I’m not a runner. I wish I were, wish I felt the satisfactions runners often write so convincingly of—the clearness of thought that comes after the brain has been emptied of its anxieties by physical exertion; the ache in the thighs that turns almost pleasing, that grounds, instead of distracting—but I don’t, haven’t, except very rarely. When I run—and I do, or try to, two or three times a week—mostly I think about how much I hate it, moment to moment, how my legs hurt, how I am out of breath, how I wish I were not moving at all. Most of the time, it’s the feeling of having run that I’m after; the moment when I get to peel off my sticky clothes and crawl sweaty and tired into the shower. There’s a sense of accomplishment potent enough that it can feel like hitting a reset button. There is life before the run, when I was was soft and grungy and dull; and there is life after, when I am taut and clean and sharp, a person suddenly capable of writing a pitch email or deciding on flower arrangements or trying to figure out how to get replacement plate decals for my newly registered car. This is why I keep running, despite the fact that I associate the activity itself with pain and annoyance: because it, like no other attempt at feelings-management, can neatly hack away the part of my day already lost to depression.
I have a tendency to prefer the hard thing to the easy thing. For example: a few weeks ago, I took a train into New York to keep a professional commitment. I’d planned to stay only briefly: I’d do work that afternoon and evening, then head back to Boston early the next morning, via the 2:40 am Amtrak. For this reason, I hadn’t arranged to stay with anyone; I was planning on camping out at Penn Station, taking advantage of their free Internet and the fact that, past midnight, they start—for reasons unknown—playing my favorite Italian pop singer, Carmen Consoli, over the intercom. Only on this particular morning, there was no 2:40 am train; there were, in fact, no trains back to Boston until around 7. At which point, instead of getting in touch with one of my many friends in the city, I decided the easiest thing to do would be to spend the night in Midtown. It took not one but several text messages for N to convince me to stay on her and J’s couch. There’s a base level of self-loathing at play here, but I think I also imagine that the hard thing for me must be the easier thing for other people. This is the kind of faulty internal logic that occasionally results in my massively inconveniencing myself in order to avoid minimally inconveniencing someone else.
Yesterday and Sunday I was back in New York. The drive down was tiring and, Monday morning, I felt unwashed and out of sorts. I was twenty-minutes late to therapy; in the bathroom, after fifteen minutes of idle chatter with my analyst, I discovered a pimple under my right nostril. I had work to do—prep for a tutoring session later that afternoon—and not much time to do it. I was also near my gym and holding a tote bag full of workout clothes and, though a part of my brain was screaming at me, telling me that I was being irresponsible, I did the selfish thing which, oddly, in this case, means I went for a five mile run. I hated that run, like I hate every run, right up until the moment I stopped running, at which point I was very grateful I’d done it.
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