Good Run

I often kick around ideas for a blog when I run in the evenings. This week I had flirted with a few random ones: how extracting maggots from my cat’s leg (I won’t tell you how many) has given me great peace that I didn’t miss my calling to the medical profession after all; how much the faded photographs a soldier showed us of himself crouching in tall grass with an automatic weapon reminded me of sepia tinted images of my father-in-law in Vietnam; how sad I am that a good friend is getting ready to move away and excited I am that my baby sister is about to start college. But as I set out to run last night all these pieces of the week peeled off and fluttered to the ground behind me. And at the end of a long week, it’s the memory of my run itself that lingers most.

I set off around six. Dark clouds were building in the southeast, but rain has been illusive lately and I didn’t expect it to come through. But I hoped it would. Though I am running a lot these days, I’m still not one of those people who enjoys it much more than how I feel afterwards. Though my runs get longer every time I go out, not a single one begins without the fleeting thought of “Can I really do this today?” So I play mind games with myself to get through it. Don’t start running until the stream and don’t stop until you get back to it. Short run have four different sections, long runs have six. Run fast up hills, slow down them. If a path separates then joins itself again, take one branch out, the other branch on the way back in. And always sprint the last stretch home. These rules structure every run I take.

In the first village I passed through I greeted a man digging around his sorghum and an old woman sitting on a stool with several babies at her feet. But after that point I saw no one else on the trail. The sandy path was full of prints under my tennis shoes – cows, goats, a bicycle track and little bare footprints. A lone black donkey trotted down the trail, easing me over into the grass as he made his way resolutely somewhere and I wondered if anyone was looking for him or expecting him. I heard lizards scuffle in the brush as I went by and birds cry from small trees but saw none of them. At one point a torn black plastic sack made me wince as it slithered near my foot. I was jumpy after my friend who often runs the same trail killed a puff adder sunning itself on the path last week. This made me start thinking about how I would say “I’ve been bitten by a snake!” in Arabic but all I could come up with was “I’ve been eaten by a snake!” which I fear would provoke more laughter than assistance getting to the hospital. I decided right then that I should look that one up, just in case.

The rain hit at almost the furthest point out on my run. It started as a light drizzle but steadily gained momentum until it sounded like the footsteps of thousands of little feet running in the grass beside me. It hit my forehead in cold drops and rolled down my nose into my open mouth. It soaked through my nylon pants which began sticking to my knees. I expected laughter as I ran through a second village, a crazy white woman running in the rain, but all I saw were sheep huddled under a baobab tree and smoke misting out of small huts. There are so many baobab trees in the village that I was almost untouched by raindrops through its entire length. At the edge of this village there is an old hand-dug well that they say was built as many as ninety years ago by British soldiers. I have always wondered why British soldiers would dig a well this far out of town and am curious if they thought the baobab grove was as beautiful as I do. There are usually a handful of women there pulling jerry cans on long ropes up out of the ground who offer me a drink as I go by, but yesterday the place was abandoned. And yet yesterday, I suddenly would have liked nothing more than a drink from that well.

At the rock where I turn around for long runs I almost broke a rule and actually stopped. The rocky green mountain rose wet and magnificent on my right. The heavy black clouds were rumbling menacingly behind me, still dropping cold clean rain. And the most unnaturally pink sunset was flaming directly in front of me, hurting my eyes with its brilliance and throwing my exhausted shadow back towards the storm. It was breathtaking. It seemed like I was the only person in the world, which felt beautiful and frightening.

But I didn’t stop. I slowed long enough to take try to soak it all in for one long moment, breathed a deep “thank you,” and turned back into the storm and ran home.