I ran 300 laps on the indoor track at the gym in our neighborhood, each one one-tenth of a mile, clockwise. This was a couple Fridays ago, when the air quality index was 110, which is technically “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” according to the EPA.
At least I think it was 300 laps. It was probably more, because I ran until my watch hit 30.06 miles, and the gym says the track is 0.1 mile per lap, but my watch often recorded something a little short of 0.1 mile per lap, and I wasn’t going to try to keep count of my laps for five hours.
The wildfire smoke moved into town the last week of July, and more or less stuck around for two and a half weeks. I made a rule that I wouldn’t run outdoors if the AQI was over 100, which some people might say is a bit over-cautious. But the truth is, nobody knows the long-term effects of wildfire smoke exposure. I was talking to a friend about this personal rule, and they said, “Does it bother your lungs when it’s over 100?” And I thought No, but I smoked hundreds of packs of cigarettes when I was a young/dumb person, and I wouldn’t say that bothered my lungs at the time, but we all know how that turns out. When the AQI went over 150, we decided to start driving Jay to school instead of having him ride his bike.
This is not what I love about running, I kept telling myself as I went around and around. Or is it? At the very least, I am not sitting in front of a laptop, or scrolling through my phone, watching videos of Other People Living Life. I am here, Living Life, around and around and around.
The week before my 300 laps, I ran 25 miles in the gym, but counter-clockwise, so left turns all day. I broke it up with a couple short runs on the treadmills, where the more sane people run indoors. Or are they more sane? I had a lot of time to think about this, circling the Human-Powered Travel Simulation Machines, the treadmills, the stair climbers, the stationary bicycles, the rowing machines.
My dad used to love this old Rodney Dangerfield joke that went something like this: “I told my dad I was tired of my life going around in circles. So he nailed my other foot to the floor.” I wish my dad could see me now. I mean, I guess he could see me now. I could FaceTime him.
I choose to run on the 0.1-mile track because it’s cooler than the treadmills. Or at least I sweat less when I run on the track. The treadmills, at least the ones I have run on at the gym, have this tiny vent, about an inch by five inches, that allegedly contains a fan. I have turned on the fan before, all the way up to the highest setting, which produces a breeze equivalent to a six-week-old baby breathing on you. Which does nothing to mitigate the drops of sweat that drip off my body in strange trajectories, onto the treadmill belt, the rails, the buttons, and hopefully not onto the person running on the adjacent treadmill? So I run on the track instead, where my actual forward motion through the air helps mitigate this.
I tell myself that people run marathons inside the San Quentin prison. I tell myself that I’m lucky that this is an exception for me, that as a white male in a small U.S. city, I feel safe enough to run outdoors almost all the time, including in the dark, and that’s a privilege. A guy ran an ultramarathon around a single roundabout. People run the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100-mile race over 52 days around a single city block in Queens every year.
I tell Hilary this is madness. I’m not complaining, more so just thinking out loud, like this is madness, right? Half asking her to be the voice of reason and say, Yes, it’s insane, stop doing it and find a different hobby, either permanently or temporarily, or—and this might sound strange, but you could, hear me out—develop a more normal relationship with exercise.
But she is not the voice of reason this time, and instead says, “It’s probably good training for your race.” And she is probably right. But it also occurs to me that when two people are partnered for a long time, their co-thinking can evolve into a somewhat altered shared reality, and maybe I shouldn’t always assume, “Well, if I run it by my wife and she doesn’t think it sounds crazy, then it must not be crazy.”
The race I signed up for is 24 hours of loops around a 1.68-mile crushed gravel path, almost completely flat (9 feet of elevation gain per loop). It sounds awful for many reasons: It’s repetitive, it’s flat, it’s probably going to be hot, there’s no shade, and it’s not particularly scenic. But it’s interesting—or maybe I’m telling myself this to rationalize it—because I will have an opportunity to quit every 1.68 miles, every time I loop past the EZ-up with a cooler, a camp chair, and my stuff in it. I cannot run faster to make it end sooner. It’s going to be boring, or, through another lens, you might say it’s going to be meditative.
I have told myself that if the AQI was higher than 80 on the weekend of the race, I will stay home. Most days, 90 percent of me is rooting for good air quality on the day of the race. Some days, though, the part of me that doesn’t know how I’ll react to running 1.68-mile loops for an entire day (and is maybe a little afraid of the whole thing), wouldn’t mind not having to test myself.
The week after my 300-lap run, I run 25 miles on the indoor track at the gym. The track is shaped like this:
The straightaways take me 54 steps to cover, and the curves take me 26 steps to cover. I have been trying to slow down for the curves to keep my body upright in hopes of avoiding some weird injury from making 1000+ turns with the same leg on the inside of the curve. I am not sure it helps.
After two weeks of running only indoors, only at the gym, I am starting to see many of the same people, and recognize their outfits. They work out, I run past them 10, 15, 30 times as I keep doing the same loop, and they move from one resistance training machine to another, finally disappearing at the end of their completely reasonable workout, and I keep circling the track.
I try to imagine the reasons all these other people have, why they’re spending their hour or hours at the gym—maybe to get stronger, maybe to feel better, to look more fit, to stay mobile, to fend off aging, to improve just a little bit in some way—they all seem valid, sensible even. Maybe that’s something worth exploring: Sensibility. I’ll look into that. After a few more laps.
—
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting my work.
