Learning to run

It had long been a wish of mine to be able to run.  Wishes are different from aspirations, sometimes even antithetical to them.  I wished I could run fast as one of the wishes I might ask if a fairy granted me some (not among the first three, but if I took my sister’s suggestion that my first wish would be all the wishes I wanted for the rest of my life, then I’d wish for fast running among one of those wishes.)  As it was I was agonizingly slow as a child, last picked for sports teams.  I would always get a stitch when I tried to run, a pain that proved too hard for me to power through to any kind of competence.

Later analysis might point out (as my husband did) that my attempt to run was inefficient - that there was far too much verticality going on (what he said was my center of gravity was too high).  What I realized was that I was really trying to fly, trying to leap up with every step.  Which, as it turned out, worked against forward motion.

As an adult I’ve tried a few times to learn to run - a few days of searing, painful treks up to the school on the corner, once around the track and back; later inspiration from a book called Born to Run, which had us running barefoot around the track at Kellogg Middle School, until they closed it down to replace the track with a rougher surface, unfriendly to bare feet.  My most recent endeavor involves running on the treadmill at the Y.  Normally I have eschewed working out at a gym when actual outdoor exercise could do the same thing; my bicycle riding has always been as much for the air and the scenery as for the workout.  But in the winter, when cold air can be a challenge if I’m struggling anyway, I’m finding the tutelage of the treadmill salutary.  And it became the subject for my sonnet today:

Back from running treadmill at the Y

I’m salty, mellow, tired but elated

Five miles today, or almost, and I find

Enthusiasm high, not dissipated.

At night, in resolutions in my bed

I think of marathons, triathlons 

Imagine running miles along the road

A settled gait that takes me on and on

Come spring, when air outside is balmy, sweet

I hope to take off confidently striding

Just me, the road, the sneakers on my feet

Past sprouting blooms, suburban landscapes gliding

For now I’m flush with incremental gains

As treadmill numbers, climbing slow, make plain.

Having finished that, I had a little more to say on the subject, so I decided to try another verse, one whose rhythm might lend itself more to running:

The wave of my gait rolls up and across

Right to left, left to right, as I stride

One movement, connected, steady and strong

Makes me feel I could do this awhile

The treadmill, my training wheels, teaching me rhythm

Makes my steps even and steady

While the green blinking numbers encourage my continuing

Show what I’ve managed already

The music that privately plays in my ears

Makes me smile and augments my endurance

Gives enough difference that each step’s not tedious

Gives me the hint of a dance

I could get used to this - 

That is my hope

That I’ll learn to want more and more

So I’ll run in great freedom and reap from it joy

And it won’t even feel like a chore.

©Wendy Mulhern
Feb 6, 2011

What makes something poetry instead of mere verse?  I feel it has to transcend mundane views, invoke a deeper world.  These don’t.  But it was knowing there would be some like these that made me include “verse” in the subtitle of my blog.