One light is on in the house as the coffee pot gargles and spits. A car door slams shut from inside the garage. I am awake. Everyone else is asleep. The night before I laid everything out.
Near the foot of the bed, I placed my race gear, minus the pink shoes my kids picked out. I placed those in a child’s car seat. I filled a green duffel bag with clothes for after the race, but after-race clothes look a lot like during-race clothes, just no bib number pinned to the shirt. I left the bag with a broken zipper by the back door. On the kitchen table, I set containers for water and coffee along with a Gatorade and a packet of Untapped maple syrup.
In the morning, I stand beside the toaster oven and spread peanut butter on a bagel palette underneath a yellow light. Depending on how far away the race is, I eat the bagel under the light or in the car. Same with the banana on the counter.
I could pretend this system is open, but it’s not. I am a pot making steam. I hit play on Lost in the Dream no matter the race distance, no matter the distance to the race. Piano notes peel me from the neighborhood. Adam starts to sing. When I’m close to the destination, the sixth track begins. Parking reduces the day to the singularity of the run. The weeks prior and the weeks beyond fold into the effort. They drip in time onto a palette from black and white holes.
Today’s race is at a local high school, put on by a divorced mother and father whose son died at the sound of a gun. They named the race after him. The same runners show up every year wearing the same race shirt design in different shades. Most runners warm up along the course, an out and back on hard asphalt, but I always run the trails that thread the tall pines between the school’s fields and a cluster of late century backyards.
Teens, often in their cross-country uniforms, herd through the pines as well. They do not fear roots. They are boundless. Then again, running never feels old. Future days are balanced by the younger ones. A fulcrum joined at the hips, a force whipping up the spine.
The air is humid, even in the shade, and with minimal effort, the skin is already beading sweat. A half dozen of my former students were lost to gun violence, committed gun violence, or lost immediate family members to gun violence.
And I could pretend that is the exigency for this run—that I am doing this solely for them— but once the pistol cracks the starting line jitters, I swap their names for mantras, and these mantras riff off the books read at bedtime: I am the monster at the end of this mile. Pure nonsense really. Have you seen my red hat? I have not seen your red hat. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Today’s sweat cannot retrieve lost blood.
In November, I drive downtown under a cold rain. I will say that my dad dragged me—that he’s getting older, and that this community race is something we should do together. And that’s partly true.
But I am also there for the tic between start and finish when the old feels young and the young feels old, when the self evaporates against the firmament and hangs in suspended disbelief. Have you seen Winslow Homer’s Canoe in Rapids—the feeling is like that, only not quite. Rapids take shape underneath the gray-blue force of a brush. The strain and the speed are in the meeting and the passing.
I never saw my dad in the rain, and he couldn’t find me at the finish. I retraced steps looking for him to pass. But I didn’t recognize his cap and gloves. I cheered for strangers, as if they might pass the word to a neighbor.
One day we missed that yellow behemoth of a school bus that lurches through the neighborhood, so we loaded the car with the incremental weight of defeat. Then we traced a u-turn because we left the backpacks by the front door.
“‘Eyes to the Wind’,” said the older kid as we started another lap.
We parked across from the school to avoid drop-off traffic. Holding hands. Silver breath in the crosswalk—
Bryan Harvey runs most days of the week. He tweets more @bryanharvey.bsky.social. than @Bryan_S_Harvey. Links to his writing can be found at BryanHarveyWrites.com.
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