We Actually Finished

April third. Here is what I remember most clearly about crossing that finish line: I was not ready to be done. Not in the way where you feel strong, in the way where your brain had decided three miles in that the finish line was a theoretical construct and then it was suddenly right there, like a door you didn't expect to open.

The 5K was Simone's idea, or it started as a hypothetical the way a lot of things between us do, someone mentions something, the other person says "yeah, maybe" instead of "no," and four weeks later you're standing in a park at seven-thirty in the morning in running tights wondering how you got there. I've been running solo for a while now, so the training part wasn't new. Running with someone, keeping someone else's pace in your peripheral vision the whole time, that was different. Simone runs like she does everything at work, efficient, head up, no wasted motion. I run like I'm working something out. We spent the first mile figuring that out and the rest of it just running.

the post-finish debrief, which was mostly just gasping

She finished about twelve seconds ahead of me and had already caught her breath by the time I got there, which I am mentioning here for the historical record. We stood at the edge of the path and did the thing where you're too tired to talk so you just kind of stand next to each other and exist, which honestly felt like the right way to end it. Someone took a picture with bibs. The bibs existed. We were real people who did a real thing.

proof of life

I started running years ago for reasons that had nothing to do with races, and I'm still not sure I'm a race person, but there's something about a finish line with someone else that lands differently than a finish line you clock on your own. I wrote the community center brochure thing a few weeks ago, and it's been sitting in my head since. I don't know if I'm about to do something new or just thinking about doing something new, which is its own kind of doing, I guess. For now: we finished. The bibs are on my counter. Gerald seems unmoved.