Following a particularly acute supper, I waddled to the
I know I'm not built for running because my feet don't have wheels, but
running, I am told, turns back the biological clock.
Since my advancing chronological age has been neatly balanced by my
declining emotional age, I've pretty much broken even since puberty. My scale, however, seems to get older each
week. I pity it.
My entrance coincided with that of a middle aged, non athletic lady who
really should have taken better care of herself. She was a real grown up.
The issue immediately presented itself of whether to let her go on ahead
and then pass her, or sprint past early on. The problem with starting a run next to
a woman you don't know is that she might feel threatened; this is similar to
the problem of catching up to a woman walking alone on a city street. Further, it is hard not pull away or drop
back without seeming to make a statement.
Your pace is not your own. Nor,
consequently, are your thoughts.
So you're doing something you don't want to do, next to someone you
don't want to be next to, thinking thoughts you don't want to have.
In any case, I would certainly be faster than her (did I mention that
she was a middle aged woman?), not that I was immature enough to monitor such
things.
You are, of course, not surprised to discover that my normal pace
matched hers, step for gruesome step.
Around and around. Yard after merry
yard.
And so we went, lock step without acknowledgement, joined by the coincidence
of our natural paces; her so old and me thinking only of how to break
free. After 1.5 eternities, she asked
how fast I ran, saying that she had forgotten to bring her watch.
"Not very," I said (ah, the self effacing modesty of the
non-threatened male).
Silence.
"I don't really care how fast I go, so long as I can stop," I
added; salivating idiot!
"I wasn't being critical," she said, therapeutically.
"I didn't take it that way," I panted non-defensively. Oh, why did I say that!? Now I really couldn't peel off without making
it seem that I was, too, being defensive,
and I couldn't quit for God knows how many more eternities without looking like
I was quitting defensively. And
I had to answer her question. I didn't
really know, because you have to do something more than once to establish a
numerical average, and each time I ran, my only thought, panted with monk-like
tenacity was: "... never again, never again, never again..."
So I ballparked it: "Oh, about ten minutes a mile. Maybe eleven."
She nodded, satisfied.
I felt uneasy with my response. Was I being defensive? At my
age?
I only wanted to show her I didn't care.
How do you show someone you don't care?
Try it sometime. Then try it
without making a fool of yourself.
"I don't know," I
added, much too much later, "maybe nine minutes. It depends."
Her nod this time was perfunctory.
"I never really timed myself," I added, with heightened
indifference. Look at me! I don't care!
No response at all. She was on
her own, slow trip.
"What a jerk!" at least one of us thought ... as I raced past
her.