Night Running

With the black skies of winter now firmly pressing down on me, it's safe to say that come 8pm I am dying to get out of the house and feel some fresh air, some life. It's been about 2 years since I've ran regularly but last night the natural desire, drive and instinct all came back to me in a burst of adrenaline. I had to go, get out and run as far and as fast as my feet could take me. I wrote this shortly after I came back, (on a slight serotonin high so please embrace the poetry I conjured out of just going for a short run).

Tonight I ran

I ran into the black night

Furiously, determined

Chasing my demons away

Under a starry chandelier.

Running used to be my escape

When I run there are no headphones, just the rhythm of my feet hitting the floor and my breathing fluctuating.

There are no walls, no blocks, no boundaries, my feet can take me wherever I wish. My mind isn't focused on anything but the finish line, my mentality is to get through the space between my moving body and that place. 

I ran in an athletics group for a while and found the competition as stifling as the four walls that drove me to running. Running is my escape, I don't do it for medals or for glory, I do it for sanity. I used to hate it, back when I was competing, it was me against the clock, me against the person next to me, hearing their breathing just as practised as my own. That's the thing, when I run I fall into a rhythm, the breathing and the pace come back to me like old friends, the familiar circuits I do welcome me at every turn. Of course I time myself, to keep an eye on my own personal fitness, but the real reason I run is to clear my head with the fresh air, to get out of the four walls that lock me in every day, to see how far my feet can take me before my legs buckle, to test my body and my mental strength. 

I choose to run at either the crack of dawn during the summer months, or late at night during the winter. It is during these hours of the day when everything is still and sleepy, even if there is something slightly horror movie-Esque about a young woman running late at night (you would reinforce this point also if you ever saw my hometown and its inhabitants). It is a time when most of the world is sleeping, or safely inside but yet there I am, wide awake, alert, mind focused and sweat covering my body, happy, elated and alive. I see the things at night that nobody else sees, I hear the first song of the birds that nobody else hears. I think it's important that sometimes we do things that make us feel like we are the only person on the planet, because in our own lives we are number 1 - and I don't think we can never really appreciate that unless we isolate ourselves every now and then.