running log
how to run faster? from my notes app
Hello!
Last year, I couldn’t decide whether I’m a writer who runs or a runner who writes. Now I don’t think it matters, I don’t think that’s the question at all.
I stopped writing about my runs when it became something to check off the list of daily drudgeries and over the next handful of months, I didn’t miss writing about the running, exactly, but I missed how it made me more—for lack of a better word—present. So I’m back to it, writing something in my notes app on my phone after every run.
The words at the top of the note where I log each run say “No backwards no forwards,” (LOL this feels wincingly vulnerable to share). I don’t remember when or why I wrote those words there, in a place where I’d see them often, but I have been wanting to push myself to write from inside of my body: what felt good, or hurt, or was witnessed. I completely failed at this, of course, but I’m glad I tried. It’s funny, reading these back now, how predictable I am. The things that are always novel no matter how many times I run by them (flowers blooming, geese), my gripes, how I’m almost always in a bad mood when I set out to run and a much better one after. Annoying!!! I’m sure there’s something smart to say about writing here, but I’m not sure what it is yet. Perhaps someone else will tell us. Anyway, if you’re curious, my most recent running log is below.
01 A boat in the harbor looks like it might be on fire, there’s at first a little and then a lot of smoke coming from beneath it, but it pulls away into the Hudson, in the direction of the Statue of Liberty. I feel rushed and I run fast but not as fast as I could. There’s no line at the pizza place that always has a line. On 9th, the door with the enormous oval window has been painted red. It is spring.
02 I’m supposed to be doing a “recovery run” but I’m busy today, I keep reminding myself to slow down. It’s gray and cold but it’s still spring. D said that on our way to coffee this morning, a sluice of optimism on a Monday morning. Somehow the slate gray sky and the dingy buildings make the newly budding trees look even more alive. I’m optimistic too, running in shorts even though it’s not quite warm enough. My legs red and numb by the time I’m at the river. A green-headed duck, green lawn, all of it for once so real. Glee in the gray, wheeling through the West Village in possession of goose-pimply free will. I never quite managed to slow down.
03 Good Friday. Black sky, damp morning. A man at the first intersection I pass is planting flowers in the dark. I have such a good time out here, occasionally. I like the intensity of city runs and I like when it’s quiet too. In Chelsea, I run past a seminary that looks like a castle. Green letters on a white billboard on the West Side Highway read: THE BEAST IS RIGHT BEHIND YOU. I skirt around a guy in a Texas hat, a girl whose blonde ponytail is swinging in time to my music. I’m running fast, running far, feeling momentarily ecstatic. I’m almost laughing! The sky lightens, the fog choking the skyline. When I first typed fog I spelled it god.
04 Running because I couldn’t sleep.
05 I’ve been writing about college, watching college basketball, digging through old pictures and am feeling unzippered by nostalgia. Everyone I pass looks familiar: my old gymnastics coach, my mom’s friend, the girl I saw outside of Piggly Wiggly when I was home at Christmas. Today almost everyone is wet-faced, red-nosed, clutching a Kleenex. And smiling. It’s spring: blooms making everyone both cheerful and allergic. It’s blowy at the river, a sailboat is struggling valiantly against the wind, but despite the wind it’s so quiet. I realize I have pollen tears streaming down my face too.
06 The other day I googled the words how to run faster and felt ridiculous. How to run faster? Run faster. I felt like a baby googling how to walk, if babies could google. I ran a Fartlek today which means speed play in Swedish. The Fartlek, pronounced exactly how you think it is, always makes me think of my high school cross country team: we had one coach who could say the word seriously, make us take it seriously, and one coach who could not. I quit mid-season when the one who could not get us to take Fartlek (Fartleking?) seriously yelled at me during a confusing, chaotic practice. No, I remember thinking, no way. I’m too grown to be yelled at (I wasn’t) and I could sense she chose me as the receptacle for her frustration because I was the only girl on the team who would take it, who wouldn’t roll her eyes or make fun of her or yell back (I was), so I quit and signed up for a half marathon and started running on my own. I sort of wish I hadn’t quit. It makes me feel a weird green shame, still, when I think about it now. I regret it, quitting, in sort of a puritanical way. But it was also one of the only truly rebellious things I did as a teenager, turning in my jersey mid-season like that without asking anyone if it was okay. Maybe quitting is fine sometimes. Or maybe I shouldn’t have quit, not like that. Both things could be true, perhaps. Could they? I run the first half of the fartlek too fast and am cramping by the end but it feels good to hurt like that, to want to improve.
