, an illusion that running eagerly shatters, serving you up with untold blends of texture, light, surface, and population. In this way home becomes anywhere, ready to be discovered, loved, feared, remembered—ready to remind you that you will never, even once, repeat a single moment of your life.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.