solitary particles

I think that maybe if I write some words, my legs won't hurt so much. Maybe that's what builds up in my muscles, in the ligaments around my knees, in the crooks of my ankle joints--words. Maybe all the running shakes them loose, and they bonk around in my frame making messes and swelling things up. Maybe I'm running to distract myself from writing. Maybe I write to distract myself from participating. Maybe it's just my big hairy ego that gives such a big dumb crap about running a marathon. Maybe my big hairy ego is a big stupid asshole.

Maybe I haven't been stretching enough. Maybe I got overly confident about the glucosamine and the Zyflamend. Maybe I thought my knees were a-double-okay, and so I stopped rolling out my IT bands. Maybe over-confidence makes you all stiff and sore and slow and dumb. Maybe confidence is best balanced with a little healthy fear and trembling. Maybe people should stop giving insecurity such a bad rap.

Lonely horrible miserable business today's run was. So cold and wet and spitty. What I think I have loved so much about running, even the long, tough ones, is the liberation of flinging myself into the universe. Shoes and music, white lines, yellow lines, cars carrying strangers. I don't have to talk to anybody, don't have to constantly examine the things that come out of my mouth or the banners that loop through my head. Don't have to read anybody else, except drivers and whether or not they're going to barrel over me. (I have learned that there are people right here in my city who truly do not care whether I live or die. I'm sure I must have known this before, but when SUVs push you into ditches, it's surprising.)

But what I think is peculiarly true about the things we love the most is that they are the most delicate. These are the things with the greatest potential to shift and turn, to become the things that hurt us the most. Maybe that's not right. Maybe they are as they are, and we are the ones who shift and turn. Maybe that's not quite right, either. Maybe the things we love most are as colored squares on a Rubic's cube, and it's a simple case of circumstantial rearrangement. The blue used to be next to yellow, then the cube turned, and the blue--still blue--sidled up next to red.

I'm not sure that makes sense.

At any rate, today, liberation, me, my shoes, yellow lines, white lines, strangers in cars, felt vulnerable and menacing. Something in my left ankle exploded. My knees felt stiff. My hands went numb (Note to self: Gloves.). Every layer of clothing was soaked and chilled. I think when the body hurts, it's easy to forget it's being driven by soul, and that soul is hard-wired to everyone and everything else's soul. That is to say, I think sometimes when everything hurts, it gets much too easy to feel like a solitary particle vulnerable to the elements. And I don't like that very much, if you want to know the truth.