What Travel Running Means to Me: A Personal Essay

This article originally appeared on Womens Running

It was through massaging clients with Alzheimer's that I came to appreciate the beauty in how we embody memories. My 87-year-old client, Virginia, had no idea if her last massage was two hours ago or two years ago, but, somehow, her body knew. Virginia was always eager for her massage. Whenever I did shoulder rotation exercises, she would suddenly remember memories of growing up on a farm in Nebraska, where she played baseball with the neighborhood kids. It was the pitching motion in the arm rotation that would trigger this memory. Her body remembered the motion better than if I had asked her to recall her past.

Similarly, for more than 30 years, running has carried me places and brought me home, physically and emotionally. The cells of my body have absorbed these places--their smells, their sounds, the way they felt underfoot, the way they tasted on the tongue, the way my body sifted differently through their warm or cold pockets of air. The combined smell of gasoline and bougainvillea places me running on a road in Nairobi, Kenya, with a friend. The scent of laundry detergent hanging in the air during warm spring evening takes me on a solo run through a neighborhood in Nice, France. The sweet smell of freshly mowed grass (a distressed signal to attract healing insects) triggers the anxiety I felt on the starting line of a high school cross country competition. All of my senses are sharper and more receptive when I'm running.

Travel Running Forms Muscle Memory

Focusing not on touch, but rather taste and smell, French novelist and literary critic Marcel Proust once wrote about the madeleine, a shell-shaped cookie that triggered childhood memories. He said, "When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."

The familiar movement in my body while running is like Proust's comment about the madeleine. If I've run a route, I know it in my body. It's like only remembering a phone number by the physical movement of your fingers when you dial it.

Re-running a particular route is like traveling in time. I traverse my old high school cross country course and recall the teenage competitors that elbowed me in the back corner canopy of maple trees at mile two and my father on one knee screaming, "They're coming!" with 100 meters before the finish. I know the dips in the sidewalks I've run countless times in the neighborhood where I grew up. The familiar tombstone epitaphs appear in my vision just before I round the corner in the Civil War-era cemetery near the college I attended in Kentucky.

I have developed a sixth sense as a travel runner I wouldn't have as a regular tourist. I have jumped over syringes on a trail along the Arno River in Florence, Italy, a dead possum along a country road in Illinois, and countless piles of dog poop on the sidewalk in Paris, France. As runners we learn to find comfort in discomfort, just as travelers in a foreign country learn to wade through the heartache that is homesickness. Both travelers and runners are conditioned to settle into the discomfort in unfamiliarity--even the kind that makes us question our safety. I feel at home running in my shoes.

My Shoes Are My Passport

During my time teaching and visiting students abroad, my shoes have taken me down alleys, through small parks, and up mountainsides the average tourists would never find themselves, like a lookout over the Rift Valley in Kenya or alongside a one-room schoolhouse in Cochin, India. My shoes are the social lubricant that allows me to crack a smile on the wrinkled face of an old Frenchwoman as I run towards her in a skirt offering an American accented "Bonsoir." Or the help from the Japanese man who stops to direct me to a bathroom with his hand gestures and my broken Japanese when I find myself lost. Or a nod of acknowledgement from a local runner on the same path along the Bosphorus River in Istanbul. To him, I'm not American or Turkish, Muslim or Christian, I'm just a fellow runner.

Often, I have traveled on my own and enjoyed it. But visiting families as a 38-year-old single childless female was a constant, bittersweet reminder that I was alone--and not the "whole" version of alone revered as a form of enlightenment in the Zen Buddhist tradition. On those trips, I'd find solace on my runs. Now, as a married mother of a toddler, running brings me back to myself when I feel fragmented. Running is my quiet companion--my "plus one." With running I feel whole--or the Old English "all one" from which we derive "alone." I am welcome in my own body. My shoes carry my weight and cradle my arches when I don't give myself the permission to be held by anyone else.

