drop your other shoe
How do you know when it’s time to run?
I’ve been running on a treadmill. Literally. Instead of trailrunning across mountain foothills, I’ve been walking down city sidewalks to a downtown gym. There’s nothing wrong with working out in a gym – it’s just that I’m not a gym rat by nature. I’m a nature rat, in fact, when it comes to running.
It’s so hard to realize what you’ve gotten yourself into until you get yourself out. Start getting yourself out, at least: start looking over your own shoulder, seeing where you are, where you’ve been. Get some perspective.
In the locker room, I finished changing from my work clothes into my workout clothes. I sat on the wooden bench just like in the old days, getting ready for basketball practice, softball practice, soccer practice, track practice. Leaning over, I pulled my laces snug and tied a double knot for the twenty-thousandth time.
Twenty-thousand days is just over fifty-four years. Even accounting for babyhood and barefoot days as a child, that shoelace figure is bound to be low.
I know the squeak of my soles on the wooden basketball court intimately, the feel of a cinder track from a rubber track under thin running shoes, the softness of the grass on the soccer field, or digging that back toe into the dirt of the batter’s box, ready, watching for the pitch.
I stood and locked my adult life into the narrow locker, giving the dial on the combination lock a half spin with the practiced flick of my thumb and fingers. As if I didn’t care about ever opening it again, ever retrieving my badge and work keys and the circling weeks of dissatisfying responsibilities moving ever closer to a year. To year after year. I filled my water bottle, then turned and walked to the treadmill.
I start here, I end here, each workout at the gym. Step onto the black rubber loop, hit the Start button, and the machine begins moving under my feet. It always starts too slow; I always find myself annoyed and kick up the speed to my pilgrimage walking pace, arms moving, chest forward, head high.
But it’s not a pilgrimage; my backpack is at home, unused on a shelf in my closet. My walking stick stands idle in a corner. My back is unnaturally light at this pace, and I always feel off-balance.
This day was no exception. And like each day on the treadmill, I brushed off my unease by turning up the pace again. Twelve-minute mile…eleven-minute mile…ten. As the speed increased, I took a deeper breath, adjusting.
The point where my eyes usually landed when I ran outside was inhabited by the red digital readout showing my mileage, pace, calories burned, heart rate. I lifted my eyes; I read the brand name of the treadmill.
I lifted my eyes further. The gym was walled with mirrors. In them I could see my running shorts, moving smoothly like flowing water. I settled my gaze and watched my legs run, and run, and run, these legs that had taken me so many places, that had traveled so far. I watched the muscles pulse and contract, over and over. I felt my heart beating.
I reached forward and adjusted the settings: nine-and-a-half. I looked up over the top of the digital screen and straight ahead. An old, familiar face watched me from the mirror, breathing methodically. Still running, I straightened the angle of my head, as if greeting myself. I noticed how my shoulders remained at different heights, one more forward than the other. I tried to adjust, but it was as if the arms were attached by different mechanisms at different points on each side. My hips do not match either, I know this; my yoga teacher years back helped me to see my imbalance. It’s become interesting to me now, the ways my body has been twisted and reformed by my living. One shoulder dropped from all the years carrying my work bag to the office. Hips distorted by childbirth. Pelvis torqued by the internal scar tissue of surgeries.
Nine. I watched with detached satisfaction as the strong muscles between my shoulders and neck flexed as I moved into a full run. My hamstrings began to remind me of my age. My quads said we could do a little more.
Eight-and-a-half. I like to push myself as I finish my warm-up runs, even if only for a few minutes. Without cues from the natural world, every quarter mile feels like forever on a treadmill, instead of marking a distance so short I’d hardly notice, if outside.
When my stride became a bit uneven, I felt I was probably nearing the end. I looked at the mileage: .84. Unbelievable, how far I had not come. How could I possibly be under one mile? I snorted like a tiny bull and kicked back into gear, frustrated and confined, by my age, by my life, by my job, by this gym, by this treadmill I was running. I pushed myself back into a rhythm and willed myself not to count the minutes. I counted the tenths and hundredths of a mile instead, until .99 kicked over to 1.00. I hit the Stop button. The machine read my heart rate. 179 quickly dropped to 169, to 159, to 135. I huffed, irritatedly shaking my head, then hopped down and took a drink from my water bottle.
