Sunday Long Run

This post has been a long time coming - I've posted this piece on every blog I've ever had and I do it because it is essentially a part of me, and if anybody reads this thing... ever, I want to have at least one thing on here that I can truly say was poured from me as a testament to who I am... (I have recently updated it too, so its not the same as it was last year).

So, to avoid delaying what has happened so frequently before now, I give "Sunday Long Run."



The alarm rang and it was 7:00 in the morning. He lethargically removed himself from his single bed and slipped on the felt-inlayed jogging pants this time of the year required. He walked downstairs to the kitchen window to observe the blanketed white that signified this…winter was here. The thermometer read twenty-two degrees but, to his luck, the forecast showed no sign of continuing snow. With the shades of the windows in his house all casting the radiant sunlight towards the ground and the last sip of his water reassuring his hydration, he was off on his Sunday long run.

Hurdling over the barriers of snow the plows had made the previous night, he entered into the mindset of the fifteen-mile run. As he ran past the fellow morning-runners, not once did he regret deciding to run by himself. He was glad to be alone. The drudgery of repetitive day-to-day life took its toll, often times more so than his workouts did; there was something different about his long runs. Although long runs bear the misfortune of being notoriously boring, he enjoyed the solitude, taking it as a chance to gather his thoughts and relieve his mind of trivial worries. The torrents of these worries and thoughts wreaked havoc on his mind when he did not have the bitter wind against his face to awaken him to rationality; for there were inside of him demons. These inexplicable, unfathomable forces that resided within him were what tortured his consciousness with over analyzed frenzies of suspicion, doubt, and worry. It took ninety minutes of sheer physical exertion to tame these demons, to tame them into the form of harnessed rage that awoke in him the primal nature that could be heard through the malicious wheezing of a monster exploding into the last sprint of a race.

But to the inevitable detriment of his health, this beast too had to be tamed. Fortunately for him though, the long run was fraught with its own means of comfort and familiarity. The endless, rhythmic pounding of his shoes comforted the primitive instincts that told him to attack all who opposed him. But most of all, he was alone. There were no coaches, there were no spectators, and there were no adversaries. The long run gave him a feeling of absolute independence, and the freedom of mobility allowed him to go wherever he wanted to. He enjoyed the isolation, he enjoyed the distance, and the monotony! How he thrived on the monotony! He even enjoyed the cars, because with each one that passed by he could play the role of narrating his own life.

“Why on Earth is he doing that?!” the cars would ask.

“Because I’m the most dedicated son-of-a-bitch you’ve ever seen,” he would retort.

These small, triumphant, hypothetical scenarios, where in every turn the confrontation took, he could deliver the most devastating quip, the most disarming one-liner, and the most profound, inspirational proverb, gave him the inert confidence that allowed him to endure the heckling of ignorant car passengers. He thrived on the thought that, to them, he was just a nameless icon, inspiring a newfound respect for all those other anonymous emblems of perseverance.

He signaled to the automotive community that he was turning left, and passed by his former high school. A plethora of memories, both incredible and bleak, surrounded this building; his first girlfriend, the exact spot of his first kiss, the track where he had set his share of school records, the patch of snow on top of the ground upon he’d had his first and only fight, and the menacing section of the student parking lot where he had lost his first girlfriend to bitter jealousy. All of these wrought their own signature sensations but it was this sound that sent his stomach into a tortuous pattern of aerobics. With every echo of this sound a shot of adrenaline would choke his gut with emotion, producing yet another wave of jolts. He looked to his east and saw the beautiful and unpredictable formations of Canadian geese, honking their marvelous choruses of honks. Back and forth to each other, at each honk he increased his pace, inspired by the occurrence, racing, but only against himself, striding out every emotion in a fit of spontaneity. He was smiling now, for this was why he enjoyed the long run so very much. The complete and utter solitude of purging one’s body of all negativity, becoming one with the majesty of nature, never having to worry about anybody but himself, and the pain, oh the pain that so gloriously signifies everything that he lives for, because this human being is invincible!


He was flying.


It was as if he had become part of the migration and was now racing through the air, following his companions to the bitter end, not caring which way they went. Through the fields where corn used to so proudly stand, past the barn where the grade school kids had played baseball with friends, past the rock quarry, barren and closed for the season. He flew past the neighborhoods that housed oh so many stories of suburban Halloween horror, and past the football fields where the desperately eager to please sons of fathers, long aloof of their children, fought to maintain their rights as kings of the mountain.

