Simone Crossed First

August thirty-first. Simone crossed first. I was half a stride behind her, which I will let stand as the accurate record of what happened this morning. Twelve weeks ago we signed up for a local 5K the way you sign up for things when someone names the registration window with the same tone they use to name a Tuesday climbing session, matter-of-fact, no pressure implied. I looked it up that night. Tab stayed open for two days. Then I registered.

I have been running the full original route since last September, and I added the second corner without deciding to sometime in January, and I've written about both of those things already, the body deciding before the mind consents, the foregone conclusion you catch up to later. What I haven't written about, because I didn't know it yet, is what happens when you take that solo habit and put it inside a race with a timing arch and two hundred other people at seven in the morning. The answer is: the same thing, mostly. You run. Your mind goes somewhere. You notice the corner before your legs do. And then it's over and Simone is in front of you with her hands on her knees and you're both laughing in a way that isn't quite about anything.

The debrief begins immediately.

We sat on a patch of grass afterward, not really talking. Simone said one sentence that I won't reproduce here because it belongs to the grass and the morning light and not to a post. The two prints are still leaning against the kitchen wall at home, not placed, which I have been meaning to write about. The cord is on the windowsill. Gerald, from what I could tell before I left at six-fifteen, is doing fine. Some mornings the apartment is very quiet when you leave it and very different when you come back, even if nothing in it has moved.

After.