RUN

"I see it there: the hunger. Someday you will need to run as much as you need to breathe."

I am a runner. I have not always been a runner and the story of how I became a runner is a story for another time and place. Running has become such a part of who I am that I can scarcely imagine that it was once not integral to how I defined myself or that it has not always been so. I have actually come to believe that we are all runners, in fact. You may laugh, I realize this. But, we are. Our bodies were made for it. We are quite literally designed to efficiently endure the exertion of running for longer and further than any other animal moving across this earth. It is one of the keys to our survival. The shape of our feet, the placement of our bones, the specific ways our muscles and tendons stretch across and bind us together, even the way our skulls sit atop our spines, these are all adaptations that allow us the ability to run upright for long distances.

I do need to run as much as I need to breathe. Running has become so central to who I am that I do not think of my running as a hobby or an interest or some sort of extracurricular activity. It is woven tightly into the everydayness of my existence, very much like something as involuntary and necessary as breathing. I hear people say often that they get most of their thinking done when they run. But for me, when I am in the middle of a run, when I have loosened up and found my rhythm, my mind drifts off and meanders without me. I become conscious mostly of elemental things, the air entering and exiting my body, the thumping of my heart, and the ground ricocheting up into my limbs. It is very nearly like dreaming. Oh, do not misunderstand me, there is pain. But, one of the many things I have learned from running is that our bodies and we ourselves are capable of far more than we allow ourselves to believe. Just as pain is a part of life as much as the joy, so too is it with running. To find the place where both pain and joy meet in that thin sliver of delicate balance is to find the thing that gets you through to the end.

The quote above comes from my latest read, Running the Rift, by Naomi Benaron. I have read only one other novel about running, the classic from John L. Parker, Jr., Once a Runner, which I highly recommend whether you are a runner or not (see my list of Shipwreck Books). Both are coming of age stories, but Benaron's book is set in Rwanda in the years surrounding the 1994 genocide there. Yes, I have found yet another book about enormous human tragedy on an immeasurable scale. It is a tragedy of which I was aware, but it had never before been personalized for me, nor had I ever taken the time to investigate the full context of that event, not that it is entirely possible to understand. I must say I came to this book with high expectations and felt at first a bit let down. For lack of a better way to put it, the writing seemed a bit ho-hum for a while. As the mass killing in Rwanda in 1994 happened suddenly and in the course of a relatively short amount of time, though, so too does Benaron's book quickly wake you from the doldrums as the chaos and fear of those days begin to upend everything. It is brutal to read, of course, and it will knock the breath from you. Benaron tells the story through Jean Patrick, a young man and a gifted runner with Olympic aspirations. He must not only face the uncertainty of growing into adulthood and the questions that itself brings, but he must do so in the face of so much loss and so much suffering. Running is all he has to keep his mind about him.