A Runner's Confession

Three weeks ago, I ran on a treadmill. In a hotel basement. Seven miles. Two days in a row. In San Franscisco. In fifty-degree weather. Worse, I told acquaintances I met in the elevator that I was going to "work out" rather than "run," deliberately intimating that I chose the hotel gym because it offered exercise opportunities that the Great Outdoors did not. It was pretty darned close to an outright lie.

I'm not proud that I gave in to the fear I felt listening to fifteen years of running only on plain and prairie tell me that I'd never make it past the first hilly mile. I'm not proud that I missed out on a chance to see new parts of a great American city with a runner's special intimacy.

And now the endless treadmill miles of the deep Midwestern winter mock me with every slightly-cushioned, somehow indefinably too-mechanical step.