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It’s difficult to imagine a time when the notion of jogging as a form of exercise or recreation was a very foreign concept. It wasn’t until the 1970’s when running gained popularity, and a man named Jim Fixx is credited with writing the first book about running which helped the sport take off.
By happenstance, there’s a hardcover copy of this 30-year-old Complete Book of Running in our school’s library. It is an enthusiastic 300-some-odd page tome dedicated to his love of running. In the book, he hypothesizes about the needs that are fulfilled from forcing your body forward. Fixx mentions the need for movement; the need for alternations of stress and relaxation; the need for mastery over ourselves; the need to indulge ourselves; the need to play; the need for self-assertion.
Fixx also addressed our need to lose ourselves in something greater than ourselves; the need to mediate; and what seems most important- the need to live to our own rhythms.
Ya’ll wonder why my running has improved so much this past 18 months- two pairs of running shoes worth.
My knees are gonna go on strike: 77 minutes -> 11K.
Hot damn, not so bad for a kid with asthma, bad knees and weak ankles.
Now I await the wrath of cranky knees. It won’ t be pretty.
It’s almost 4AM and I just got back from a 49-minute run. This tells you two things about me: I’m a night runner and I only like to run at uneven intervals that are not in the 5s, 10s or 15s.
It may also tell you something else: I’m out of it. That everything is off kilter and I find myself fatigued beyond recognition. When I’m not in that building on 20A MM Ali Road, I am not working. Instead my find myself immersed in obsessing with dressmaking, graphic design and writing. There’s also a fair amount of daydreaming, mostly about what pair of shoes I’ll be wearing with which dress for whatever occasion.
This job has taken so much from me emotionally and mentally that I feel as though I’ve been forced to clutch onto what I have left of myself, to save it from further degradation. And so I spend those moments in front of a sewing machine, Photoshop or my journal.
It’s like I’m blindly feeling my way around in an empty, pitch-black room hoping to bump into myself.
Our new apartment does not like me:
My left middle finger was slammed into a door last night. A third of it is black, it’s as swollen as a finger can be and for the first minutes after the accident, it felt like a mousetrap was hanging from the tip.
Gnats everywhere. They are attracted to light, so when I lay in bed watching The Office on my laptop, the little bugs land on my screen and crawl around. I’m about 99% certain that one flew into my mouth the other night and I swallowed it.
Other bugs and spiders are hanging out too. They like to bite me.
The fan in my room broke two days after being installed. Sounds innocuous enough, except that I live in the subcontinent and I have two windows- one that faces a brick wall a few feet away and one that has an unobstructed, direct view into the setting sun to the west. This means that my bedroom feels about 8 degrees warmer* than any other part of the flat. (*This is an approximation because I am a woman, not a thermometer despite what scienticians have implied.)
My right knee is still wonky. I think I have ITB syndrome, an injury I sustained from that massive trek in Nepal. I miss running. I plodded along on the new treadmill upstairs for about 17 minutes before my knee started to activate my pain sensors which do not have the luxury of being numbed.
Back to the days of no-hot-water. Hygienic standards be damned.
I have a cavity.
It’s not wide or long enough, or at least it’s smaller than we’re used to. I rolled off it the first week I pounded along on it. The treadmill, its narrow black rubber band turns continuously and carries my feet backwards. The treadmill, an unlikely friend, has become both a refuge from, and metaphor of, my life here.
I go to it when I have nowhere else to go, and there aren’t many options to begin with. On an average workday, I don’t have time or inclination to leave the building and end up traversing the same six floors ad nauseam. It’s akin to riding an elevator, you move up and down but you’re still in the same spot. The treadmill is stationary too, but at the very least my body feels like its moving.
One of the two treadmills is positioned in front of a wall of mirrors. I’m not a fan of watching my face slowly redden, so my eyes tend to rest on the reflection of my feet. I watch my overpriced running shoes glide backwards, slipping away from under me, over and over and over again. My nerves are stretched and taut, like the vinyl band that rolls beneath me. Luckily, the treadmill has a stop button. My days do not.
If anyone ever tells you that working as a volunteer teacher, for a start-up university program, in a developing country, with minimal experience and training, without hot water (still), was going to be hard work- you’d be wise to heed those words. There are moments where I find myself nickel and dime-ing time from the universe, in a vain attempt to keep whatever superficial semblance of sanity I have left.
It hit me, that perhaps I’ve entered an unhealthy work cycle while I was doing some yoga stretches after a short run. I was on my feet and hands, pushing my bottom towards the ceiling in the downward dog position. My head hung low and the muscles along the back of my leg felt a slow burn. This is a time for deep meditative breathing and to allow my body the space to rebuild itself as it formed an inverted “V”. Instead, I found my eyes narrowed in on a grammar point as I had three grammar textbooks splayed between my two outstretched arms. This was my compromise with time, me multitasking in the most desperate way.
If anyone ever tells you that it’s nearly impossible to learn, and figure out how to teach, a grammar point while doing yoga, don’t question them. But perhaps question how you got to that position and why you thought it was a good idea in the first place.
Television rots minds, smothers brain cells with apathy and erodes attention span. But apparently there are still populations of folks who are satisfied with watching shadows stretch across dusty pavement as the sun arcs across the sky. These folks can watch grass grow, or, in the case of this morning, watch me run on a treadmill.
The Access Academy houses a gym facility, roughly the size of my old bedroom in Portland, equipped with two treadmills, a stationary bike, rolls of yoga mats, some dumbbells and a bo-flex-like weight machine. Since I haven't gone on a serious run in a month, I set the timer for 40 minutes and began jogging on the narrow rubber band. I left the door open to let air and sunlight into the room, but didn't expect to find an audience instead.
The gym is alongside the room where the housekeeping staff meets in the morning. As they began to trickle in, to put on their long, red work shirts over their kameezes, they would curiously peer in on me. As more of housekeepers showed up, more gathered in the doorway. So many of the women were crammed into the room that they were blocking the light.
They sat and watched me run on a treadmill for a good 20 minutes- almost the time of an entire episode of an American sitcom. Me, and my short legs with special running shoes, is almost as good as an episode of Out of this World (you know, the show about the girl who is half alien and her pops was this weird crystal candy dish thing). I couldn't fathom how anyone could watch someone jog on a treadmill for so long. Whenever I wiped my brow or scratched my cheek- it felt like I just created a new story element in this unfolding saga. And I tried really hard not to fall. Because I slid off the thing a couple nights ago and I have two gnarly bruises on my elbows to show for it.
Eventually, their boss showed up, a stern man in a button up shirt and khakis. He looked at them with furrowed-brow authority and the housekeepers slowly filed out of the gym. One of the women tried to shut the door, but I asked her not to. I still wanted the sunshine and some of their eyes still peeked in.
