***

Ten years ago, tucked in the years between our kids leaving, one by one, for university, another run stands out in memory. It was late afternoon of a rainy Sunday toward the end of September. I was no doubt trying to salvage the gloomy weekend with a loop along my trails. Just above the lake, along that southward path, I would take a flying stumble, managing to throw my right leg out with remarkable force while airborne and attempting—with no conscious marshalling of thought—to land on my feet. The attempt, however unconscious, was misguided. I landed in a heap, crashing down onto my right shoulder. Dirty, damp, teary, discouraged, and with no further to sink, I arose, only to realize that my right leg would not bear weight. Pain surged from the back of the knee to the base of my butt.

Seconds before the fall, I’d been enraptured, in the zone—charged with one of those runner’s highs that keep even us older runners lacing on our shoes. The dreary weather had only served to make that joy sweeter. Such was my state of mind as the damp root passed across my field of vision on that narrow, twisting pathway at the base of my loop. I saw the root, but my right ankle failed to catch the brain’s signals, nerve damage from my early thirties having left that right leg obstinately non-responsive to perfectly clear signals to lift. That’s how I found myself, a few long seconds later, a muddied, deflated heap.

Two months after, on a chilly Sunday in late November, I was heading back out across the meadow, at the top of my beloved trails. The snow had yet to accumulate, and the early dusk hadn’t yet overtaken the afternoon light. I was still injured but filled with happy anticipation. No runner’s high: this was a mature, measured joy.

There’s little chance of a runner’s high—not even a zen-like moment—when recuperation condemns you to alternate two minutes of running with a minute of walking, scrutinizing the digits on one’s watch with full attention. While there would be progress from week to week, my torn hamstring had asserted itself like a tattoo onto the front of my consciousness. I remember its tightness, its snakelike grip at the knee and the butt, as if taking umbrage for a moment’s abuse. And I learned from it.

***

I’ve been running for a long, long time: a lifetime, really. I took it up, in a serious, intentional way, at fourteen. The choice to run was special, a divergence from what running had been up to then: that mad dash to safety in a Steal-the-Bacon game on the lawn outside of St. Bernard’s Church, or racing with friends alongside the railroad tracks on our way home from South School on the late June day that released us into summer. The running I took up at fourteen was serious stuff: no route to greater joys, it was an end unto itself.

It’s been more than fifty years—a long, sweet (but sweaty) stretch, this relationship between me and my running. I remember, at 28, realizing that I’d been running for half my life and tossing off some wishful dream that I’d run till I was 60, 70 even. But after 65, I took the longer view. Peering ahead, I envision my mother, who at 92 still walked a mile every morning. I’ve upgraded my earlier dream: gods willing, I want to be running into my 80s.

My part will be to keep tinkering with the fine balance between what the mind and spirit need, and what the body can manage. Hold the pace to slow and steady. Crank those lazy arms harder when the uphill gets tough. Keep the eyes sharp and the mind engaged. Step high to clear tree roots and loose stones. Tune into the aches and twinges. Keep it loose. No more than two running days in a row. Warm up before and stretch after. It’s all about compromise. Gone are the hectic days of tugging double knots tight as I backed out the door, leaving kids to their supper the moment their dad returned from work, deciding my route as I approached the road.

It used to be about compulsion and perfection and straining toward goals, about personal bests. Now? It’s all about tracking, about navigating between limits and accommodations. About keeping fit and sane, and happy. Now, it’s closer to managing a temperamental syndicate—or sometimes, like coddling a cranky relative.

Why? I ask myself. Why keep striving to run (or to write, for that matter)? Running and writing: my twin obsessions. Both act to keep some sense of myself intact, to manage all that energy. The running (like writing) serves as a release valve.

***

Far back, from the fringes of adolescence, I remember watching longingly from our front porch, late afternoons, for Bobby—an older boy—to run along South Main Street. He was a track star, a loner, and my hero. I would hang around forever, waiting for him to lope past and then watching for him to return. He was tall and lanky, and moved with a loose and fluid stride. I have no memory of him standing still, or speaking, though he must have done both.

My own running would begin that same year. Memories surface, affirming the significance of this: I remember the rush, a sweet sensation of release, running down the paved back roads of Maine in the summer of Grade Ten. I could do this: alone, on my own steam, pushing myself, for myself. This was mine. An eccentricity, surely, but—unlike the nervousness, the tendency to go quiet, to hide myself—this eccentricity was more quirky than troubling; an act of strength, acceptable even.

I remember being stunned that I had this freedom. All it required was a good pair of shoes. My first pair were Adidas “Italia,” white kangaroo leather with dark green stripes. Bought with cash from my first real (as in, not babysitting) job, they were special—an indulgence—gradually stretching into a perfect fit and lasting for seasons.

Out alone, taking a long ascent in the evening light, I felt agile, resilient. I propelled myself and answered to myself. I learned to ignore the gawkers by resorting to what’s become my enduring habit of never looking into vehicles that pass, likely a natural extension of my solitary ways, that inwardness.

My other hero of running, Mr. McKinney, was a high school track coach, an ex-military man. This would be my sole venture into sport; Mr. McKinney, my first coach. To be on a team—to race on a track—took me, and my running, to a whole other level.

I remember my first official race, an 880, against girls from a rival school. Aware of Mr. McKinney at trackside as I raced past, I accelerated. It felt great! Bursting toward the finish, I was shocked, as I moved alongside her, to notice that the lead girl was crying. Shaken to think I was committing some offense, I seized up, shifted into a lower gear, and finished second. Though competition seemed fraught with peril, I loved it all the same.

***

Running has become a way to make sense of the world, to render my own peculiar relationship with a location. I can ride or drive a route six times and have only the vaguest notion of it, but I run a route once and it’s etched in memory. I seldom forget a run.

Though the act of running pulls me into the deepest reaches of mind, to nearly a dream state, it also weds me to place as nothing else does. Over the years and across this continent, I have loved running on trails or along roadways, in rain or snow, in towns or along country roads. Almost always, I run alone, although I have joyful memories of training with a cohort of teammates on the track in university, or of keeping pace with a pack in road races in Montana, in my twenties. The subsequent decade would carry me into Canada and marriage—and seasons of running in and around Kamloops, the area so new to me, as both the place and people worked their way into familiarity and fondness.

Besides my beloved trails above Heffley Lake, and those early runs along the winding roads of coastal Maine, I’ve run through several seasons and circuits while living in Upstate New York and Montana. Thinking about it, I can retrieve memories of at least one specific run from each of fifteen states and ten provinces.

Now? Mostly I’m back to running alone, maybe only two or three times a week, and almost always along those same trails I loop endlessly, and happily. Now I swim and do core exercises, ride my bicycle, and attend fitness classes—all of that in order to keep on running.

Running today is usually a pleasure, and often a trial. The gaining of distance has become an end unto itself. Speed and stamina are fond memories. Today, running requires wisdom and maturity (those boring twins). Now, the challenge is to resist obsessiveness, to restrain the competitive drive. When I do give in, the sweetness will be fleeting; a resulting injury, sadly, will endure. The clear winner as often as not turns out to be the physiotherapist. But when I do manage to strike that balance and am mid-way through a long, lovely run, I recognize and love it for what it’s always been: a simple habit of strength and independence.