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  • Rhythm Is Originally the Rhythm of the Feet
  • Gary McDowell (bio)

Of birth and death. Movement and lowering into the soil, beyond and then the incorporeal, wraith, the shade of ever. Running as obsession. Running as clarity. The creation of. The absolution in. Threnody. Ode. Palinode. Genethliacon. Elegy. Born and born again. To celebrate: much-frequented, kept solemn. Like prayer and thanksgiving. Like the body overcoming.

At first I couldn’t run at all. Two hundred eighty pounds. Years—fifteen years—of bodily abuse hung on a once-in-shape frame. My shins throbbed, muscles tensed, and bones stressed after only a quarter mile. The bottoms of my feet cramped and my lungs felt overinflated, heavy with internal sweat or pins and needles or some other river of pain, the threshold far past. The pounding, the force, nearly a thousand pounds of pressure per step—or something equally difficult to conceive of. Tendons, ligaments. My muscles would adapt, slowly. But those other fibers, the less malleable ones, would be forced to burden the load until then. My body couldn’t perform the demands I placed on it, couldn’t bear my weight or my effort.

How and why we move. Migration and purposeful movement versus potential movement and static contractions.

Migration: The white-rumped sandpiper, a shorebird, not much bigger than a sparrow, breeds in habitats above the Arctic Circle. Every fall it migrates to South America to overwinter. Before it embarks on the opening 2,500 mile leg—more than two days and nights, nonstop—the sandpipers fatten up. Their bellies full, they fly all the way to Suriname, on South America’s north coast. They fatten up again, and then it’s 2,200 miles overland across the continent, through the Amazon, and finally to Argentina to complete the 9,000-mile one-way trip from, nearly, pole to pole. At the end of each of their migrations, in the fall and spring, the birds again reach continuous daylight, after having come from the midnight sun. In short, except for when in transit, the world the white-rumped sandpiper experiences is without night. [End Page 122]

My journey, my migration, started, like so many of my previous adventures, with reading. I turned to Bernd Heinrich’s Why We Run: A Natural History. Little did I know the lessons it contained, the wisdom one could garner simply by understanding human locomotion.

Heinrich explains potential movement thusly, “Play serves a vital function in many animals. It serves the ultimate function of practice, and it is motivated by pleasure. Pleasure is a proximate mechanism for achieving many ultimate benefits.” And since the mind serves as the mediator between sensory input and physiological output, we know that playing, frolicking, call it what you will, means health, means life, means muscles contract and hearts beat and lungs expand.

You fall you fall you fall. It’s magic. It’s not hard to run. It’s actually, given gravity’s persistence, impossible not to. Stand in the middle of a room, at the threshold of a driveway or a sidewalk, anywhere. Feet shoulder-width apart. Knees gently flexed. Relax. Now bend. But not at your hips or at your knees or at your waist. Instead, lean forward at the ankles. Lean far enough and let gravity do its job: you fall. Now put a foot down to turn your fall into a step, keep your lean, and stride with the other foot. You’re running. You’ve fallen and you’ll keep falling so long as you keep your core tight, your hips relaxed and legs pistoning, your chest forward, head level.

Last year, a friend, who just weeks before had nearly died of alcohol poisoning (he had woken up in an ICU, and learned his BAC had been 0.42 when friends brought him to the hospital), texted me to say, “I just ran eight miles in 45 minutes.” Jesus. That’s a sub-6:00 pace. “Just thought it might feel good to stretch my legs a bit.” Granted, he used to be an athlete, had a DI basketball scholarship in his pocket until an illness derailed him. Jealousy: it’s...

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