Warm Up
The white cat watches me as I walk by, stretching my human muscles. Perched on the sidewalk, she blinks stoically. A block later the twin black cats, flopped on the grass outside their house, smirk at me. They feel so bad for me. My species is so far gone, we have to make up reasons to run.
Run
The first five minutes are always terrible. I am a new runner, and I get bored easily, so I have a pomodoro approach: run five minutes, walk one. Someday I will run three miles straight: no walking, barely sweating. Cool and fresh faced like the faster runners who pass me. Not flushed like a pink lady apple. You have to be humble, learning to run. I like to be the best at things. With running, I have to be okay with mediocrity.
Walk
Is skincare a real concern, or is it just capitalism? I put SPF lotion on my face in the mornings, which feels like it should be enough. Will I regret it when I’m older?
Run
When running, you have to stretch properly, and roll your muscles out on a foam roller, especially if you are getting into running when you’re thirty and don’t have pliable, teenage legs. Sometimes when I roll out my legs on the foam roller I cry, not from the physical pain, but because it lets loose psychic pain I have stored in my tight muscles. It comes out of me in waves of wails and frightens my husband, who I ask to “help” me roll by standing near me, reminding me to get every crease, and telling me that everything is okay.
Walk
I aim for the pure state of body neutrality. Like enlightenment. A body has no moral quality, the philosophy says. It just is. And I can feel every inch of it.
Run
I’ve told myself that I’m not worried about losing weight. I want to feel fit and clear my mind. But I secretly want to lose weight. I feel guilty about this wish, because I know that weight is not related to beauty or self-worth, and yet I am still here, trapped in a never-ending rollercoaster of body-image-issues because I was eight in 1998 when they called Kate Winslet fat, and I was thirteen in 2003 when they called Natalie Maines fat, and I was nineteen in 2009 when they called Jessica Simpson fat, and they said it with venom, as if it were the worst thing a person could be, and so I’ve been thinking about the least interesting thing about myself for as long as I’ve been aware of my corporeal form—so forgive me, I gasp, my heart racing which is supposedly good for me, if I have not managed to untether myself from this world just yet.
Walk
In college freshmen year, I learned about “social constructs.” I annoyed the shit out of my younger brother by telling him that everything he knew and loved was a social construct. What I know now is that just because something is a construct doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Doesn’t mean it can’t affect you.
Run
I struggle to radically accept myself, and that makes me feel bad. I’ve heard self-care will help me do it better. We are always looking for something to cure us of the pain of being made of fallible meat. They say drink lemon water in the morning instead of coffee. They say buy yoga mats and Pelotons and fifteen-dollar green juice concoctions and then you will live to be one-hundred, cancer-free. Then you can feel good about yourself.
Here’s the part of the run where I pass the reflective window of a gym. I do not look at myself in the glass, although I always want to. I want to see my sweaty, open mouth. I want to see my stomach (am I just bloated?) I want to see my ass moving like a seal in water. I love my fat ass— it is fashionable. It is so much easier to radically accept what is fashionable. And this, my knees creak out, is why I am full of shit, and so is everyone else.
Walk
Maybe we all just need to accept that we will age and die eventually, and there is nothing we can do about it. At least the air is fresh in my lungs. At least the endorphins have kicked in.
Run
There are always a few minutes on a run when I feel a lift-off, lightness, power. I understand why people do this. The houses whir past me in alive colors. The green leaves are saturated green. A memory—not mine, my mother’s, or a future memory—hits me: commuting home from teaching in the fall, light growing dim, listening to the radio, rain starting, family at home, lamps on, stove bubbling. It’s like getting that momentary impression of a dream you had the night before as you’re getting ready for bed. A fantasy of contentment. A feeling I can unlock with my body.
In the before-times, I was a baker. I was on my feet, lifting, handling, moving all day. I miss being a moving being in a crowd—the restaurant a multi-celled organism working. Now I forget the bad parts of working all the time like that. How I got carpal tunnel in my forearms. How I had a weird thing where my heart would get out of rhythm and beat too fast, which stopped when I quit going to work at four in the morning. But moving is such a privilege. Each step pounding into the pavement, I’m real, I’m real, I’m real.
Walk
I inhaled a bug once. Felt it burning in my lungs for two miles, coughed it up in the shower later. Watched its little corpse go down the drain. A runner’s rite of passage.
Run
My therapist told me that my anxiety keeps my brain in a state of constant fight or flight. When your head clouds and pounds and vertigo tips you into an anxiety pit, she said, run.
Run and get out the fear: it will be good to be fit when the climate crises come. Get out the grief: it’s got to come out somehow, even though this pandemic year has left you numb, like you can name emotions but can’t feel them. Get out the rage: at the anti-vaxxers and the fascists and the gleeful world-crumbling billionaires—your legs and lungs are burning with fear and grief and rage and if you run some more, if you can just finish this set, for just a moment, you can get it all out.
Cool Down
Now is the time to be smug. Breath in the pollen air. Sip water. Wave to the cats, awaiting your return with coy smiles. See the streets glow orange with evening. Listen to the way the world sounds brighter. Hold onto it. For just a moment, you were so in your body, you were in another world.
