The chime of my wristwatch awoke me at 6 a.m., and I sat on the side of my bed, double knotting the laces of my blue Adidas. My roommate groaned, “What the f**k are you doing?” as I stood up and checked I had the dormitory room key in a pocket. “Going out for a run,” I replied. “Why?” he asked as he stared with brows furrowed. “I always do this when I am in a new place,” I answered and quietly closed the door behind me. Now eighteen I had been running every day since I was thirteen and knew it would carry me into this new chapter of my life.
I ran through the campus and took in the different buildings, from brown two-story Victorian buildings (one of which I later learned housed the philosophy department) to low concrete buildings from the old Doctor Who TV show with Tom Baker in his brown overcoat and long striped scarf. As I left the campus, I headed up a main avenue and took in the oak trees and the subdued rainbow of house colors. Only a few cars were driving, and no one was walking—the town’s streets were on a grid.
Six miles and 45 minutes later, I returned to the drab three-story white dormitory building with a mild runner’s high and showered.
Over the weekend orientation, I would learn about my new campus and what it offered, along with several hundred other recently graduated high school seniors. This initial run gave me compass bearings for where I would live for the next few years—grid, small-town, and lots of open space.
After my second year at the university, I had no summer job, and my friends were gone until the fall. I was bored, so I decided to run the circumference of my college town. It was the same preparation ritual as that first run, except there was no surprised roommate. Fields of corn, tomato, alfalfa, and hay surrounded my college town. I could see into the distance until the horizon faded into a grayish blue. Only in one direction were there low foothills.
The town was so flat that the university created artificial hills in front of the engineering building for students learning land surveying. The landscape surrounding the town painted a picture—I lived on an academic island in a sea of agriculture.
The run ended up being 33 miles or 50 kilometers, the furthest I had ever run. Arriving home five hours later, I was pleasantly tired but no longer bored.
The summer after my third year at university, I went to Tokyo for an anthropology program. Unlike the grid of my college town, early mornings became a choose-your-own-adventure run through a maze of neighborhood streets. Tokyo was built to confuse invading towns. I imagine samurai armies becoming lost amidst the tile roofs and colorful kanji shop signs. The quiet was refreshing since I knew how busy the streets would get later.
Returning home to the university from Tokyo, I wanted to continue the adventure and add a challenge. I remembered a childhood dream to run across the country, so I joined the university cross-country team in the fall. The daily practice was simple and familiar. Run eight miles twice a day. In a year I could cross the United States and go back—reach New York City and return to Davis, an hour north of San Francisco.
One night, I remember running under the full moon and my friend Paul pacing me on his bike. He was getting his Ph.D. in math and told me about the three-dimensional shadows cast by higher-dimensional shapes. I shared stories from my Native American Studies classes—how a place is alive and can teach you everything you need to know through stories passed down by those living there.
My running abruptly halted when I developed Achilles tendonitis. The pain of the swollen tendon made it challenging to walk for six months, and I could not run for an entire year.
After half a year of not running I needed an adventure that summer. I grabbed my sleeping bag and topped the stuff sack with nuts, two apples, and a water bottle. I walked to visit those foothills that had been so clear on that summer day that I ran around the town. After an all-day 25-mile hike, I reached the nature preserve owned by the university. I explored a stream and felt the peeling red bark of manzanita trees. Climbing onto a cluster of boulders at sunset, I looked back toward town. The next day, I simply woke up and hiked the return journey.
The next day in town, a fellow student said he had seen me and thought I had decided to leave school and walk into a new life.
I had been running daily for a decade when I graduated college. I had grown from a child to a young man. Running helped me navigate these years and make sense of the world. Running the town’s perimeter and its various streets grounded all the knowledge I had gained from five years of academic study. I was confident I could handle whatever adventure came next because I had a daily running practice.
Note: Thank you editors Shirley Rivera, Jack Dixon, and Sandra Yvonne. Thanks to Cam Houser who gave me useful suggestions for an earlier still unpublished essay on running.
Epic Ken Rice 