Right when I was ready to ride the fitness wave I’d built over the summer of 2019 an old hamstring injury popped up. Soon I was riding and rowing and rehabbing at the local gym with the yellow walls and purple floors.
Every morning I rolled into the parking lot as the sun was rising, reticent to be inside instead of on my beloved backroads watching first light filter through the trees. Instead, first light filtered through the grimy windows of the strip mall where the Purity Supreme was when I was a kid. They doubled the coupons of their competitors, which meant my mom would drive from a town away to do her grocery shopping there with my siblings and I in tow. Now there are Smith Machines where the bread used to be.
After hanging my car keys on the collective board, I’d make my way to the locker room where I found myself navigating to the same locker each morning. Locker 42. I’d spend the next mind-numbing hour doing everything that wasn’t running in hopes that I could run again, and hopefully run fast.
I negotiated with myself. Persuaded. Cajoled. I don’t like working out inside. I don’t like not running. It took a lot of effort to show up. And then one morning as I opened the locker and hung my hoodie a thought broke through the fog of resistance:
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