On any given day in summer, on the dirt roads that frame the small Kansas town I live in, there are runners. Committed runners. The men take off their shirts and their sleek, hard bodies glisten in the sun. The women run in just sports bras, their hard abdominal muscles straining in a way that reminds me of a cat’s haunches. In fact, these runners have a glow about them. Their bodies radiate as if it were a light shining behind them, a halo of health.
As I drive by, I don’t want the men or women, I want to be them. I want to feel my muscles, tight and rigid, feel the energy and strain. I want to hurt, feel the pain and stress of the activity on my body.
I want this in a vague, metaphorical way. I want what it means to be a runner. To prove to the world that I’m as hard and muscled as my thoughts.
I am a reader and a writer. The activities I would rather do than most anything involve stillness. Certainly, my mind has been exercised with constancy and consistency. My brain, I am sure, could wear a sports bra and parade itself around with its tight, firm agility. Not to say I am particularly smart, but I do understand the effects of a well-used mind, just as I can see the effects of a well-used body.
Being a farm girl, I am used to a hard labor that tones the body without having to purposefully exercise it. I’ve always been healthy and thin without particularly or consciously trying to be. Since my work on the farm has lessened as I’ve moved away and married, my body has become limp. I am not fat, but I am plumper than I used to be and out of shape. At college I gained the mandatory 15 pounds and kept it on. I’ve never gained more, but I’ve never lost it either.
Today I began reading Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. In it, he describes the parallels between his life as a writer and as a runner. It made me think that the two are interrelated in some figurative and vital way. That neither writing nor running are specifically the point of either activity, but the exercise and use of both mind and body at varying times is critical for a wholeness and balance and preparedness for work, relationships, and well, life. In other words, to be successful at one, you must work at the other.
In fact, Murakami asserts this point saying, “For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself.”
Joyce Carol Oates, also a longtime runner, equates running and writing, saying, “Ideally, the runner who’s a writer is running through the land and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting.” Just like Murakami, both find their writing a necessary backdrop while they’re running, important to the act of running in a crucial way. If they were not writers they would not be runners.
It is easy to convince myself intellectually of the purpose and significance of running, but to actually put on my tennis shoes and get out the door is an entirely different story.
I’ve dabbled in running and writing for seven years. I’ll be motivated and go out five days in a row and then not go again for months. Then I’ll guilt myself into going again. This past year I’ve gone an average of once per week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I’ve worked to a point that I can run for about 20 minutes straight. To a “real” runner, this must seem awfully trivial, but at the end of that twenty minutes I feel an awful lot of pain, sweat, but also pride.
I want, though, not to be an occasional jogger, but to be a runner. I want to feel the way about myself that I feel about the runners I see running down those dirt roads. I want physical exercise to enter my life in a fundamental, consuming way. I want to run like I write and write like I run. (I definitely don’t want to write like I run now, because that would be very sad.)
I aim for a wholeness and a balance that I am not currently achieving. And so, I start this blog. To hold myself accountable, chart my progress, and most importantly contemplate the link between writing, reading, and running.
My goals are simple, straightforward, and seemingly impossible. I want to be able to run six miles a day, everyday, one year from now. I want to compete in a half-marathon. I want my body to be sleek and toned.
And most of all, I want to write with the same tenacity as I run. Linking the two could be a way to success, or a downfall that could be devastating.
We shall see…
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