When my marriage began crumbling, my dream of a perfect life got crushed. I had nowhere to turn. I was living in Glen Cove, Long Island, in a house I couldn’t afford, living a life that didn’t feel like my own. I commuted to New York City on the Long Island Railroad, which delivered thousands of men in matching suits to their jobs in a two-hour ordeal each way.
Maybe the idea of running away from everything got me to take up running. One night, after an endless commute, I put on a pair of sneakers and ran to a nearby junior high school track and did a couple of laps and collapsed. The next night, I did exactly the same. Forty years later, I am still running. I have always loved the start of my run, happy to get to the halfway mark and then the push to finish. The absolute best part is the minute or two at the end, feeling a fleeting sense of accomplishment, while the heart and breath slowly return to their normal rhythm.
All of us started running as soon as we could, mixed somewhere between our first steps and a full on walk. The look on every running child’s face is one of excitement and joy, like “Look at me.” I think running has everything to do with freedom and I have no idea how long ago this got implanted in our DNA, but it is primal.
Wherever I have been in the world, my shoes, shorts and shades were never left behind. I ran the New York City Marathon in 1982 and I ran it from beginning to end, without stopping. When I travel to a new location, my first thought upon arrival is where I will run the next morning. One of the greatest feelings is running alone. It is all me, stripped down to the sound of my breath and my feet rhythmically striking the surface underneath.
I am likely guilty of the illness of routine, which I may like a little too much for my own good. Inflexibility takes routine into rigidity and that just doesn’t work in a world of curvy lines. There was a long period of time when I would run six days a week, always resting on Sunday. I ran in snow, rain and on all sorts of surfaces, from the shoulder of eight lane highways to mountain trails in the Rockies. I have become a little more discriminating in terms of weather and will take an extra day off just because. There are now weeks where I may run only five days! I may have run on a handful of Sundays over the forty-year span of this mania, but that’s it.
With the exception of that brief time in Glen Cove, I transitioned to a morning runner and I only run in the AM and it is always the last thing I do before I move into the day ahead. No matter how early the day’s activity starts, my running precedes the starter’s gun. Yes, if I have a 6AM flight, I bag the run, although years ago, I’d be doing my roadwork at 4AM if I had to.
One thing has never, ever changed and that is my run always begins the moment I walk out the door of wherever I wake up. The long ago marathon was the only time I ever broke the yoke of pattern, taking a bus to Staten Island for the start. I have walked out of hotels in Roatan and Tel Aviv, tents in the Rockies and Maya Centre in Belize and started running. It is what I do.
My outfit of choice is a pair of shorts, socks and a relatively inexpensive brand name shoe like Saucony. The shoes get replaced every six months and the old one gets recycled into my walking around wardrobe. Sunglasses have always been a necessity and aside from cutting the sun, they reinforce the feeling of being the lone runner, making me invisible to others. Every now and then I run with unshaded eyes, but I don’t like it.
Before coming to Kauai, there were reluctant garment, concessions to winter and never usually enough, because I didn’t like the feeling of being covered, separating my skin from the air I ran through. I remember running in Prospect Park in Park Slope Brooklyn. In fact, I was living there when I ran that much written about marathon. In winter, I’d run back to my ground floor, railroad apartment with icicles on my eyelashes.
The more I write about my special relationship with running, the more I want to call it a passion, rather than some neurotic, rigid behavior pattern. It has forever been a love/hate duel that plays out each time. I have always felt that if you are going to run, you push yourself up against giving out every time. I don’t know how many times I have felt like walking, so I could catch my breath and I have run through it because you can’t walk if you are a runner.
I am no fan of hills and there have been times when I found myself running up hills, convinced they would never end and I’d just give out, then recycle my breath in a walk and keep going up. Running back down on the return is no consolation either. I remember that experience in Navajo country one winter morning and when I got back to the warmth, I felt incredible.
When I first started, my sons were around two and five. Often, I would take them with me to that junior high school track. I would set them up in the grassy infield with some toys and then I’d run the track. Both of my boys have found ways to express their own athleticism and it has given me a quiet inside smile. I started running in my early thirties and I was not an athletic kid. My boys are in their forties now. Andy was always a pretty good athlete, playing baseball, basketball and soccer. Today, he runs and does that kill yourself cross fit stuff. Danny was a cross-country runner and today rides his bicycle miles and miles, all over Israel.
I have run on thousands of days and everyone has been different. Each morning, when I take my first few strides, I reintroduce myself to the road ahead. I’ve been running a long time.