A Good Run

Self-portrait

It is not quite clear if my feet are taking me through life or the world is just moving past. Running is not the proprietary activity of the fleet-footed featured in running magazines or even of the harried bipedal human. A student of mine who snapped his spine in a surfing accident off the Boso Peninsula, Japan, still goes running, rolling along in his wheelchair as he trains for rugby. And when Dad called to say his mother, who sat much of the time in her chair by the TV, had died at the age of 91, I replied, “She had a good run,” considering his father’s heart had failed at 59.

It was a couple of years after Grandpa’s death I took up long-distance running, when a girl I secretly liked joined the cross country team. Our coach was a 6-foot 200-pound man in a blue polo, gray polyester coach shorts, knee-length tube socks and the latest pair of New Balance running shoes. He drove alongside us in his minivan while we ran the backroads in and out of town. I learned stretches, breathing, posture, and foot strike, which in those days was on the outside sole, heel to toe, and which for me was in a $9-pair of discount tennies.

The morning of the first day of practice, Dad took me to a local auction, where I spent my short life’s savings of birthday-card cash, $180, to buy a pair of jersey calves to raise, artificially inseminate and sell as springers for a profit. I had just won a low bid of $60 on a skittish lanky copper-colored female when an old-timer in the know leaned over and advised me to go for the stout big-boned black-muzzled one with doe eyes. With plenty left in my budget, I outbid the others and went home with my prize, whom I named Wilma, and the other calf, whom I called Betty.

Back at the barn, I was transferring the calves from van to pen when Wilma bolted. About to lose two-thirds of my investment and with only a short time before I had to leave for cross country, I dashed after her and caught her tail just before she pulled herself and then me through the blackberry briar and barbed wire of the neighbor’s fence line. I ended up bleeding and she ended up with a broken tail that healed crooked, but I made it to practice on time and she and Betty later sold for $2000, with which I bought a used truck that ran well until it blew the gasket that was the known fault of that model.

 

Fence line in summer

Running is a simulation of the “fight or flight” mode that so often causes anxiety in our mundane modern lives. Physical hurdles can be cathartic. One sweltering morning re-shingling the roof, I smashed my blood-blistered thumb for about the fifth time, while Dad, tired from holding the shingle in place, yelled at me to hammer faster. I jumped from the ladder, threw my hammer and nail pouch and took off running County Road T in tears. By the time I reached the meadow where coyotes bound after cottontail rabbits through purple clover, Queen Anne's lace and ox-eye daisy, I had regained my composure, and after making the five-and-half-mile loop back home, I recovered my hammer and pouch and rejoined my father and brother, who had just come out of the house from lunch.

In the days following the 2011 earthquake, when public utilities were knocked offline in our area of Tokyo, I was quite content running a makeshift bucket of laundry basket lined with garbage bag from a public spigot on the street to our second-floor apartment so my family could take a bath and flush the toilet. The water was out for a week. It was as if I was again that country kid watering livestock with two five-gallon pails, bucking hay bales on an 80-degree summer day or splitting red oak with a maul in a 30-below wind chill—until Fukushima. There's no do-it-yourself when it comes to nuclear fallout.

Haymow back home

Dad, who had run cross country too, told me it is a mind game. The trick is to start gradually, hold a pace and find a way to take your mind off the pain, a formula I managed to follow only once, at conference first year of high school. I kept with my teammates the entire race, coming in fifth and helping us to first place. I prefer my own pace most times, though I never quite agreed with a philosophy professor who said strength was unnecessary as long as one can go about their daily activities. Clearly he had never had to buck hay bales, shingle a roof or catch a calf by the tail.

One runs to be able to run, at the very least, when one needs to; otherwise, one faces the fate of Fr. Paul, a chain-smoking Benedictine monk who decided one Minnesota winter day to give up cigarettes and take up jogging. He was found dead in a snowdrift. I tell this story with affection for the man and the string of venison sausage he shared once, which he had had concocted from the wiry musky muscles of a 15-point buck, ground and mixed with copious amounts of fat and spices. (That came out more sexual than I intended, though that is hard to avoid when discussing wieners.)

