Washington Park, June 2018
I’ve been running regularly for years but I can’t say I’ve enjoyed every day.
The more I think of it – I doubt I enjoy half, or even a quarter, of my outings. Usually there’s something in the way – in the evening I’m tired after the workday, in the morning I’m hungry because I’ve yet to eat. At the weekend I’ve other plans or chores to contend with.
Last weekend I found myself lacing my shoes in Seattle, on a Sunday morning at the end of a weeklong vacation (which involved some late nights and a lot of good food). On screen the night before, a short run around Washington Park looked fine. In reality, it looked hilly.
At 7 a.m. the following morning, if I’m being honest, my heart was sinking. A run in another city, on terrain and in an area I wasn’t familiar with, without feeling too good to begin with – all signs pointed to ‘meh’.
Then I started, straight into a 30-degree incline outside the door of our accommodation. Once I made the top of the hill, instead of my all-too-usual irritable, morning running mood, I felt a strange lightness. And so I continued, around the outskirts of the park, stopping occasionally to check signposts for directions.
After 5 minutes, running alone on a Seattle Sunday morning, skirting a beautiful green space, all my irritation had evaporated, replaced instead by – to quote the “Parklife” lyric – “a sense of enormous well-being”.
Twenty-five minutes later, by the time I descended the hill back to my lodgings, having run through the silent, people-less park, my mind was reset. The lethargy was gone. Even my usual aches and pains – born of years of jogging – seemed to have disappeared.
Yes, of course there’s a moral to this story. Of course it’s always better to get out than stay in – even when every urge is keeping you in your bed, or with your book and coffee, or playing with your puppy. But simple as it is, it’s a lesson I somehow regularly forget. And sometimes it takes a steep hill in an unfamiliar city on a tired morning to remind me.
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Cormac Looney 