07 Daffodils. A man snoozing in a security booth. A big ship. A hat with the logo of an entertainment company on it. Sometimes I run and feel like I can taste heaven. Sometimes I spend 38 minutes thinking about whether or not I should have painted our bathroom door yellow instead of white.
08 Why can’t I be like everybody else, wearing blue, FaceTiming, doing sociable things on a Saturday afternoon? I can’t remember if I picked this or if this picked me. Populated is a word looping through my head. Plans. I’m reading a book about a woman who moves to an orchard, attempts to sever herself from polite society. She thinks she is lonely, but being alone in an urban sprawl, blue sky gaping open-mouthed above the colorless buildings? Worse, I think. I hate pitying myself. I always feel like this before I start my period. Right? I keep trying to let myself feel it, feel the badness, but the thing is, I don’t want to feel bad. I want to feel populated. Planned.
10 No no no no and then by the water where it’s ten degrees cooler: yes yes yes yes. A dog on a leash wrapped around the hand of a park ranger with the words goose patrol on its harness. A bright green lawn. The whole world, once I’m in the mood for it, looks like a pair of full lips. Even the waves seem rounder, more energetic.
12 I’m always excited to be home, running down the dirt roads I used to run when I was a teenager, and then the first run is never that good. The air is heavy and there are more hills than I remember. My body resistant to change on a cellular level or something. Deer, pine, a truck kicks up dust on the dirt road and it settles on my sweaty skin like glitter. I see one other person on my run. I was thinking about this last week running from my apartment to the West Side Highway, how there will never be a run in New York in which I’m totally alone. In the city, to be so alone feels unimaginable. I forget it’s possible, to a be a body moving outside but still private.
14 A hill, a hawk, a rock in my shoe. Running through a pastoral. I know it’s impossible to be without context but at the risk of sounding completely insane, lately I want to be sky, space, a stillness. A blue truck parked on the side of a road with the key in the ignition, air coming in through the open window. I want to not know about the blonde alix v. alex feud or what the phrase “lower bleph” means. Before I left home I’d seen about 14 movies, none of which would be considered “films,” and I think I was better for it. Bored but less tortured. I think we are forgetting: there are still poems and people who play sports for fun and picnic blankets. It feels good to sweat, to run down the dirt road and need a shower after. Anyway I saw a deer leap over a chain link fence this morning. I had no idea they could jump like that.
15 My favorite music to run to: the song Lady Madonna, a song that goes “I hate your favorite song, I hate the name of your dog.” GOD I wish I could write like that! Also Audrey Hobart, especially the song with the line about hot pockets. And The Kids by Lou Reed. Kings of Leon for some reason. Troublemaker by Weezer.
16 Slow and dark and starry and I don’t see a fox and I run down a dirt road and the fog and the dry leaves and a pond and my calves hurt and I didn’t sleep and—
18 I run slower in the city. And superstitiously—like if I talk about it, my conscious will rip and the shards of willpower I need will shatter into slivers so tiny they won’t work anymore. I feel this way about so many things: writing most of all, like talking about it will take anything good I might write or do away. That’s so sad, that’s such a sad way to live! It’s a perfect day, sky blue and clear and the park where I run is busy for a weekday morning. Spring break, I guess, so many children and people stopping in the middle of the path to take pictures. I can sense the runners around me getting frustrated and I feel it too but then I stop and surrender to the crowd, and whatever. I almost laugh. It’s maddening to live here and impossible and so lucky. How many places are there like this, where so much could go wrong every single day, and yet the majority of us stop and wait for the mom to finish taking the photo of her sons, pause to give directions to the subway? Okay yes it’s the morning, it’s Mamdani’s New York, I haven’t looked at my email yet today, I’m optimistic. But still, it’s nice. I don’t mind. I run slow but it’s still a run, and the sun is out, and I don’t mind at all.
Thanks for reading! You can support my writing by buying my novel anywhere fine books are sold.
wait this rocks
i loved reading this; thank you for writing it!