A Run in the Rain

No resolution or structure or guidance to this post. Just going to let my fingers go. Sorry in advance if you get confused, weirded out, or put off. No one is making you read my writing.

I ran 6 miles today, a 3 mile there-and-back. The first 3 miles are unremarkable and mostly downhill, which implies the uphill incline of the last 3 miles. I run to my friends' house on Outlook Avenue, ask for a drink of water, chat for a while, then turn around to resume the run, to make my return trip. It starts raining and that's when I have a glorious excerpt, an epiphany, of life at the edge.

I duck out of the rain as it picks up, duck into a covered porch, walk inside the door, ask for a bathroom. I pee and look at myself in the mirror. I am sweaty and grizzled. I haven't shaved in a week, and I am covered in sweat and grime. A wild man is staring me down in the glass. I exit the bathroom and look around, realizing I am in a nursing home for the elderly. I wonder what they think of the wild man, wonder if they know I am a philosopher at heart and in mind. I find a rocking chair on the front porch and sit down to wait out the rain, which is now pouring heavily on the pavement of the parking lot in front of me. It is windy and about 40 degrees out, though the part of me that longs for symmetry wishes it were -40 degrees, so it would rest on the intersection of the Fahrenheit and Celsius spectra.

I think about the times I've been caught in the rain running, and I think I recall the feeling of being alive very poignantly. The rain is not letting up, and I have to eat sometime. Fuck it, I say to myself, and I get out of the chair and begin running uphill in the cold and the rain.

I run steadily uphill, my legs churning and pounding rhythmically and forcefully like the work-hardened pistons of a diesel engine. The rpm's have to increase to gain any traction, to achieve any progress on the uphill. The pace is slower, time slows down, the beauty of motion comes into higher resolution. The rain falls on my head, occludes the transparency of my glasses, and in my head, there is music, not one, but two songs dueling in an oddly functional syncopation: the "Training Montage" theme from Rocky and "A Little Fall of Rain" from Les Miserables. I am Rocky, willing himself up the hill, all heart barely caged in a bundle of muscle and bone and coursing blood, but I am also Marius and Eponine, oblivious to the falling rain, ignoring Cosette pining in the background.

As I power myself up the hill, pain begins to creep up my legs, starting with the burgeoning blisters in the arches of my soaked feet, stretching higher up my legs with each impact, like the mud splashing onto my calves, like the puck in the strong-man hammer game at the carnival, bouncing higher and higher until the puck hits the bell every time, ding, Ding, DING! The cold and the rain and the pain and the mud and the stab of the air into my lungs reminds me powerfully that I am very much alive, and I laugh scornfully at my friends who wouldn't be out here in the rain, who would've stayed indoors, who sit on the couch and watch their televisions and miss out on the carnal knowledge that they are gloriously alive. Cars and trucks scream by on the road, 60 mph, and as each careens by me, the warning sounds rising exponentially with Doppler waves until the closest point of approach, I hope desperately that their brakes don't lock up, that they don't break into a hurtling skid, fishtailing the car around at 60 mph to paste me into the passenger door like a bug. I'm running just off the paved shoulder of the road, mud splashing, each step a probabilistic mystery as to how far down my foot will sink into the next consecutive puddle.

Let the cars scream by me, let the drivers gawk from their warm, dry, steel-enclosed cabins at the grizzled crazy runner who has forgone such shelter. Let them wonder, what specimen is this -- man or beast -- who runs through the elements and forces of nature so recklessly? I am a Spartan, I am sprinting across the battlefield, I am a wolf bounding through the woods, hungry. As the uphill and the strenuous pace force the breath from my chest, I stop controlling my breathing and let my exhalations escape in ragged, noisy bursts. Eee-HUHHH, Eee-HUHHH. I sound like a woman giving birth, but to run yourself through the soaking cold rain and mud is to be reborn, a scene like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption after he crawls through the drainage pipe and stands free, arms raised, in the thunderstorm.

As I cross under the final overpass and begin the final steep hill to my driveway, my body tells me, no, No, NO, but I am alive, God made me alive, and I need to live (what's the point in being alive if you're not going to use it?). And my legs protest, but my heart will go on. Cliches and quotations fly through my head, boring prose suddenly brought to life by my electric experience. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war! Though my heart and my flesh fail me, God is my strength and my portion. And most prevalently, from Macbeth, his final words, my final words as I run headlong up the final hill, Damned be he who first cries, "Hold, enough!"

I arrive at my front porch. I shake my soaked shoes off of my blistered feet. I stumble into my garage, find a plot of concrete, and knock out 100 pushups and some abdominal exercises for good measure. I put away half a sandwich and a protein shake. I sit down at my keyboard, think for a second about whether people will want to read my self-centric ramblings, don't care, and begin to type. It occurs to me that I am writing while stark naked and high on endorphins. I let my fingers go.