I got up the other morning to go for a run before class started. The sun was just beginning to wash over the city and wake the masses, and traffic was light enough for me to pick my way over to the footbridge and across to the Bois de Boulogne. 

The Bois was once again coming to life after the confinement ended and from our apartment it's just far enough to be a good warm-up. I knew that before long, the hoards would descend on the park like so many ants on an errant slice of watermelon at a picnic, so I decided I needed to check it out before it got too hairy. As runs here in the city go, it was about as solitary as it gets and the weather was near-perfect. It was still early and the Bois de Boulogne was quiet -- just waiting for its imminent, post-confinement invasion. 

Like a high school romance that sizzles and fades, my relationship with running has been off and on these past couple of years. Back when we lived on Camano Island, I would shake the yoke of a long and stressful day of teaching by darting out the back door and into the woods for long, dusty runs. I got immense satisfaction from my dirty shoes and the mud that found real estate on my calves and ankles. Sometimes I'd find a wayward glob hours later… even after the shower that was supposed to get rid of it. I would run until the pastel veil of dusk emerged over the sound and the need for nourishment overtook the need for serenity.

I used to love moving through the trees -- their limbs and gnarled roots sometimes creating imperfections and deceptive, almost human-like, silhouettes along the path. Puddles and patches of mud, fallen branches and even the occasional wild animal… all these things made my brain and long forgotten muscles work a little harder: a sidestep here or there to avoid a log; my aging back sending me a reminder to remain upright and get my hips underneath me; some quick math to figure whether Can-Ku hill was faster today than it was yesterday. Even a rogue spider web across the trail was a test of bandwidth, sometimes leaving me swiping and spitting like a madman, all while I was trying to remain upright and attuned to my surroundings. I loved that, at times, the only sound I could hear was the sound of my own breath, like the beat of a song you've known since your earliest days. I began to think of it less like an escape and more like an autonomic response -- which is to say I began not thinking about it all. It was as necessary as breathing or the mystic thrum of my heart. 

But, now, that song I knew so well had become buried beneath the complex layers, not just of the life I was living, but of a pandemic not imagined by people far smarter than I. 

I think sometimes the mental aspects of running get lost in its physicality. Back on the island, I could run far and forever it seemed. Not fast, but steady. When I arrived here in the big city, I was met with crowds and wide swaths of concrete carrying endless, merging streams of people and vehicles. Just getting to the woods required more effort and what I found there wasn't nearly as peaceful. For me, the whole process had lost something in its voyage across the ocean. 

But lately, I think I'm finding that peace again.

The distractions that came along with the pandemic certainly added to my amnesia. It was easy to blame my apathy on the crisis but I knew that runner was still in there, somewhere, waiting to lace up his muddy shoes and get after it. Could I possibly turn the crisis to my advantage? The thing about truly forgetting something is that you aren't aware it has happened. That thing has found a deep recess in the tangled, elegant circuitry of your brain -- a long neglected corner; a place to hide where only the perfect combination of time and circumstance reveals it. It gets so comfortable there that neither you nor that morsel of information wishes it to be dislodged. But how was it that I had forgotten this thing that had given me so much?

Maybe I hadn't. I mean, not in the most technical sense. It might just be that the rhythms of life are like this and that, sometimes, even the things you feel most connected to occasionally take a backseat to the absurdities and time constraints of adult life. 

Did it take a worldwide pandemic to bring me back to running? I like to think not. I prefer to think I would have found it again regardless - time and circumstance once again doing their beautiful thing.