Romance and Old Routes
The body keeps count in the subtlest of ways
Last week my family and I came to New York to see friends and clients and, for me, to run old routes. We got to stay on the Upper West Side, where I first ran in New York. As a neighborhood, it’s still leafy and slower-moving than the rest of the city, but after so many years south of Houston, across the river in Brooklyn, and out west, it felt new and foreign again and like a time capsule of a different New York in which small businesses line each street and the young, old, and middle aged rub shoulders, living out their lives in parallel.
Our first morning was a Sunday, which is a special morning in New York. Whole neighborhoods decide to sleep in and the city starts slow and mild and people might even smile at you when they pass. I initially headed to Central Park because I thought that what I should do is to run the reservoir, but then turned back before I’d gone a block because I realized that what I wanted to do was to run Riverside Park.
As I headed down the steep hill towards the river, I found that I had forgotten how West End is bigger than you think and Riverside Drive is smaller. I skipped down the granite steps remembering how slippery they are in the winter and hit the park in the deep shade of what might be hundred-year-old oaks and elms. The blue-black-gray asphalt paths are sometimes as wide as boulevards and sometimes as narrow as two people side by side but as they stretch between sloppily mown grass and overgrown shrubbery you can almost forget that you are in manhattan because all you can see is river on one side and a solid green curtain of leaves on the other.
I thought it might be nice to run through Columbia’s big gates and central walking aisle, but there are no street signs in the park, so I just ran until I felt like ascending the stone stairways back to the street level to see where I had ended up. When I hit the top I saw the sign: 115th st, my old entry. My old exit. I did not know where I was as I ran through the fluctuating, man-made, almost-wild park greenscape, but my muscles did. They counted the blocks as I stretched my legs under the arched treetops; they knew where to go and what to do. It was the most romantic thing I can imagine; the memory of distance embodied in my muscles, alive, unconscious, for decades, until I visited it again.
And in that, I realized that running is not generally thought of as romantic but, despite the huff and puff and physical struggle, it is. When we run, we build connections to places as the miles peel away. The precise tilt of the pavement or trail, the feeling of the air, and the smells of the route can become as strong in the memory as the things we see and hear. The only difference is that non-visual memories seem to be held mostly in the body, instead of the mind. And they can lie dormant for a long time before being discovered again.
The body keeps count; it keeps count of injuries, but joys, too. It’s been twenty years almost to the month since I ran that route in Riverside Park, but I remembered how it felt: the hit of my shoes on the pavement; the sound of the massive, fat leaves rubbing together; and the rhythm of the blocks as they passed underneath me.
Where ever you are today, whatever your memories, remember: go run.