12/4/2022: 5.29 Miles
I followed my dad out the door today, and he showed me, as he sometimes does, the openness of space in the city on Sunday mornings. The roads were open and the sidewalks mostly bare of human souls, and traffic lights did little to impact our constant pace as we romped through the borderlands between Boston and Brookline.
Later in the day, I would see an old friend who I used to run with and when we came across a stretch of road that was closed to traffic for the day, he would tell me about some research that found that having all these roads in our cities essentially meant that there were massive holes that pedestrians could not fall into throughout our towns and neighborhoods; bottomless pits that are black as pavement essentially surround our homes, dotted with small bridges that we could only cross at certain short times, and otherwise we are stranded on our island of ground, staring hungrily ahead to where we wish to be, while waiting, waiting, waiting.
Small wonder that I take exhilaration in being able to run through these streets with nonstop ease; it’s as though we are flying across these holes in the ground, our heightened pace allowing us to grow wings and take flight. Yes, the pedestrian clings to their stable paths, the cyclist looks straight down their lane and the driver travels quickly and easily through their larger spaces, but the runner alone is allowed to grow wings and glide effortlessly between any and all of these spaces. For the runner there is always a path forward; they only have to have the awareness, energy and determination to find it and evaluate the safety of it in the seconds before they launch themselves into the scarce spaces in between it all.
Tim’s still running through the cities and the strange places.