Running As...
a personal essay By Meera Rothman
R
unning as magic. When I was younger, my dad used to tell me the story of how he fell in love with running. He was fifteen, at a sleepaway camp deep in the Vermont woods. One night when he was – frustrated with his counselors? bored of the routine? I’d like to imagine – he ventured down the driveway, and out of the camp. There were no cars on the main road, just streetlights and houses so deep-set he could only see their windows. And sweet, sweet silence. My dad ran for miles. Just a skinny boy with no phone, tracing the light’s path forward. He says he ran every night after that (seems unlikely), and that he’d run for hours before he turned around (definitely false). My dad has a propensity for exaggerating. But I’m sure that’s how it felt, at least, and that’s how he told the story. *** My dad used to run every Saturday morning when I was growing up. It was his one indulgence,
the only fissure in the armor of my parents’ very busy, very responsible lives—a daily rhythm that consisted of rising at six, arriving at the hospital by seven, and working late into the evening on patient records, which they’d shield with their hands when I’d pass by their laptops. Somehow, they also deposited my sister and me on the bus, spread peanut butter on our sandwiches, and tucked us into bed. Then back to the computers. But on Saturday mornings, my dad would disappear from our house with the dog and return hours later, covered in mud. At the end of the only decent running trail in the suburbs is a swampy pond that you could, by very loose standards, call a swimming hole. My dad would leap into the calm, green water with our yellow lab like it was the most natural thing to do. At home, he’d squat down to clean the mud tracks on the kitchen floor, beaming and retelling stories of his best running days in San Francisco. ***
4 2 Illustration by Cindy Ren