It wasn’t the mile or the pace that was hard. It was the treadmill.
The feeling of running on a treadmill is heavy-footed, no matter the pace. Unnatural. It’s the feeling of forcing yourself to do something because you think you should. For me, it feels awkward and frustrating.
Running has always been a way for me to leave my life behind, whether running away from home as a kid, running as part of a team as a lonely adolescent, or trailrunning after work to shake the dead weight of professional restraint. But my running always circled back to where I’d started.
Twenty-thousand days, and I was still running in circles. Twisting my shoulder to wipe my sweaty face on my T-shirt sleeve, I decided I was training for my next journey, my next adventure. Or maybe I remembered; I feel like I keep having to remind myself who I am, why I’m here, what it is I want to do with my life. I keep running the same loop, over and over, working a day job until it works me into the ground, finding the strength and the stamina to keep on running, finally hopping off the treadmill in a leap of faith mixed with huffy frustration at myself – for continuing to expend so much energy going nowhere, when I could have been out in the world all along.
I needed to use running to prepare me to walk away. Which is what I have been saying for six months now. Which I was saying for six years before that. I keep leaving the world of full-time work and then coming back, circling back to where I was before. I keep walking away and then running back to security.
I was thinking all these things after my workout, after weight lifting to build bone mass and balanced support, after resistance training for core strength and quick response, after a cooldown run, hoping to cool my agitation. I sat on the bench in the locker room and took a long drink from my water bottle. I leaned over and untied the double knots, slipping off my old shoes. The tread was virtually gone, the soles nearly worn through, the pavement and the treadmill taking their toll. I stood and stretched in front of my locker, then holding my shoes in one hand, I tried to turn the dial on the lock with the other. The lock swayed and the dial balked. I reached up to set my shoes on top of the locker so I could use both hands – when suddenly, I felt one of my shoes slip from my fingers. I heard a muffled flump.
It didn’t make sense. I looked up and saw only one shoe on top of the locker. I looked at the floor around me, but of course it was empty; I hadn’t seen anything fall.
Taking off my socks, I climbed barefooted onto the bench and stood on tiptoe, peering up onto the top of the lockers.
What seems solid, bound and sealed, often is not. I keep forgetting this ancient truth, and Life keeps reminding me with recurring lessons. How far I have not come.
As the row of lockers met the corners of the locker room, they didn’t fit exactly. So the gym owners had simply angled a couple lockers to cut each corner, and braced them with thin slats screwed across the backs. Leaving triangular gaps just the right size for a shoe to drop, all the way to the floor behind, impossible to recover.
I stood on the locker room bench, looking at my one shoe atop the locker. I imagined climbing onto the lockers – but to what end? I had no tool to hook my fallen shoe. And suddenly, I noticed that it was 8:00pm on a Friday night. The gym was only staffed until 7:00; after that, 24-hour access was maintained by security cameras and by scanning your electronic fob at the locked doors. I realized the man who had been lifting free weights had already left. Everyone had gone out or gone home. I was completely alone.
Up on my toes on the locker room bench, I straightened my cocked head, then hopped down. I started laughing. Spinning the dial on the padlock, I swung the locker open wide and took out my towel, heading to the showers. I found myself humming, steam surrounding me like mountain mist as I took time to loosen and roll my neck and shoulders under the soothing hot water. I turned off the shower, and still the gym was silent except for the sounds of the turning fans. I dried off and got dressed, then scrubbed at my hair with the towel before tossing it into the basket across the room.
Two points. I put on my socks, and my old right shoe, chuckling as I saw myself tie the lace in a double knot out of habit. Then I put both of my workout socks on over my regular sock on my left foot. I looked like I’d just gotten a cast put on, or maybe just gotten one removed. It felt like that – like getting to learn to walk after a healed injury, a little uneven, a little awkward.
But then, tossing on my hoodie and my rain jacket, I picked up my bag and marched resolutely across the empty gym and out those locked doors. One shoe on, one shoe gone. Forever. One foot in this world, one foot striding into the one I want.