CROWDED SOLITUDE IS NO PLACE FOR NEW YEAR'S RESOLVE
Around a year ago,
I took up running. Most mornings, around seven o’clock, I’d rise and don the
appropriate footwear, shorts and a t-shirt, and I’d head out, do a few
stretches then jog my way down the road, do a few laps of the local oval, jog
back. Nothing too intense, just some early morning cardio to justify the
smoking and drinking that accompanies my profession like the smell of damp
undergrowth does a tropical summer storm.
The timing for
this burst of exercise was purely coincidental. The fact it was early January
had little to do with it, far less so than my rapidly expanding mid-section,
far too used to the relatively small amount of exercise I’d been doing
previously; as was gently pointed out to me by my better half, I needed to step
it up somewhat, and so I started running. I hate it and am not a natural
runner, but I began none the less.
I kept at it too,
which is something of which I’m reasonably proud, and so this protuberance I’d
been carrying around gradually shrank. Or at least, for the most part, didn’t
get any bigger.
So here I am now,
a year or so later, and I rise early and head out for the first run of the
year, looking to get the heart-rate up and begin to shed some of the excess
that has accumulated over the festive season. It’s a cool morning, rain on the
horizon, but light and brisk, birdsong etc. It’s a lovely time of day, solitary
and still, which is what I need in order to keep this momentum going – it won’t
work if there are multiple spectators.
But here’s
something I’d forgotten from when I first began last January. It’s January.
People are fresh off boozy New Year celebrations, weeks (perhaps months) of
eating and drinking and making merry. They’re bloated and fat, over-ripe and
ready to pop. And so they think to themselves, ‘I need to get some exercise
happening, my New Year resolution, I will
get slim, I will exercise daily’.
And so, as I set
out on my first run of the year, a hoary old veteran of such sweat-stained
dealings, I have an audience. Multiple walkers and runners, around every bend,
every turn in the path, as I emerge from the bush track into the wide open
spaces afforded by the cricket oval, there are people everywhere, undertaking
some form of January-induced exercise, sweating and wheezing in my previously quiet
and solitary morn.
‘What fresh hell
is this?’, I mutter to myself in a fit of self-righteous pique, albeit a
slightly out of breath one. ‘Where have these people come from and how dare
they encroach upon my carefully choreographed morning custom’. I carry on
however, side-stepping middle-aged men with fat and droopy dogs in tow, finish
my course and head, dripping with outraged sweat, for the shower.
Of course, I have
no right to be grumpy; these roads and paths are as much anyone else’s as they
are mine. As well, the early hour, before the world properly wakes up, belongs
as much to a well-intentioned first-time dog walker as it does to anyone who’s
risen early these 12 months past. Or longer, for that matter.
I have no ill will
toward anyone wanting to better themselves, and I certainly don’t hold myself
in higher esteem merely because I stuck with something (to be honest, the main
reason I didn’t stop running, is
because of how much I do like to
drink and smoke…). I do like my solitude and space however, particularly when
engaging in an exercise I utterly abhor and so don’t want anyone to witness.
Oh my quiet paths,
my empty oval, the birdsong sung just for me. How I yearn for you, even after
only a day. Go to the gym you lot, leave me to my hobbled jogging, my fractured
running, my uneven-gaited perambulations. I admire your intentions, I doff my
cap to your will power and I salute your resolve. Just do it somewhere else and
leave me to stagger around in peace, trying to keep my gut in check, lifting
the heart-rate and shedding the excess in my own, solitary way.
Samuel J. Fell
No comments:
Post a Comment