Running to Stand Still (is still my favorite U2 song)
There was a time when running wasn't a euphemism in my life...
Photo Credit: Elaine Funk
When I was a teenager, I ran track as a break from playing basketball year-round. I loved the way races shut down the outside world. I ran sprints—100, 200, 4x100, and the 400 if my coach felt like watching me pass out—and the mere seconds from gun to done were as close to meditation as I got.
I remember once, as a young kid, getting scared while running as fast as I could on the elementary school playground. I stopped and looked around to make sure I hadn’t started a tornado because, in my head, it felt like I had. I wasn’t that fast, but the speed we create when we’re little makes the world feel slower in ways we are not prepared to handle.
My final competitive 200 meter race started well and ended very poorly. I was on pace to run my best time ever in my best event and maybe—maybe—beat a guy I’d been losing to for four years. Coming out of the turn, my hamstring twinged, then seized, and then tore. I fell flat on my face. The race ended, some teammates helped me off the track, and we went on to lose the overall league championship by two points. If I’d finished second, we’d have won by six. It still bothers me.
When I was in sixth grade, my brother goaded me into challenging my 43-year-old father to a foot race. We ran about 40 meters and Dad destroyed me. I only found out after the race that he had been a sprinter in college. Hindsight and all. Fun fact: I never ran the 100-meter dash faster than my father.
I coached high school track for a while. One of my favorite drills was to send the entire team on a four-mile run at the very beginning of the season. I mapped out the route and sent them on their way. Then I drove to the run’s midpoint, located near a Baskin Robbins ice cream store, bought a cone, and sat under a tree while they panted by. As they passed, I told them I wasn’t tired yet. I like to call that team bonding. You’re welcome, Cardinals.
When I run now, there’s no danger of the kind of temporal displacement I felt as a kid. I haven’t sprinted in years. If I ran the 200 now, it would have to be timed on a sundial. I still feel my hamstring, but now it’s joined by an arthritic ankle, reconstructed knee, repaired hernia, and general sense of being elderly. I’m pretty sure a kid who saw me running recently went out of his way to push the crosswalk call button for me out of altruistic concern for my wellbeing.
***
When I was 19, I woke up one morning in my dorm room with blood on my pillowcase and the acute inability to make sounds happen with my voice. I went to a specialist who sent a scope up my nose and down into my throat, grunted, sighed, pulled the scope out, and set it on the tray next to him.
“Well, you won’t be singing anymore.”
“For how long,” I asked, accustomed to taking brief breaks that let my instrument recover.
“Ever. At least in any consistent way. Sorry. You just have a poorly constructed system.”
Twenty-one years on and it still feels like getting punched in the throat to even type those words. Singing was part of my identity. I miss it every day.
What have I learned from it? That losing sucks. That I could have done everything possible to save my voice and still lost it. That I never gave singing the credit it deserved in terms of how much I needed it. That I got to do some great things because of my voice and feel, in many ways, cheated by what happened.
Mostly, I learned that I was called to do something else and that discovering who and what we are supposed to be isn’t always a rapturous experience.