 |
In my running days, when I’d start in the fall to
hit my winter comeback trail, leading to a race I loved
to run in the spring, I began to notice, in my sixties,
that each winter I’d make it a little less far back
up the old comeback trail, that there were heights
of it I’d probably never reach again.
And that was okay, I’d think to myself. Everyone gets older,
and running-wise, I’d known for some years I was
slowing down, even if it didn’t feel like it most of the time,
and even though I wasn’t a math and numbers person
who always watched the clock.
Now, in my late seventies, with a knee the meniscus
is wearing out in, keeping me from running much at all,
I feel each winter that I’m moving less far back
into each new spring, like the springs are pulling away
from me like a group of younger, faster runners,
like my spring will probably get here but I’ll somehow
belong less in it, that I’ll arrive in it less sweaty and
exuberant, that I’ll mostly just be able to walk in it,
and then maybe only sit and watch it.
All this is just a feeling, of course, just one of those things
runs everything even though I’m conditioned to think
my thinking mostly does, which it doesn’t.
It’s those feelings, the modern tip ends of our animal
intuitions, that are what actually run things, the clicking
body stopwatch I resist, even though the numbers don’t lie,
because I think somehow they maybe just might, because
we humans invented them, the numbers, and because we’ve
assigned them to every damn thing, like pain levels and
fat grams, and because we can calculate any distance we’ve
traveled, and manipulate the standings in our polls. The
point is, the comeback trail will only come back so far, and
then one day—like a diminishing echo—it won’t come back
at all, and by then, maybe I won’t have time to feel too sad
about what’s coming back and what’s never going to.
|
|
