Monday, June 30

Training Day: 6

Days Until Race: 125

Now when I run, my thoughts run too. I follow a carefully plotted course, but they’re uninhibited. Allowed to move freely, independent wanderers. Sometimes away for time that’s long enough to notice, before they lope back to rejoin. Inevitably, they always lead me somewhere different. Which is one of the unexpected joys of this new running life.

(A few others: Keener awareness of moments. The way they pass, and how I’ll choose to spend them. Deeper calm, like a well I’ve just tapped, and am still learning to draw from. A serious love of sweat; it feels fantastic; I wear it like a badge. In Duane Reade after six miles on a humid night, the last of June, I curse the air conditioning for whisking hard-won sheen off my skin. And my bum! It bears mentioning! For the first time in my life, I’ve actually got a booty. No black diamond mogul maybe, but something still. A bunny slope bump, where before the landscape pancaked flat. I catch sight of its reflection in store windows and jolt, surprised, again and again. This bottom doesn’t yet belong to me: a freshly grafted body part to whom I’m still making introductions.)

Tonight, the same course. South on the East River Esplanade, three miles, around the flagpole and back up again. But this time when I see the Williamsburg Bridge, my unbound thoughts fly me suddenly to Paris. For no discernable reason, because the cities and their bridges certainly don’t look the same. If anything, New York sometimes reminds me of London—the Mary Poppins version. Gritty skyline with its tugboats hauling steel beams, the Domino Sugar factory and Queens across the water, makes me think of Mary, Bert, Michael and Jane shooting up a chimney. Clothes and cheeks and noses covered prettily in soot. Strolling the rooftops of London, enchanted at twilight witching hour, and below you can practically hear the hungry urchins clanging spoons for more, sir, please. We want some more.

I think of Paris often, of the time I had there during junior year, when I thought it would always be so easy to return. The Euro hadn’t yet replaced the franc, and red wine, a decent Bordeaux, was cheap even for a poor student. I loved my time, and at times I hated it, when I felt physically sick for home or frustrated by a waiter who still replied in English to my meticulous French, like in a strange inverted Babel. But did I appreciate it? I thought it could always be mine. Even when the American woman at the Eiffel Tower asked us, me and my friends, to take a picture of her family, then told us she’d also studied here, a lifetime ago. So much longing in her voice. She was a tourist, and we weren’t. She’d lost, but I could always win, because maybe I’d marry a French politician. Or a viticulturist in Burgundy with brooding eyes and a dark brown beard, too many acres of grapes to see and hands caked in good clean dirt after a long honest day in the September sun. Or maybe I’d just have my own apartment, in Montmartre, where I could drink black coffee strong as licorice and write books. Anything was possible, because I was romantic and everything was only just beginning, and I didn’t realize.

Now it’s usually a smell that transports me back with a gut wrench. Most often of baking bread. Sometimes so strong I actually jerk to a stop and statue in the middle of the street. A bloodhound inhaling air and memories. New York continues to flash past in time-lapse motion—except last Saturday, when the city hadn’t yet woken at 6:00 a.m. On my way to meet Fred’s Team in Central Park, 42^nd Street abandoned like that scene in Vanilla Sky, I caught a whiff of pastry dough and butter from the single stirring bakery beside Grand Central, and my entire body cried: CROISSANT. The kind I ate each morning. Grease blots on the paper in my hand, but so light they melted, really, upon making contact with my tongue.

Funny enough, when I lived in Paris one of the girls at school was a dedicated runner. Maybe even training for a marathon, because she ran all the time, almost every morning. Along the Seine and around the Périphérique, early, the sun still rising and the rest of us waking up with groaning hangovers. Privately I laughed at her, or shook my head in bemused disgust. What a waste of time, when she could be overcooking pasta or packing roast chicken for a picnic! What a silly way to see the city, with the Métro so accessible! Now if I could go back, the quiet hours would count among my favorite. To pound the streets of a town that didn’t completely want me, but simultaneously get goose bumps. Racing past Haussmann buildings that were mine, that’s how much I loved them, that’s how deeply my blood knew them. 

I turn away from the Williamsburg Bridge, and Paris slowly disappears again. A scraping at the wall of my heart, but I remind myself that I’ll re-remember. Vividly. Maybe tomorrow maybe in a year. But always when I least expect it, like how my flying dreams return. Which is possibly the best gift. And then, as luck and life would have it, there is a man sitting under the 34^th Street overpass that smells of pee. And he is playing an accordion. And the song that fills the darkening street is “Comme Toujours.” And I swear, you can’t make these things up.

                                                         Entre deux misre
                                                         Il boit un verre
                                                         Au carrefour
                                                         De son amour
                                                         C’est le dernier
                                                         Comme toujours!

Miles: 6

Time: 55 minutes