Jock Time, Part I

I ran 15km last weekend, partly by accident. I did it again this weekend, deliberately. This probably marks the point where I can no longer credibly claim to be “reinventing myself as a jock” as a bit, although I’d hoped I could keep up with the pretense until I’d hit at least 20km.* Now I have to face the reality of my metamorphosis.

There’s a certain feeling I’ve only ever gotten from running. People say runner’s high, but it’s more of a pleasurable blankness than a high — you run for a while, and you’re just present in the world, in the experience, not thinking about running, or the anxieties of life, or anything else. It’s nice. You run a bit further, and then you hit the ideal point of total psychic obliteration.

Anyways, that’s how I ended up running 15k. I hit a fugue state and let myself get lost in Westmount.

I think there’s a universal human desire to liberate ourselves from the burdens of consciousness and selfhood: sex, drugs, religion, sleeping, meditation, really good conversations (these are all, at best, hit-or-miss). I used to be able to get out of myself fairly reliably through writing, but one of the disciplinary effects of grad school has been that I’ve been pushed to think about time as a scarce commodity, necessary to be carefully measured, divided, and rationed in a way that has ruined my ability to write without an intense awareness of the iron cage imminently descending — this is a topic for another essay but suffice it to say that this is the one thing I resent about my grad school experience. Unfortunately, my alternatives are limited: I’m asexual, get hangovers very easily, couldn’t get further into religion than an undergraduate flirtation with Catholic aesthetics, am a habitual insomniac, and my closest friends all live in different cities.

Might as well get into running, even if it clashes horribly with the image I’ve cultivated of myself.

*I ask my readers to interpret the fact that I actually got back into running regularly around the start of COVID as simply a very serious case of commitment to the bit.