The Distance That Finished Itself

October thirteenth. The route is four-point-something miles. I stopped measuring it precisely sometime in 2009 because the precision was getting in the way of the point, and I never went back to check. This morning I ran all of it.

I want to be careful about how I say this. It was not a return. Returns have a quality of drama that this didn't have, some gesture toward the before-and-after, the gap acknowledged and closed with ceremony. There was no ceremony. I got to the last third and realized I had already decided not to stop, and the realization arrived the same way it did at the third block in July: too late to be a decision, only early enough to be noticed. The route finished. That is the accurate description.

The moment after, looking back down the block

I came home and made coffee, black, still, the experiment has apparently concluded itself the same way, and sat down with the notebook and tried to write what had happened without reaching for a frame that wasn't there. I've been carrying this thread for seven months. One block in March. Two blocks in June, the corner arriving at a particular angle. Three blocks in July, the mind ahead of the legs. And then this morning, the full original distance, just because the morning had enough of a gap in it and the legs remembered what they were doing. There's no announcement to make. The open loop about running as its own register, distinct from yoga and climbing and the bouldering wall, that loop closed this morning somewhere in the last mile, before I was paying attention to it. Simone will probably name it first at Tuesday session, which is the usual order of things.

The windowsill is the same. Gerald has been very quiet. The cord is still on the sill and still the standard. The collapsed bowl is still on the shelf above the stove and the light on it in the afternoons has been doing something specific lately that I haven't written about yet. There's a lot the fall light is doing that I haven't written about yet. That part isn't a complaint.

Back home, writing it down while it was still true