New beginnings

Spring is the season of change. And this strange seasons has brought a surfeit of time to think (when not consumed by existential dread about you-know-what) about what I want to write.

The things that have moved me to write recently have been running adjacent. The kind of thought that slips through the mind three miles in, but not explicitly about the physical act of running.

Which is natural, because my relationship with running has changed. I’m still a runner, but not the runner who spent years relentlessly focusing on running. Go back through this blog and there’s a near-obsessive hunger for statistics and measurements in pursuit of goals. My relationship with running hasn’t become a Murakami-esque chart of age’s downward trajectory, but it’s no longer the superlative-chasing of further, faster, harder, stronger.

To run is to have space to think. It is to have time away from distractions or notifications. It is to let the abstract thoughts that seep through the subconscious like groundwater well to the surface. It is to convene with oneself. It is to lay out everything, press it flat, and see the moment for what it truly is. It is, ultimately, to strip away the veneer of the projected persona and to loop deep within and say ‘This is who I am’.

This is still a running blog. But this is what I think while running, while I no longer chase metronomic miles reading off target paces – 6:26, 6:52 – like Bible passages.