I seek the dirt path along the nurturing murmur of running water--a river, a coastline, a canal, and even an empty creek bed. Whether I'm running along the bubbling Boulder Creek in Colorado where I live now, or the rushing Isere river in Grenoble, France where I taught for a year, the water and all the secrets it has carried speaks to me.. It listens, too, and absorbs my troubles as I chatter back to my ancient companion. Watching the sun set on the horizon of the East China Sea, as I ran along the rare star-shaped sand beach of Ishigaki Island, reminded me I was not in control. And the vastness of the North Atlantic Ocean, settled my nerves when I naively drew whistles and stares, like a matador waving a red cape at a bull, running in red shorts along the shore in Casablanca.

Running allows me to feel weightless, not a luggage burdened tourist. I can leave the house or hotel with no destination or goal in mind--exploring spatially--Baudelaire's flaneur in a pair of pink Nikes.

A runner runs for some of the same reasons a traveler travels: to reorient and reset one's perspective in a society that expects one to always be set on a specific path. The part of me that forgets the discomfort at mile 20 and signs up for another marathon is the same part of me that forgets the ache in homesickness and decides to travel around the world teaching aboard The Peace Boat, a Japanese passenger ship, for three months.

I compete in races around the world to experience the culture from a different angle. In my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, when you complete a race, you cross a "Finish" line banner. In France, you cross an "Arrival" line banner. I've always thought I'd rather arrive somewhere than finish something. There's a sense of renewal and excitement with arrival. Of course, there will always be another finish line or another point of arrival. You can always pack up your bags or strap on your shoes and head out the door to leave behind your greatest challenge: a relationship, a choice, a job, a regret. But sometimes, instead of escaping, we as runners and travelers have to stop and sit in the discomfort that is here and now and work through it.

Running Abroad and Running Away

Travel running is my ultimate act of escape, independence, and defiance. Out on the trail or road I stomp out the childhood temper tantrums for which my parents took me to a neurologist when I was two. I used threaten to run away when I was five. My dad would offer to help me pack my bags. I'd then sit on the front step until I'd convinced myself that my parents would worry too much if I left, and that I should just stay home. Now, running away takes me places, and, keeping in line with my childhood, often places my parents have fearfully discouraged me from visiting alone, particularly as a single female.

For years my parents have fed me a steady diet of warnings to be careful and cautious during my travels, some of which are warranted and come from a place of love. But my parents' warnings can't protect me from my own falls. Scars are my tattooed memories--souvenirs from injuries all over the world--the dent in my knee from the rock in the Gorges de l'Ardeche, the coral in my shin from Waikiki, the gravel in my elbow from Lokrum Island off Dubrovnik. I carry those places mapped on my mislaid skin fibers.

I've learned from guiding my blind friends that falling is far better than going nowhere at all. The experience of guiding a visually impaired runner has provided me with a greater perspective than any trip I've taken, seeing things I would normally let drift by in my peripheral vision. I not only guide her around obstacles, I illustrate the beauty and the humor along the route: the dappled aspen trees under which we duck, the small child walking a dog twice her size, the older couple making out on the bench, the vagrant holding a sign that says, "Give me a dollar or I'll vote for Trump." The experiences I share with these friends are the vivid kind you have showing a friend around your town for the first time, and you really see.

Returning home from a trip, I relish the red stains on my shoes from running through the clay of the Grand Canyon floor, the dirt in my shoes from running the Costa Brava trails with a married Spaniard I loved, sand found in the crevices of my soles from a New Year's Day run on the D-Day Beaches. I feel like I've snuck away with a precious stolen souvenir that customs never found.

When I'm the age of my grandmother when she died (100) I will have a database of voyages stored in the swing of my legs and arms, the taste of the air on my tongue, and the anthology of smells, the first of which will always be the sweet smell of mowed grass crying out for rescue. And when my legs are too tired to run, my heart will race again.

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