The Art of Running by Andrea Marcolongo

Author:Andrea Marcolongo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2024-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I have a body.

It’s such a simple and obvious statement that it seems dumb to write it down, subject and predicate. Yet I swear that before running I wasn’t aware I had a body. I didn’t even know I had thoughts—I mean concrete, tangible thoughts—but running has taught me so many things that I often wonder what I knew about myself before I picked it up.

No other activity that I’ve practiced in my life has brought me so close to my physical consciousness: not traveling or eating or making love. Writing least of all. Writing means forgetting all about your body for months and years.

What I mean is that, like everyone else, I’ve been totally aware of having two legs, two arms, two hands, etc., ever since, I think, I opened my eyes and began to catalog the appearance of human beings to distinguish them from cats, plants, and mosquitoes. Or maybe I was already aware of it when I was taking the measurement of things in my mother’s belly.

I knew it, but I didn’t feel it. My outrageously robust body was never really a cause for concern, nor was it fodder for half-baked philosophies. That it would always do whatever I wanted it to—including things I shouldn’t do—seemed to me a given, something that should come as no surprise, part of the natural order of things, like the sun that shines, the sky above our heads, the smell of sunscreen in the summer.

And, as an heir to Western culture with Judeo-Christian roots I never took much interest (read: no interest at all) in the bustle of cells that I’m made of, unless I was studying them in a biology textbook, and it was almost vulgar—frivolous, surely—to devote time to the mechanics of the body at the expense of training my neurons.

I told myself that if two thousand years ago the West regarded the body as nothing but a container, the Tupperware of the soul, then I might as well put all my energy into the latter. I have a vague recollection of giving up swimming lessons just before entering liceo classico and not shedding a tear about it. On the contrary, I was happy to sacrifice a few hours of sports at the altar of Greek and Latin. Honestly, I couldn’t find time in the afternoon for anything besides homework and test prep.

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