Run run run

Every time I attempt to sit down and properly write a post about the why's and the what's and the how's of running, I get stumped.

But the other day, following an especially exhilarating nighttime tromp through my neighborhood park, the glow of distant streetlights and the moon's reflection off the lake guiding my way, I swore I could have kept running for miles.

There's something completely freeing about feeling the pavement under my feet, bounding and reconnecting and supporting and pushing as I gain momentum and almost free-fall into the darkness in front of me.

I feel like I'm cutting through the enveloping darkness, a cold wall of obstacle and fear and what if's as I push past the dull pain in my thighs, the gasping breaths in my chest, the blur of the broken lines on the road as I press on.

Beat.

Running is like a kind of therapy for the soul, and sometimes I will myself to run at a high speed so that I might break through the sound barrier into another realm, one of complete stillness and meditation.

It's a kind of mental separation, trying to pull apart the pain of the external from the calm of the internal. The faster I go, the more blindly I hurtle into the darkness, the quieter my mind becomes and the clearer I can think.

I distract my mind with a full awareness of my body, of my joints, of each muscle as I move forward, onward, forward, onward, right foot, left foot, right foot, left.

Breathe. In. Out. In. Out.

Out.

Catch my breath and bob my head to the beat of my own being learning its rhythm for the first time. In the darkness of a night run, there's no such thing as stopping, of stagnation, of rest.

At night, my mind comes alive so the body does also.

Running is not an escape. Running is an embrace. In the undeniably unique boom boom swish boom beat of each runner's pace, breath, pace, there is a release, an embrace, a release.

Pushing off the ground and touching down just to try again so that I might become a part of the night.

Running.

Beat.