Running with Neil

Its been raining for two days and I'm coming off a serious ankle injury and coming on to a major calf strain. And I show up at Neil and Steph's to find out instead of running with Steph, I'll be running with Neil.

And why does that matter?

Neil and I are friends but I'd never run with Neil before when it was just the two of us. We'd always run with Steve and Steph and it worked. Neil likes to bolt. I heard him say once, he has some speed and once in a while he likes to use it. And, I imagine, my turtle slow pace can get a bit tiresome. When we ran as a group, Neil could be way down the trail and I still had a runner partner.

Its a thing about running a lot of people don't get. I don't begrudge Neil his need to run fast. I'm always a little surprised when anyone fast wants to run with me. They're fast. God made them that way. They should go fast. When Neil is way down the trail I'm not hurt, I'm envious. I admire his ability. I respect it.

I don't mind getting left behind because I run to run. Its the friction of someone fast thinking they need to hold back for you and all I can think is how much it must hurt being tethered.

When I showed up at Neil and Steph's and Steph was curled up on the couch with a blanket and Neil was getting ready, my first thought was that Neil got stuck with the chore of running with me as a favor to Steph. It didn’t bode well as far as I could reckon. I would slow him down and he might push me harder than I could go.

I hate that I keep circling back on this but I have no illusions about my speed or gains or anything like that. Neil just out classes me as a runner. He’s younger, by 209 years, he trained most of his life and he’s got the body type. He's tall and lean and fit as hell. I'm a northern European viking type, barrel chested with skinny arms and I’m nervous.

Do you get how wrong this could go?

So we start running. Neil’s real quiet for what seems like forever and then he starts talking, actually asking me questions, where my family lives, what my dad does for a living and I’m having the hardest time hearing him or breathing for that matter. He has to repeat himself and I’m thinking, now he really has to be irritated.

Then we have this exchange where I mentioned how fast he is, how we've never run alone together and he seemed snappish and then I corrected him, he misquoted me, I didn't say he was fast but faster than me and that seemed to piss him off and I kept thinking this is such horrible mistake and then we got to the water.

At first, it was splashy puddles and what seemed like anemic drainage streams then rushing streams and vast sections of water where we had to run around them into the woods and he kept having to wait for me and then it started to happened, he started smiling. He gave me some pointers on how to manage the water. Step straight down and then straight up again. Bounding. Working the edges.

I started smiling and laughing. I stopped noticing how much I was holding us back and started running. Then came the red clay hill...

It was two stories of red clay piled up from construction and Neil had us run up and over and he just one two three’d up  that bastard but with the clay's tension was broken by the time I started my ascent. I seemed to almost instantly sink into the muck, struggling to find a path. Sinking, plowing, digging until I made my way up to the peak. I was covered in red clay almost to me knees and my shoes were like adobe bricks. We looked out over everything. And owned it all.

Neil took off and jump from anartificial cliffs half way down. He jumped hard and smoothly. I ran and half jumped and half slid. We headed down a granite strewn drainage bed back into the streams. I wasn’t even trying to stay out of the water now. The red clay was coming off my shoes in sheets but that wasn’t even why. It was just so damn fun not to care about pace or stride.

Neil used the word awesome. I get that but I reckon he meant awestruck. It was so easy, unbound from worry , my pulse pounding in my head as the water got deep, knee deep, hip deep, shallow and then not shallow and then Neil seemed to fall forward, splashing face first into the water.

I called out, You alright and he yelled back, Yeah. And I yelled, Is it deep? But never heard his reply when I hit that spot and dropped 5.5 feet into an eddying pool, the water swirling over my head.Neil yelled, Don't swallow the water and I grabbed a tree root to hauled myself out.

We ran out of the woods and up along Park taking both the big bad hill and its little brother. We ran those hills hard and as exhausted as I was from everything, I just ran harder. I wanted to give up everything I had left inside me. I had been to the wilderness just a little. Cars actually got swept away in this very rain we had been running in this very night.

We turned left into Neil’s neighborhood and headed home.