People run for different reasons. Some do it for fun, some for fitness, some run on doctor’s orders, to trim down or stay sane. A few people run for money, to earn it through prizes or raise it for charity. They run to win. Me, I’m a plodder. I run to keep my weight down and manage depression.
Nowhere is this spectrum of runners more visible than at a big charity run. I recently did the 15 km Run for the Kids in Melbourne. An event like that draws out so much from people: what they are, how they respond to the world around them – the long(ish) run is a well understood metaphor for life.
On the day of the event, I self-select into the starting wave behind the strongest, fastest runners but ahead of the people who plan to walk with strollers or are recovering from surgery. We’re packed in tight at the starting gate. I literally rub elbows with the person next to me. These are people just like me, serious enough about the event to run the whole distance, but self-aware enough to accept the race is with ourselves. I know this because no one speaks. We are people for whom a fifteen kilometre run is part meditation and part mediation; we run for a bunch of reasons.
The gun goes off, releasing the elite runners onto the course. I watch them jockey for position on the big screen TV. I wish them luck.
Our group shuffles to the starting line and we await our signal.
We begin. Now we too are a wave. I’m in it, somewhere. I pass people. I get passed.
I run next to the mascot for a while, until my dignity demands I run faster and pass whoever is waddling along in that Minion costume.
I run on, shedding thoughts as I go.
I pass a guy as he turns to his friend and says, “I've never run more than five kilometres before.” He had ten to go. Oh, to be seventeen again, and to know the possibilities.
At nine kilometres, I come up behind an annoyingly chipper girl sidestepping her way up the hill. She's singing, "I'm dancing on two poles."
I debate whether to use the next portaloo. The need passes and I run on.
I glimpse an emaciated old man. His shirt’s off and he’s puffing through his rib cage. His body is littered with tattoos, the home-made kind, more cut in than drawn onto his skin. His knotted grey beard glistens with spit. I think he must be a junkie who’s joined the race from the underpass where he'd been sleeping. That's a little judgemental, I think of myself. I should be more charitable. He stops running as I get up beside him. "FUCK" he yells at no one and spits over the side of the overpass, a great gob of phlegm, that tumbles onto the street below. "I'm never running a race sober again." He walks, picking and scratching at his arms, his hair, as if he were covered in biting ants. "Fuck this. I need shit inside me!"
I keep going and don’t see him again. Everybody runs their own race.
At eleven kilometres, I begin composing this piece in my head. I try to hold on to ideas, to sentences, to dialogue I overhear. I almost stop so I can write this out on my phone at the side of the road. But I can’t accept the ironic circuitry of stopping the thing that keeps me going, which allows me to write, which keeps me going. I’m in an Escher drawing.
I finish the race. I write this down. And I go on. Because I can. Because I have to. The road is littered with us minions.