He came upon a partially frozen creek and bounded over it without a second’s hesitation. Nothing could interrupt the fluid perfection of his stride, the effortless glide of leg past leg and the skilled pattern of breath that was barely above a whisper.
Down past the creek he entered into the enormous public park that was the location of the infinite number of grueling practices his former coach had pressed upon him and the rest of the team. The many times he had exhausted his body’s every resource in this park were now buried by the foot of snow that had fallen the night before, and because of this, he was hardened against all the feelings of pain and suffering that would have otherwise emanated from the ground. To this portion of his memory he was cold and distant, for the surrealism of ever pushing his body to the point of submission seemed beyond anything he was capable of. He did not want to experience that pain again; it was more unbearable than anything he could remember.

Yet at this he unconsciously turned onto the road that lead back to his home and in doing so he felt a small droplet of water form in his eye. The road that held as much familiarity as his very own home had become a blurred vision of disillusionment. His breathing became less fluid and he began to periodically graze the inside of his leg with an unwary stride. He tried to choke back his emotions but in doing so only caused them to erupt more. His lungs forced out a cough and his breath now contained a wheeze. Why was this happening to him? He didn’t know how to deal with whatever had come over him and out of impulse did the only thing he knew how. He was a little over a mile from his home but the primal demon that resided within him tore out through his heart and began to sprint for his front door.

His arms started to stray from their positions next to his chest and his legs began to lose their perfected form, but he still sprinted onward. His breathing took on an almost panicked quality and he noticed for the first time the sweat trickling down his forehead. The wind that had played so little a factor at the beginning of the run now tore savagely at the patches of his body that had the misfortune of being exposed. The tears had begun to flow, but he could not for the life of him understand their origin. He could taste a subtle metallic substance in the back of his throat, which had become chapped from the repeated gulps of the cold, dry air. With every step he took, he felt as though there were some unseen force pushing back against him, some inexplicable being holding a locked arm forward bearing a shield that he could not overcome.

Then there emerged from his mouth something that surprised even the incubus holding the barrier before him. Out of the depths of his body an abhorrent scream, more, a roar, shook the very foundations of the earth beneath him, and it was then that nothing could stand before him. With an explosion of animosity, of sheer malice, he felt the very essence of his soul forsake all physical limitation. The sound of his heart in his ears, his lungs groping for oxygen, his eyes no longer able to hold a steady focus, he blazed onward with a prayer for numbness that wouldn't come. White patches began to encroach on the already faint sight of the road before him until every time he blinked he was blinded by the absence of color, the absence of rationality.

The last footsteps he took were more closely akin to phantoms than that of actual steps; whispers when sounded together with his tortured gasps for breath, the needles they evoked with each meeting of the ground never allowed him to ignore that every pore on his body was screaming with pain, a pain that he had all but banished from his memory. It was at this point that his world became quiet, a black and white projection of false reality - it was like a movie played without sound and he was a detached and impartial viewer. He saw himself crying and sprinting to nowhere, but in his eyes he saw something else. He saw relief, resolution, confusion, and anger. He saw the realization that this day's run had shown him things he had never hoped to see, it let him experience things as if for the first time, it had broken him and restored him tenfold. It gave him something he may never be able to feel again...

Upon reaching the sidewalk that directed visitors to his two-bedroom town house, his body collapsed completely. He rose up to his knees and coughed a speckle of blood into the snow. Wheezing, he dragged himself inside and his muscles buckled under the weight of a body they had just carried a mile’s distance in less than four minutes. Passers-by would later recall that he was running the same speed as the cars that curiously overtook him, and that they could have sworn the very sky above them had opened up with the echoes of his deafening scream.

For what seemed like hours, the community that had witnessed this phenomenon stood statuesque and in silence; it was as if an atomic bomb had been detonated and this was the sound of a nuclear silence. The only sound was that of the belabored breathing coming from a runner who had long ago proven to himself, and to the world as he knew it, the sheer enormity of human spirit, of human emotion and desire. With quivering legs and a taste of blood in his mouth, this runner resigned himself to the inexplicable…the beyond.

For on that day, he had run with the angels.