Baristing

There is a slight twinge in the area between my shin and calf, which I have and will run on.

There is a gravity to longer races, like larger things. They hold you close and squeeze your vision and then, when circumstances and effort shift you away and your trajectory alters, the delta changes as well, and you're flung into the space between the stars, an unlight of experiential lack.

This is the not remembering, the propulsive browsing, the fearing the fear of missing out.

Which is to say, of course, that I'm back to running and eager to train for something, anything, though I don't know what.

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This is an experience I've had before, and likely, if you're reading this--and you are--one you have as well. And so it is perhaps not worth saying, except that I suspect the only reason anyone writes anything at all is the drive to share universals in a unique way, so we can all gesture and say yes, yes, it is like that, we are not alone here or in our experiences.

I could tell you that a marathon is long and hard in the same way I could tell you that Anna Karenina and Middlemarch are long and great and the Mississippi wide and the bronze burning sunset crowning it beautiful.

Books particularly strike me as similar experiences to significant races, in that one spends a great deal of time and emotional energy invested in a world that is not precisely shared by most people we interact with and so you look up and around and talk and it takes you a while to orient yourself that this is here, and not there, and in fact people don't know the contents of your mind, nor you theirs.

This, I suppose, is why book clubs have always worked, and why races are useful.

It probably also why there are a lot of books about running, and probably soon a Nobel prize winning author with one. (Admittedly, I've DNF'd races and IQ84.)