I commit myself, as always, to one perfect step at a time, with each step landing midfoot without heelstrike, timed to breathing keyed to music that, if it were a mixtape, would have worn grooves in the magnetic ribbons down to flimsy plastic by now.
I commit myself to one step at a time, because the universe is big and 42 kilometres is a long distance, and I have asthmatic lungs and flat feet, and I reject this truth, and so all I can do is lift my will against the universe, one step at a time.
And I fall off the wagon, and I don’t always make my timings and after seven years I still haven’t managed to run more than fifteen kilometres at a stretch and that hurts, perhaps more than any physical pain that comes from the running.
But I keep running one step at a time, trying to keep each step landing on live feet, to feel the impact as a coiled spring in my legs, because as long as each step is alive, I am alive. As long as each step lets me take the next step, there is still life, and there is still will, and I will throw my will into the pan to balance against the scales of an uncaring universe.
As long as I can still take one more step, then that is one more step than the universe is willing to give me, and I’ll lift my will against it again.
And one day I will be dead. But I will have taken tens of thousand or millions of perfect steps, and each step has taught me something, and each step has given me strength, and each step leads somewhere that I was never meant to go and somewhere I choose to be.
So onwards.
(Running log today: 6.6km in 42 minutes.
9 and a half km/hour. Still going.
Still alive.)
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