in which I discover that I am not, in fact, usain bolt

The other night I went running.

I know that for some people, running is a regular task, not worthy of commentary. They just run and then do that whole bounding into brunch thing, all glowy and endorphin-y, and say “great run, dude, up at sunrise and just really cleared my head, hey, yeah, I’d love a wheatgrass juice, thanks.”

Blech.

Let’s be clear. My body ain’t exactly built for speed.

Of course, it’s not really built for endurance either. It’s built for…cheese, a little tapas, maybe a dry rosé.

But the other night, I was out at the soccer fields football pitch with the boys; it was a beautiful evening; I was wearing my sneakers. There were two empty pitches off where no one could see me as I trotted around and I figured that running on grass would perhaps cushion my increasingly rickety knees.

I stretched, I tied and re-tied my sneakers, I adjusted my walkman ipod to the music I like for exercise: loud.  Loud drowns out the slow thud of my feet and my equally thudding breath.

Off I went around the fields, The Black Keys filling in my ears, trying not to notice the slight floop floop of my tummy as I jogged along.

Okay, I think, I’m running.  My mind should be clearing, I should be feeling my creative juices bubbling up.That’s what’s supposed to happen when you run so any minute now I should be getting an idea – HEY! I could write about running. Yeah. That would be great –  maybe I should stop and write this idea down?

I do not stop. My inner gym teacher keeps yelling at me to move, dammit!  Inner gym teacher looks a bit like Sue Sylvester and a bit like Mrs. Friel, from 9th grade, who seemed to think it her mission on earth to make pre-adolescent girls cry.

I whine to myself in time with the music:  I’m huuunnnngggrrry….I’m thirrrrsssstttyyyy….I’m tirrreeed. I offer bribes to myself – ice cream, cookies, cheese – if I do just two more laps, which I figure would bring me to almost twenty minutes of non-stop running trotting jogging ambling quickly.  I do not believe my own bribes and call myself a liar.

The gym teacher screams at me again to move. I kick The Keys a little louder. Okay this running thing isn’t so bad. Let’s get a little more speed going here, yeah, that’s right, a little faster.

I am flying. I am Usain fucking Bolt here, I am burning up that field, it seems I am built for speed.

Whoosh. See that blur? Yeah. That was me.

In my mind, anyway.

Okay, maybe I was more Usain Bolt’s great-great grandmother than Usain himself, but still. I did it. Twenty minutes of non-stop “running.”

And you know what? I think I want to do it again.

**when I wasn’t pretending to be Usain Bolt (or his elderly relatives), I wrote about the expat workers in Abu Dhabi for the World Mom’s Blog, over here; and published a sort of op-ed about the relative failure of Abu Dhabi’s recycling program (as near as I can tell, the city/country doesn’t have one), over here.