I do not like to run. I like to have run. And I also love runners, all runners, even the serious ones, even the ridiculous ones who can’t take three steps without glancing busy at their “running watch”. fitness “, object equipped with a heart rate and blood pressure monitor as well as a pedometer, and whose dial also displays valuable information on the calorie balance of the jogger and the quality of his sleep. It looks like the hospital.
You can even get your message notifications on it. What’s the point of running if it’s for reality to catch up with you? Still, all of you who run are my brothers and my sisters. I can see you passing by at all hours, whether it’s raining, snowing or hailing, nothing seems to be able to stop you, neither the scorching gravity nor the freezing cold of January. You are diurnal, nocturnal, road, forest, you proliferate. Like the deer grazing on the side of the highway, you are now part of the landscape. An invasive species as we like them.
I often worry about seeing you brushed by cars and pickup on the thin shoulder of a country road, as if there was nowhere else to go. You are solitary heroes who affirm the presence of pedestrians on this asphalt continent where the smallest urban or peripheral boulevard is transformed into a highway. de facto. Whether you are athletes fueled by performance and achievement, the type who runs seven marathons in the high mountains in your week, parents hitched to the “heavy cart of the perpetuation of the species” (Michel Tournier) and who ‘nevertheless frolicking cheerfully behind the stroller or simple fellows addicted to the Zen bubble where you can hear the body pulsing and emptying your mind, it’s the same fight.
And it’s a street fight. The dispersed infantrymen that you are are the vanguard of a secret army which only lacks a few anti-tank guns. In this world designed for the car, where electric assistance now turns scooters and bicycles into public dangers, you who, despite the ” tracking of activity” on your wrist, continue to use your feet and your lungs without the help of any appendages, you are entitled to the title of superpedestrians. Respect.
I said I don’t like running, but that’s not quite right. What I don’t like is the obligation, the official message, health as a civic duty. “I burn calories therefore I am, cardio in the mat. Spend the excess energy of a sedentary life and respond to that internalized aggression that Dr. Hans Selye has identified as the stress syndrome.
I would prefer, for my part, to keep in shape by taking my legs around my neck to escape the giant cave bear and the saber-toothed tiger, like my distant ancestors. Their situation had the merit of being clear. But even though the legion of our enemies has largely dematerialized over the millennia, it seems that we are still running to escape them. And “a healthy mind in a healthy body” resonates today less like an ideal inherited from ancient Greece than like the subtle injunction of a beleaguered healthcare system.
The question that kills is: what makes the hamster run in its cage?
But running is also a sport, the first, the most natural (along with swimming), and it is this stripping down, this biological intimacy in the absence of any technical mediation with the environment, that I particularly cherish. I love the elemental nudity of running. Running is a way for me to pay tribute to my father, this ordinary long-distance runner who never set foot in a specialized store. On certain parts of the course, I also sometimes take myself for Richard Chelimo or Haile Gebrselassie sprinting in the very last strides of a 10,000 meters.
I go through the door and leave on foot, free-spirited, willing body, cap screwed on my head, out of reach for an hour. A ten-minute walk to warm up the joints, then set off at a gentle trot, feel the body working, the blood purring, the cartilages throbbing, the breath deepening, becoming more rhythmic, the first rib, its resistance , as if the weight of the earth itself was pulling on the soles of your New Balance. The joggers I meet rarely smile. Nothing but the tension of the effort and this suffering which feels good.
I don’t perhaps offer a very elegant vision when I trot between the houses like this, my style is a bit clumsy, no doubt, a bit of a dancing bear, in terms of pace. You have to find the rhythm, get back on track after the inconsistencies of the summer. And visualize the route that twists along the streets of the neighborhood, imagining yourself already at the top of the last climb, flooded with good burning sweat, your pulse racing.
On the way back, I will pick some late raspberries at the bend of a pedestrian crossing and bring them to the new member of the household, who is called Michoui and who adores them. Before going in the shower, I slip one between the bars of his cage. In the evening, our Russian hamster becomes more active. From the living room, we hear his wheel spinning. And turn, turn the wheel, while I knock nails in front of the TV.
We sleep better after running.