It was about five years ago when I started, for no reason, running. It was a novel experience at first, to go from not running to running. Suddenly everything was moving. Swinging the arms and swinging the legs, I felt like a cartoon chasing after the Hudson river. It kept going. When do you stop? So I ran further and more often. I ran in the parks, in other cities, in the countryside, through the woods. By now, I am running nearly every day. This way one never has to look out the window and decide whether or not to go. If you run even when it's too hot or too cold, or when you get soaking wet, your running body becomes less particular and more like a blank sheet of paper and then all the sheets slowly pile up into a journal, recording all of the changes that make up a year. You come to know very well the weight of the air and how firmly it clings to your skin. You can feel how much the summer heat presses down into your lungs. Or how the frigid air coarsens the walls of your throat. You develop as well a kind of punctuality where you can measure time by how far you've gone. Minutes still pass by wasted, never used, but the ones that are caught have a more physical dimension. This is maybe the most curious aspect of running, that it transforms you into an instrument for measuring not just time but the difference between geologic time and human time. The body records over and again the exact distance and exertions of an hour, and thereby proves that the other time, the one that drifts, or lurches forward, stands still or doubles back, is wholly unmeasurable.
