Time to No Thing

1) No things but in time.

2) I-no-I running yesterday-no-yesterday up the mountain-no-mountain through the trees-no-trees for an hour-no-hour until I-no-I seeing the view-no-view: city-no-city land-no-land things-no-things matter-no-matter.

3) Running breathing running thinking running quieting running ascending running turning running cresting running descending running grounding running treeing running rocking running mountaining running birding running squirreling running deering running winding running watering running sunning running birthing running dying running disappearing running changing running beginning running timing running stopping running resuming running.

"Sneakers"

When my sister and I were kids we had friends who lived on the next block. One day they came home with a cassette tape they wanted to play for us. When I heard the opening song, “Sneakers,” I felt like it had been made just for me.

Maybe we all felt that way. That spring, we played “Sneakers” every day as we ran laps around their foyer, boombox in the center of our track blasting out lyrics I’ll never forget:

When I run, I run, I run, I really flyyyyyyyyyy

When the song ended we caught our breaths as the tape rewound. Then we hit play again on what was effectively another track repeat. Whole afternoons passed this way.

How old was I that year? Maybe seven. And how many more years would it be till I relearned what I knew then? That the body is where joy lives. That fun is a renewable resource. That art can be at once fully personal and fully communal.

I don’t know if the neighbor kids ever took up running again the way we did as kids. I don’t know if those afternoons meant to them what they meant to me. We lost touch years ago. But this year for Christmas my sister gave me a vinyl record by a band whose name I didn’t recognize: The Tickle Tune Typhoon. Curious, I put it on the turntable. A few new notes into the first song I was clearing space in the hallway and telling my son to get ready. It was time for us to fly.

First to Last

The pleasure of watching sports is rarely about the outcome and almost always about preparing yourself to appreciate moments of poignancy when they occur as they will without warning.

I was reminded of this and of track’s abiding virtue at a recent dual meet at the local high school. The winning runner in the girls 1,500m had crossed the line in about 5:40. I had clapped encouragingly alongside my wife and son and most of the fans in the sparsely populated bleachers. Some of the runner’s friends and classmates had called out her name as they cheered. Good for her. But as the second and third runners finished the stadium had returned to murmuring conversation punctuated by a regular and respectful applause for the trailing runners as they came across over the next minute or two.

It could have gone on winding down this way until the next race began, except that for anyone paying attention to the whole field there was still one runner with a full lap to go. She was so far behind it was as if she were in a different race. And, really, she might have been for all the chance she had to move up to even second from the back.

The real competition in track, you will sometimes hear, isn’t the field but the clock. But as pure as that claim may sound it’s still one step removed from the truth. You don’t need a clock. Your competition in track is yourself. Not your abstract self or your best-ever self but your actual self on a given day. The test of a race is whether you can rise to the challenge of performing the best possible version of yourself in that moment. Your effort must be your best—but best is always relative.

There was no pity in my tears for the last-place runner as she rounded the final curve. Because I have rounded a hundred final curves myself, because among the days when I have not done my best there have also been days when I have, because I was watching the race closely so that I might have some luck explaining it to my son, because the rest of the crowd had not entirely forgotten her, because moments of true appreciation are profound, because the gods sometimes bless us, I watched with pride as the last runner came down the homestretch.

After the race, I leaned over and told my son that what makes track special is that the runner who finishes last is doing the exact same thing as the runner who finishes first. It doesn’t get any better than that.