nowhere to run

but in circles

Two (9:13):

The great thing about running in circles is that you have no idea how far you’ve run. You’re keenly aware of your body, your breath, the inside of your head, because it’s the only thing changing, the only thing letting you know that the fiftieth lap around the block is not the same as the forty-ninth. 

Three (9:15):

When I run on Saturday mornings, there is a green car with a lady inside it on the side of the block opposite my townhouse. That green car is not always there: today, I saw the green car emerge from a driveway and take its usual spot by the side of the road perpendicular to Evelyn Ave. The woman sits in the driver’s seat of her car for what feels like ages. I’m not sure if it feels like ages because it is a long time, or if it feels like ages because I am not staring at my phone. 

Five (9:27):

I wonder if it feels like ages to her. She got out of the car today, carrying three of what looked like tote bags. One of the tote bags was patterned like a colorful zebra—the black-and-white movies could not have displayed these colors, because they were in black and white and this bag was not. 

Six (9:37):

Does she wonder what I’m doing, running in circles like this? Or does she not notice? Does her phone capture her entire visual field? I wonder if she wonders about my running. Does she wonder if I wonder whether she wonders why I run in circles? 

Eleven?

I can’t tell if I’ve run seven rounds, or twenty-three, or five. This time, I saw a boy in his grey car on the left side of the road. He looked 14, or 17. No, he can’t be 14—that’s illegal. 

Eleventy-two:

I did a pre-run stretch this time, or “pre-hab” at they call it, so I don’t get stupid injuries that will prevent me from running this exact same route, in circles, every Tuesday and Saturday and sometimes Thursday for the rest of time. I already do some kind of warm up before running, by swinging my legs back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until they feel kind of loose.

Ten:

I followed a 25-minute stretch the other day and, boy, did I need it. I did everything: massage gun, dynamic stretches, static stretches, self-massage. I feel less tense, but it’s not entirely gone. Will I ever feel “loose” again? 

Fourteen:

Why does maintaining your body’s sanity take so much time? Why can’t the tiny little hairs that sometimes grow between my eyebrows, that I can only see if I stand close enough to the mirror that I’m almost kissing my reflection, pluck themselves? 

One (9:23):

I don’t listen to anything on my runs, because it feels sort of meditative to propel myself forward without a podcast or somebody’s voice in my ears the whole time. I can hear my feet pit-patting, my breath pacing itself, the whoosh of the occasional car. It’s, like, 7am. There aren’t that many cars out yet. 

But I do sometimes think about a piece of music for the first few minutes or so, to take my mind off the fact that I’m still getting into the groove. I fantasize about rhythm in my head until I find it in my body. I notice myself running faster when I get to a particularly exciting passage. 

Forty:

My knee doesn’t hurt yet? It’s been 90 minutes. Wild. Maybe stretching actually works. 

Zero:

A few hours later, I’m somehow both ravenously hungry and not sure how much I actually want to eat. I’m listening to my stomach and it seems to want food, but it feels like I could possibly throw up if I eat too much. I know I won’t get sick if I eat too much—I have too big an appetite. 

Here I am, thinking about food. So much time spent thinking about food. 

Seven:

I don’t wear headphones to the gym anymore, just as I don’t wear them on my runs. Not wearing headphones at the gym is like playing Russian Roulette with a variable number of the chambers filled: who will violate my auditory sense today? This feels like one way of introducing variety into monotony. 

I’m finishing a set, and a man with a mildly disheveled faux-bowl cut (what even is that?), who has also finished his set, is paying rapt attention to something on the wall. I look at the TV he’s staring at to confirm what I already know: it’s Olivia Rodrigo in pixels, doing what I can only describe as (excuse my German) violently penetrating my ears. 

She keeps saying (asking?) “bad idea, right?” Am I supposed to comment on her dilemma? (“eject that man from your life like he ejected his (don’t finish that sentence)” (is he a man yet? How old are these people?)) I’m not sure what she wants from me. 

As it turns out, I don’t actually know the answer to Olivia’s questions. But, I guess, that’s why you become famous and write a catchy song that tops charts (this is absolutely not why you write a chart-topper or become famous): the whole world knows enough about your love problems (we know nothing) so that you can draw on the collective wisdom (we are all, or at least mostly, incurably insane) and well-wishes (a lot of people probably hate you) of literally anyone who knows your music (whether by choice or not). 

Some singers will use their music to dispense advice instead. The same morning, a man with pasty skin and blonde hair longer than Olivia’s told me I mustn’t be afraid to get loud. I didn’t take his advice, because I was in the middle of a gym. She gets crazy, he told us multiple times. I’m not sure who she is, or what it means for her to get crazy, or what this has to do with getting loud. But he has a good voice, so I don’t press the issue. 

Twenty-two:

I couldn’t relate to “Driver’s License” because I got my license a lot longer than one week ago, but I did drive through the suburbs, because I lived in the suburbs. I didn’t cry over a boy, either, because I’m straight. I have, however, let tears loose in a moving vehicle, though for entirely different reasons. I guess you can always get to the right answer for the wrong reasons (that’s what language models do). 

