I believe in the steadiness of pavement. I trust that as my feet fall on the hard surface, it will be there ready to propel my legs back into motion. No matter where my runs take me, I know the pavement will be there to absorb the impact of my footfall and along with it, the shock of my thoughts as I let them loose on the road.
For me, running is more than a form of exercise . It is the one sliver of time I reserve for myself everyday, a time where I am alone with only my thoughts as company.
I haven’t always been a runner. My dad first enrolled me in a youth running club when I was in second grade. I never had an interest in soccer like other girls my age. Running, he thought, I could excel in. But I hated it.
I dreaded going to practices once a week and looked forward to the weekend races with even greater dislike. The act of putting myself through such strenuous, and sometimes painful, exercise was difficult for me to understand at the age of seven. I remember one race on a rainy Seattle morning. The course wound through a forested park. I felt lost, scared and frightened as I panted along the muddy dirt paths trying to follow the girl in front of me. Halfway through the run I saw my parents at a popular cheering point. Instead of using their cheers to propel myself to the finish, I immediately sprinted to them.
“Don’t make me do this,” I pleaded with them. They hug
ged me but pushed me back out on the course, telling me I should finish the race. Needless to say, I quit the club a few weeks later.
I then tried a series of sports over the next few years. Softball? I broke my arm during the first season and was relegated to the outfield where it was unlikely much action would come my way. Tennis? I could barely make contact with the ball and ended up looking like a fish floundering on dry land. Guess that didn’t work for me either. Basketball? The two points I scored that season were my crowning achievement. But my diminutive 5’2” frame didn’t give me much of a height advantage. Looks like I would need to keep searching.
Then in high school I rediscovered running. I joined the cross country team, trained hard, made varsity and helped propel my team to a second place finish at the state championship. Running taught me discipline and endurance. And as I got more involved in school and busier each day, I found that I began to rely on those hours I spent alone on the road. Whether I was angry, sad, stressed or happy, I would run. It has become a way for me to process my thoughts, without fear of other voices clouding my own.
I have had countless imaginary conversations during long runs, playing out scenarios that won’t ever become reality. I need this time alone to myself. It’s important that no matter how out of control my life seems to become, I have the consistency of running. Without it, my day feels disjointed and incomplete.
Sure, the pavement and I have had our squabbles. While running does not require the hand-eye coordination other team sports do, the simple task of placing one foot in front of the other has often proved to be a challenge for me. In high school it was considered a successful day if my team came back from a run and I had not fallen, and I became used to the idea that I might have skinned knees for weeks.
I remember one particularly embarrassing run. My team had been hiking up a mountain with several precarious trails and I made it up to the top without incident. On our way back down, we decided to jog. We had almost reached the end of the trail and the parking lot where our cars were parked when my feet flew out from underneath me and I ended up face first in the dirt. My teammates helped me up, dusted me off, and led me to our car. But the scrape on my upper thigh was so bad that my coach had to find the first-aid kit before we could drive home.
Though it has been a while since I last had a “falling incident,” it seems my clumsiness is something I will not outgrow. But even falling has become part of my running routine, making me more conscious of my footsteps.
It’s hard for me to imagine a day when I don’t run. C
oming to college, it was a given that I would run for whichever school I decided to attend. But somehow running with my college team wasn’t what I expected it to be. Sure, I made the varsity team and ran in the PAC-10 cross country championship during my freshman year, but there was something missing. By my sophomore year I realized I needed a break from the team and from running.
The last year I have spent rediscovering my passion for running. Quitting the team has taken away the pressure. When I first started running it was my escape from stress and almost therapeutic. But the team made it something I was required to do, something I began to dread and one of the activities in my life that added to my stress.
Now I run when I feel like it. I listen to my body and run until it doesn’t feel good anymore. It has again become something I look forward to, something I need to sort through the jumble of confused thoughts in my head.
And as the pavement greets me each morning, I look forward to each step I will take. For those precious minutes my busy day seems far off, the stress piled onto my shoulders falls away and my head becomes clear. No matter where I run, the pavement is always there, steady under my feet and guaranteed to eventually lead me home, with or without a few bumps and bruises along the way.
Me after the PAC-10 Cross Country Championship at Stanford University
