It’s not much, but it’s mine.
When it’s very windy, I run into the gust and jump a tiny bit. I let it carry me for a moment, a fraction of an inch, and I’m free of every weight. I started an activity I refer to as “run-walking” some months ago and floating this way is one of the reasons I’ve kept up with it. Other reasons include discovering the best places in town to hotbox, trespassing onto interesting properties with perceived immunity, and temporary reprieve from voice and screen.
Until now, I thought I knew myself well enough to swear off running, ruling my genetic composition predisposed against any capacity for it whatsoever. I regularly ignored advice to pick it up from long-limbed athletic forms because, unlike them, I have very short legs and I don’t sweat. I could walk for days but running was a not-for-me thing. I gave in because of an immodest suggestion that there was more to running than, well, actually running. It turns out, this is not a devious lie.
In fact, despite myself, my body, despite me, I like it. I like what I see when I’m inching my way through town, how I feel when I’m climbing up the stairs to my apartment spent. Does the fact that I like running make me less me? Do I adhere to other revulsions wrongly? Mushrooms? The color pink? Camping? Star Wars? Trump? Babies? Maybe not. I’ve found I like running because, as promised at least for me, very little of it has to do with energetically sprinting from point A to point B, which happen to be separated by miles, hills, and cars waiting to run me over. Because I am so horrible at the athleticism piece of it and utterly without hope of ever being fast or strong, I’m free to appreciate the simple fact that running takes me places solely for the sake of being there.
As a woman with little (no) sporting experience, when I first picked up the pace, I knew just enough to secure myself with a sports bra. I did not anticipate the wet diaper effect of running with a disproportionately large bottom end. Out of necessity, I discovered that running pants are firmly constricting and supportive,which is also to say they are compressing and uplifting. I swear onlookers say, “That girl runs like she’s drowning, but it must be butt-sculpting because her ass looks great!” This has lead me to buy many pairs of running pants and maintain a reason to wear them routinely.
Also at first, I ran at night, between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. Running Hoboken’s waterfront “after hours” is beautiful and adventurous. In the night, the skyline is made up of the world’s best-dressed military men, charming for attention in staggered rows. It’s a diverse mash-up of every nation’s richest regalia and each soldier is standing tall, proud of his own color and shine. Their collective glow swallows the vast darkness above them. Sometimes a fog cuts off their heads, but they remain stiffly resolute and impressive nonetheless. Any light cast into the water outlines a piece of cake in the river, frosted ripples and all, which I pretend the soldiers share. Less poetic, I once found myself ten feet from a man who hiked up his date’s white skirt and had his fingers (two I believe, but maybe more) inside her unrepentantly.
More recently, I run the waterfront in the morning, between 6:45 a.m. and 7:45 a.m. It is less beautiful and adventurous at that time but I get to run more often. In the day, the skyline is a witch’s bottom jaw, each building a grey, wayward tooth poking up grim and grisly. The vastness of the sun and sky expose this greatest city as man-made and small. No one is frisky and Hoboken’s homeless are stirred or stirring.
The only constant since my first run is my basic course. I’ve found my path, my way, how I come and go.
The first pier I reach is an unadorned stick-straight dissident. An awkward canopy hangs over part of its north side, casting shadows of branches and leaves without any green or warmth. Three benches, equally-spaced, sit facing the skyline too far west to be at the pier’s east edge. I run two concrete slabs past the benches and turn around, sometimes passing group instructors or personal trainers making mommies into warriors when without strollers.
The second pier closely neighbors the first. It is a wide rock-beached park, curvy and calm, like a waiting woman lying on her side. At its bottom arch, a low gate opens to a finely sanded beach where I see a person and a dog, always a different person seeking the comforting company of his or her canine.
Next I run a broken sidewalk without a view. Cars drive by quickly on my right and I am slow because I want to make out what happens in the quarantined shipyard to my left when no one is known to be looking (so far, nothing). A skatepark leans against the southern wall of the shipyard’s aged filth and slams it and me awake. I skip the small t-shaped pier nearly adjoining.
Then I decide to run the bottom arc of a giant multi-stepped gazebo, leading into a gradient of two-dimensional steps, long flats along the skyline transverse to curt connections. This mellow zig-zag continues along the straight edges of a soccer field, used most often by a young men’s league. Once I made eye contact with a player and broke off it awkwardly with an o-mouthed wink in the style of an ‘80s pornstache. Each time I get here, I remember this, cringe, and make a note not to do that again. I pass the town amphitheater and a restaurant I’ve never been to because it is too beautifully located on the crook of the waterfront walkway to also have good food.
Now I reach my third and favorite pier. It is the shape of my giant eye. I run only along the top and bottom eyelashes, while families of all colors are the iris and new loves beam from the pupil.
The space before the last and most famous pier is as wide as two or three Hoboken one-ways. I run along the bike trail in the center and imagine that I am zipping up a jacket of tall trees. Turning towards Pier A Park is to take the best parts of my run so far, streaming behind me, and plop them down all in one place, the mommy warriors, the curvy calm, the quiet of old and the noise of youth, the gazebo, the depth of an eye.
When this is done, I retreat into the waterless part of town, past the post office, banks, coffee shops, through two more parks and find myself tumbling home more than I already am. I do this thing called run-walking now, and other than the running pants, it’s barely about physique or movement at all. I can’t be sure but more of my home, myself seems to be coming into focus. Each step a bit clearer.