What My Legs Remembered

September twenty-eighth. I went for a run this morning. That sentence should not feel as strange to type as it does.

It wasn't dramatic. I woke up at 6:20, couldn't go back to sleep, and the apartment was doing that fall thing where it's cold enough to make you want to move but not cold enough to be an excuse. I put on leggings and a long-sleeve shirt and laced up the shoes that have been sitting by the door since approximately March. Yoga has been good, Wednesday class is something I look forward to now, genuinely, not as a discipline but as a thing I want to do, but it is not the same as moving through space under your own power, and somewhere in the last few weeks I started noticing that gap.

I went maybe two miles. I am being generous with that estimate. My lungs had opinions. My form was not what you would call optimized. At one point I passed a man walking a dog at a pace that was genuinely competitive with mine, and we both pretended not to notice.

the stride of someone who is trying to remember

But I finished the loop. I sat on the stone wall at the end of my street and just, stayed there for a minute. Not dramatically. Just long enough to register that I had done the thing.

post-run. still alive. mildly surprised.

The tree on the corner has gone almost fully amber and there were leaves on the ground and the air smelled like fall, actual fall, the real version, and I thought: okay. This was worth getting up for.

I'm not making any declarations. I'm not rejoining the morning club or setting a training schedule or writing the word 'journey' anywhere near this post. I just went for a run, and my legs remembered what to do before I did, which felt like information worth keeping.