run

I actually went running this morning... for a huffy, brief ten minutes. Funny how such a thing can feel so different from its predecessor, walking. I walk for miles and miles every day, and yet all that walking prowess barely translates to one red-faced, sweaty running mile.
I'm grateful to running because once I used to do it as a prayer, running around the outdoor track at the university late in the night with nothing in my head at all. I ran all throughout a senior year that needed an escape, a calming trip outside of myself. I ran because I was in love with someone who was not there and because I had no idea what I was going to become and because the apartment I lived in housed three girls with varying degrees of diagnosed depression, and then me.
I ran because I was heavy and slow and the running that year helped me shed twenty pounds and I then wasted it all when the summer came and I was again rootless, aimless, answering office phones 40 hours a week, and answering my restless legs and fluttering mind with melted cheese and angsty sleepovers.
So what I'm saying, I guess, is that running reminds me of that time, and it's harder than I thought. I don't think I have it in me anymore to pick running as my drug of choice. Much as I'd like to, I won't ever become a Runner. I am other things. I lift weights sometimes and I try out belly dancing and yoga and I bike and sometimes I swim laps and all the time I am a walker. Kind of miss the way midnight in February felt as I jogged around an empty, well-lit track, though.