On my hike from the Pacific Ocean to the Jomon Sugi, I lost my way in the rain at 2 a.m. and found myself running through a surreal thousand-year-old forest, reprimanding myself for unmanly discomposure, until I emerged at dawn on a narrow-gauge railway where a wet toad happily mused. I must have made a similar sight, alone and unnerved, on a swampy highland route in northern Honshu that was thickly populated with bears and the ticks they carried. I encountered more paw prints than boot soles, and the beasts rustled through the bamboo grass surrounding the hut I slept in that night.

Bear print, Japan

As resident poet of The Frost Place, beneath the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I came upon a steaming heap of corny bear poo that made me quicken my step past the piles of field stones that inspired Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”. The bear later made an appearance at the kitchen screen door before lumbering away. And I took a quick jaunt up the mountain behind Saas Fee, Switzerland before breakfast and the seminar I was attending, past some curious Ayrshire cattle, to locate the route over the Alps into Italy only to realize that the trail I was looking for actually went over the mountain on the opposite side of the valley.

I have never much liked the sports gym, with its herd of treadmills running into infinity at a wall. I need to travel. Autumns, I used to zip along the trails weaving between sugar maples of the Kettle Moraine State Forest: reds, yellows and oranges dappling the sky overhead and padding the path underfoot. And one March, I made a bare-chested dash and dive from sauna to snow at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, North Dakota, repeating the performance 20 years later, in New Zealand, from the Welcome Flat hot pools to the cold Copland River.

“The boy loves the icy thrill of taking a dare and running through a graveyard at night,” wrote the poet Jim Harrison, whom I sought out at the Wagon Wheel Saloon in Patagonia, Arizona, the year before he died. Back in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where Harrison liked to watch the bald eagles tear apart fish on the frozen Mississippi, I went jogging with a neighbor who told me he had taken the drunken college dare and had run to Taco Bell butt naked in February. It's probably better not to eat fast food, or drink.

 

Thatching a roof, Nepal

At 3000 meters on Poon Hill looking onto the Annapurna range, I accepted our guides’ challenge and slid and bounded through two feet of fresh snow down to the lodge where we were drinking and playing cards beside a wood stove the night before. I like to think they weren't just performing their tourism jobs. And during the “Kazakh games” at the close of a 12-day horse trek through the Altai, I gladly joined the foot race, in full riding gear. Startled by my zeal, the computer programmer from Heidelberg yelled, “Where are you going so fast?!” If he had been running with me from Zimbabwe across Cecil Rhodes’ bridge over the Zambezi, I would have replied: “Back to Zambia! To the toilet!” There I relieved an explosive case of diarrhea for 2 kwacha, or 17 cents.

Being a success at running has never been that important. The point is not to be as athletic as Haile Gebrselassie or María Lorena Ramírez, and even they began running out of need and perhaps joy. I have been running now for over 30 years—running in shorts, running in chaps, running half-naked, running in winter coat, running in hiking boots and running in bare feet. I go at least 10 km a week these days. But I no longer do it for the girl I liked (though everything in life is somewhat, metaphorically, chasing girls). I do not do it to win. Running is not my religion. I run because it is something I do at any time anywhere for better or worse. It gets me where I want to go, often physically, mentally and sometimes metaphysically. I am not perfect, and that’s why I keep at it. I do not expect to run forever, but I sure expect I’ll have a hell of a good one. 

With all the knowledge and technology now available, there's no reason everyone on this earth can't have a very long life. At the same time, every day I lace up my shoes and set out on a regular run, I bemoan that this is no substitute for living with a purpose. "Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde où la garantie de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre la certitude de mourir d'ennui," says the narrator of Jean-Paul Dubois' novel Not Everybody Lives the Same Way, recalling a slogan from 1968. "We do not want a world where the guarantee of not dying of hunger is exchanged for the certainty of dying of boredom." All Grandma's hours alone by the TV couldn't have been that great.

Victoria Falls Bridge between Zimbabwe and Zambia