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On Running: The Road to Peace
In which I explore my relationship to my favorite hobby
I started running when I was 12, for no other reason than that I had won the U12 division of my Chicago suburb’s 4th of July 5k. For a town of 12,000 people competing with other nearby races that awarded actual prize money, this only required a pedestrian 21:30. Yet for my parents, who had always thought I lacked a single athletic bone in my body, this came as something of a surprise.
In hindsight, I think their surprise was feigned, or at the very least misinformed. One of the things I will always be thankful to my parents for was that they mandated that my sister and I participated in organized sports as long we lived under their roof. I had never been very good at soccer, nor baseball; fencing required too much patience. But by the time I had run that 5k, I had been swimming seriously for three years, and while I was far from elite, I was still further from a couch potato.
I decided to join the junior high cross country team in the fall, and although I kept swimming for another three years afterwards, running slowly began to dominate my time, passion, and focus. Compared to the drudgery of 25-yard laps, running through the suburban sidewalks and muddy forest preserve trails was like running through a midwestern Garden of Eden. Rather than the hellish two a day workouts for swim…
