Dispatches from the middle

There’s something ineffable about the joy running brings. Something that defies articulation. It’s the most intimate way to move through one’s environment; it puts us in touch with instincts we’re dangerously close to neglecting completely; it’s power and vulnerability. Each run is new. Each run is a victory. The culture, the creativity, and the crazy all fascinate me. The joy has me hooked.

I celebrated my 30th birthday last month and a good friend gave me a gift that reminds me of this joy every day. It’s a page from a magazine, framed, which shows a collage of faces, photos taken of people as they finished the Honolulu marathon. It’s a page of determination, exhilaration, pain of a sort one can’t really understand until one’s experienced it, pride, exhaustion, and complete, unabashed joy. However trite all this may sound, it’s something I want to explore and it’s something I want to find language for as, to me, there’s still something quite ineffable about it all.

So eff it! Here we go!