Revisiting Old Stomping Grounds
Nearly every lesson I’ve ever learned in life holds true when it comes to running. Some lessons you learn while your heart is pounding and your feet are landing one in front of the other on the pavement. Other lessons you learn during the rest of life, only to have them reinforced the next time you lace up your running shoes.
Sometimes the knowledge gained is so simple that I wonder if it’s something I’ve known all along. But every time it’s worth learning again anyway. Even if I believed something might be true, it doesn’t solidify until I take it running with me.
You get out what you put in. Pay attention to the details. There is time to push yourself and time to take it easy; and both are important. Not all roads lead to home; but if you’ve kept track of yourself, you’ll get there eventually. You can keep going when it gets hard or uncomfortable, because it’s in the hard, uncomfortable moments that we learn what we are capable of.
I really don’t know where I’d be today if I hadn’t started running when I was in middle school. If my parents hadn’t brought us as a family to the Oak Apple Run each year when I was a tiny human, exposing me to a sport that I would come to love. The trajectory of my past 25 years, probably my whole life, would have been different.
Maybe I would have had another sport teach me all those important life lessons. But it wouldn’t have been the same. When high school and collegiate athletics end, other sports don’t have the continuity that running does. With other sports, you have to find new teams or pick up something new in place what you’ve always done. With running, you just keep lacing up your shoes each day and heading out the door.
Running is both the same and different every day. It’s consistency, monotony, and structure. But it’s also freedom and adventure. The craving to lace up my shoes and leave everything else behind for an hour happens every day, no matter where I am. It’s a feeling I hope to never lose.
Thousands of miles run through the same few neighborhoods, again and again and again. Countless loops logged on dozens of different favorite trails over the decades. Thousands of miles run on unknown streets and bike paths in anonymous neighborhoods all over the country. And a few hundred kilometers run in other other countries so far too.
Some routes I’ll only run a first time. Those routes are either forgotten almost immediately or remembered forever. With other routes, each step is so familiar that I can tell you when the smallest details change, even if I’m just back in town visiting. It’s like everything else in life that way. Some things you’ll only do once, and they’re either epic or inconsequential. Other things become so familiar you know them by every inch.
Recently I had the opportunity to revisit some of my old stomping grounds. I had the chance to run paths worn familiar by countless pairs of degrading rubber soles. At first, on these trips to places I’ve been before, I don’t always feel like I know the route. But then something catches.
Something clicks into place. And everything is suddenly so familiar that I wonder why I didn’t recognize it sooner. Because once I know I’ve been here before, I always know the way home.