Twenty-five:

Aside: For an essay on running, I sure have spilled a lot of ink on Olivia Rodrigo songs—am I a wannabe culture writer? I am definitely not Wesley Morris. I recommended Morris’s Longform interview to SZ one evening, and SZ wondered whether Morris had written a particular take he vehemently disagreed with. SZ confirmed this theory by Googling the term “Wesley Morris” and looking at a few of his reviews until he came across Wesley’s review of “Saltburn.” This prompted a “fuck you, man,” but substantially less chill—it was like a spoken version of texting someone “fuck you” in all caps (because he said “fuck you” pretty loudly). 

I’m sometimes concerned about not having anything to write about, because I’ve somehow become increasingly convinced that all there is going to be left to do that is uniquely human is to write about the human condition. Is that circular? How do we write about the human condition when the bounds of experience for many of us are a radius of 5-10 miles around our homes? Men used to go to war, they say. Now, we have hikikomori. 

I think Murakami may be a little too gentle with the “new generations” he writes to. Read lots of novels when you’re young, he says. He’s correct. But, maybe, it’s not quite enough.

Sixteen:

Driving is very different from running. If you run in a circle, a few people might notice. If you drive in a circle, you’re trying to trap a wild animal, displaying that you’ve lost your mind, drifting, doing something illegal, or all of those at once. 

One-Nine (6:58):

A wise musician once said, “if you can play it slowly, you can play it quickly.” I decided, one morning, to apply this advice to running. So, instead of running for 6-7 miles at a leisurely pace, I ran for 6.5 miles at a much less leisurely pace. I’ve been deadlifting much less than usual recently, so this did a number on my hamstrings. It’s like they’ve internalized the stress of all the emails I still have to answer today. 

The great thing about running in circles is that, when you do it faster, you get to think things like “wow, I’m suffering.” I think this applies when you’re not running in circles, too. 

One-Ten:

I feel reasonably confident that Olivia should not run in circles, the way that Olivia should not meditate, the way that GaryVee says he feels he should not meditate. You don’t produce bangers that way—bangers of the literal variety, in that they’re banging on people’s eardrums. 

Nine (9:00):

It’s important to fuel after a run, and my fuel of choice has become oatmeal of some sort. They say it’s hard to beat a bowl of Quaker Oats, but I’m pretty sure I’d win against one in a boxing match. Quaker Oats can’t box, because they’re inanimate. This means they can’t run, either; so I’d probably beat one in a race, too. I think this is why the Quaker Oats People hedged their statement about beating their product with the preface “When it comes to nutrition,” but I think they should, at minimum, pretend to have more confidence in their product. At least Duolingo is willing to threaten to kill its users. Threatening to murder your users for not using your product takes real conviction, and it’s a great way to bump your DAUs. 

Of all the Thompson-isms I’ve absorbed, the one that hits me most deeply is a phrase he used in his massive piece on outrunning his past: that running is, to Thompson, a way of proving to himself that he is alive. I think that’s what pain signals to me as I run until I’m out of my depth: is my suffering merely brain states? The scenery—the trees that are roughly my height and that restless with leaves one week and dead the next—bears no mark of my exertion. The only proof that I have done anything, running in circles, is the tightness in my body and the temporary lightness in my head. 

6.21 (1:02:44):

I sometimes forget to breathe when I stretch, but I always remember it when I’m running. When I’ve “hit the groove,” I find my breath structuring itself around my steps. Four steps to an in, four steps to an out—triplets just won’t do. 

When I return, I fire up YouTube and a guy named Ash tells me to do my dynamic stretches through my phone speaker. It’s so logical: batter my body until it’s blue, massage myself and recover so I can wake up and push my limbs to their limits again. 

Somehow, in our nearly immobile travels together, Ash has not yet contorted himself into a position I cannot replicate. But today, as I’m stretching my hips and opening my knees, I’ve followed him into a pose where I look precisely like a roast chicken. I continue to hold a strong suspicion that Ash didn’t run in circles today. I didn’t either, actually—I intended to, but then I felt like seeing the distance I was running. 

Making a 10K out of this neighborhood turns my route into a sort of tree, and I have to think about it more than when I’m running in circles. And, yet, I’m stretching in the same room anyway. When I told SZ that I was running in circles, I said I was “trying to figure something out”—what I was trying to figure out was, and is, also a mystery. He joked that I must be pursuing some Sisyphean revelation. 

Perhaps that revelation—what we’re always looking for—was a kind of enlightenment, even if I won’t admit it to myself: I’ll have to disappoint, but much to my chagrin, running in circles for 6-10 miles a few times a week does not turn you into Buddha. Perhaps, as Elizabeth Daum says, we do place too many expectations on experience. The act of experiencing things is also a skill—we experience all the time, but I’m not convinced that makes us naturally good at it (what does it mean to be good at experience?). 

There’s a great essay about Proust’s theory of literature that explicates the basic separation between a novel as observational and a novel as confessional, as reflecting on and judging experience. While, in the final volume of his massive novel, Proust brings what he sees as two contradictory approaches to a literary work together, much of the content of his writing is pure observation. Maybe I thought I’d perceive something while running, something beyond mere observations.

Perhaps the entire concept of running in circles was a quest for insight, and perhaps you read this thinking I’d, paradoxically, through these in-place travails, arrive somewhere different. I ran in literal circles for many hours because running in circles felt like an apt metaphor for the direction of my life at the moment. Maybe all this has been a long way of saying: press the issue, and don’t be surprised when there’s nothing to it. And do consider running in circles for an hour or 90 minutes or however long your stamina permits—it’s surprisingly pleasant, and maybe you’ll notice something. Maybe it’ll give you something to write about.