The past week has been a blur. Hell, that might be an understatement. Each day feels progressively more like a clusterfuck than the last, an impressive feat when every day feels like peak calamity already. Traditions once as much of a given as death and taxes–March Madness, the Boston Marathon, Coachella–have gone dark quicker than Donald Trump can tweet. Everybody’s on edge; there’s no worse feeling in the world than having no control whatsoever, and right now the whole world is feeling that learned helplessness.
With that backdrop, running seems relatively insignificant. Who cares about mileage and training when an actual pandemic is afoot? But for me and many others, it represents an iota of control we still have over our own lives. Sure, they can stop us from going back to school (and with good reason, I’m obviously not debating any of these measures). They can stop us from traveling anywhere. They can stop us from attending sports games and concerts. What they can’t take from us, however, is our running.
For those beautiful moments we run every day, we forget that we’re living in perhaps the most uncertain times thus far in our lives. Every sensation associated with running–the pain, the adrenaline, the feeling of seemingly floating on air–feels the exact same way it did before any of this happened. And that’s the beauty of running. They can take just about anything from me, but damn it, they can’t take my running. It’s the nostalgia for better times, the self-medication to make me forget (if only for a brief second), the one thing I can control right now in an otherwise unpredictable world.
Let’s fast forward the clock to September. Everything won’t be completely back to normal: How could it after something like this? But given everything that occurred, we’re as close to normal as we could’ve possibly imagined. Students are returning back to school, while adults are remembering what a physical workspace feels like. And we get back to campus, reminiscing over the good, the bad, and the ugly that we’ve felt over the past few months. We lament how the careers of our seniors ended so unceremoniously–if that was the end for them, they deserved a hell of a lot better. We prepare for another cross-country season, with everyone greatly anticipating it to get back to some sense of normalcy. Most of all, though, we thank running. It might just be sixty minutes each day. But that hour gave us power, in a time when we seemed powerless to do anything.
Contemporary American Poultry 