Running: A Masochistic Exercise

The first scream of the alarm jolts your body awake. In that moment after the first sound and before the second, it's like you can feel yourself being forced into consciousness. Your face scrunches in distaste. Your toes curl in protest. Your eyeballs roll in their sockets, in the dark, before your lids are reluctantly pulled up.

In the dark of the room, that alarm might as well be welcoming you to Hell.

So you stumble across the room to where your phone is charging, and reach a finger out to hit "snooze". Except you don't. You swipe to turn the alarm off, because your well- rested self had, some weeks previous, named the alarm "Wake up, Fat ass".

That's rude. No one wants to be called a fat ass. But it reminds you that you have a half marathon to train for, and that today's the day your run will be stretched to ten miles. A prospect so gratifying the night before waxes horrific in the wee hours of the morn.

To avoid being a fat ass, you change, splash glacial water into your face, eat a damn banana or two, head out. Then you come back because you forgot ear buds or pants or something.

It's still dark out and the air is chill against your skin. Stretching brings as much pleasure as pain, and your joints lose their stiffness as you warm them up.

Then there is nothing else to do. You run. You fly.

When you've spent your first wind, you begin to see visions of your own death. Your lungs are asking you politely to take it easy- walk a little, Cynthia. Just a minute.

Ignore them, the saboteurs! Keep going, keep pushing. The sky begins to lighten, and you forget to listen for your own labored breaths. Your heart begins to sing, and suddenly you are like wind. Light, airy, boundless- like something wild.

The muscles in your thighs hurt, but your breathing is easy and your heartbeat free. Uphill. Downhill. Bridge. Oops, someone didn't pick up after their dog. Uphill again, made difficult by a sucky song. Downhill. A cyclist swerves around you.

The sky is aflame. Molten, bursting. You lose yourself in it, in the way it touches the ground and the trees and  the canyons. What a day to be alive.


And you've reached the end of your trail, so you stop and hear you breath for the first time. You're surprised to hear how hard you're breathing.

STRE-E-E-E-ETCH.

Running back takes hardly any time at all. Perhaps your lungs are a bit more persistent, perhaps your ass hurts something fierce. But you run with the sun and fly with the birds.

You get home and do squats until your legs give out. Which means you do five squats and go on twitter for twenty minutes.

You're done. You're mortal again. Same loser you were before.