12/8/2022: 1.91 Miles
I was determined to get Kevin lost on our morning run in his Philly suburb, snatching the lead from him even though I didn’t know anything about the trails rocketing down the slope we were descending, slick and muddy from a night of rain, and switching my trajectory randomly to try and get him completely and totally lost.
Why did I want to get Kevin lost, you ask? Because the stakes were low- we would have just turned around and climbed back up the hill and gotten up to the car with ease- and because it would have been pretty funny. Unfortunately, Kevin was too smart for me and he steered us back on course pretty quickly once we made it to the bottom of the hill. We wandered through the blazed trails, stepping gingerly so as not to fall, laughing on the way down and gasping for air on the way back up.
It was the first time I had run with a known friend in over six months.
12/9/2022: 5.28 Miles
And then I ran with dozens of friends, both known and unknown. It’s hard to describe how wonderful and rare a run like this one really is; to be running in a long and wide pack of people you know, many of whom you even love. Running on the same common path to a common destination with all these familiar people; I think that such shared commonality building towards the common movements and motions of a community really captures the nature of college. Throughout this weekend that I spent at my alma mater, I was reminded of how similar everyone’s lives are there; everyone is either student or professor, focused on assigning or completing assignments, all for the end goal of finishing a senior project and getting the necessary credits to graduate, while also hopefully accomplishing individual goals and having fun with friends along the way. After a summer working with the Forest Service in Idaho, where people of all ages, backgrounds, interests and lifestyles gathered to do some wild work for their own private reasons, this was a strange thing to behold from the outside. I was certainly a part of that system mere months ago, but it feels different to immerse myself in it now. Not bad, just different. I think it is these similar systems of education, all within one compact campus community, that foster a great deal of the social successes that college students get to enjoy.
But anyway, the run. It is an utter thrill to drift through the pack, talking to one person after the next over the course of a mere minute; conversations on the run with these people can be picked up and put down at will, some to be held over the course of days to come and some that will never be brought up again, but either way it hardly matters because the next conversation is now already happening, and the last one is already fading from our memories.
There was little time to enjoy the Christmas lights on this run- which was the proposed goal of the run- because that’s not really why we came out here tonight. Such events do not exist primarily for the purpose of enjoying the event itself, but rather to forge, deepen and explore connections through the act of doing them. I couldn’t be happier to see that my old cross country team still understands that, even if the team has changed its functions and traditions so much since I was just shy and uncertain freshman, delighted and surprised when an upperclassman offered me a ride up to the track for our first day of practice.
You know that Tim’s still running.