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Sometime ago I sold my body to Lowell track.
I’m not sure when it happened. It crept up on me: I realized that “Elena Chin” doesn’t completely belong to me. My body isn’t mine to digest barbiturates with or keep up late. This Sunday, you won’t see me at any prom after-parties. The Wednesday after is track and field All-City trials and I have to be in bed as early as absolutely possible all week. For a lot of my friends, the cuteness of their stilt-heeled prom shoes is of primary importance, but mine have to support my arches and mid-foot, keep stress off my ankles and if I irritate the extensor hallucis longus in my left foot, I’ll pretty much die. I can’t hurt myself, not because I’d be in pain, but because I’d run slower — and Lowell track wouldn’t like that.
I figure track took over with a sort of foot-in-the-door progression. As a freshman it made sense that at practice I would do pretty much what my coaches told me. Still, I’d complain about the distance or the pace and by the end I’d have run a workout that fell in between a frosh-soph runner’s whines and a coach’s ideal. By junior year, my first year running Varsity, I stopped complaining and started exerting 100 percent effort at workouts. That was reasonable. From 3:45 to 6:00, Monday through Friday — plus Saturday meets — Lowell track owned my body.
However, this year that afterschool hold evolved into a 24/7 possession. Rather than just controlling me athletically, actions “for the sake of my running” filled the non-running part of my day. A few weeks ago, I visited the University of California-San Diego and found myself surrounded by the possibility of getting completely smashed every night (and afternoon, sometimes). But I never realized that possibility: The reflex to turn down those red cups was as strong as my impulse to sprint past the finish line. At a party I went to my first night there, a very drunk UCSD senior endearingly began calling me “sober girl” and pinching my cheeks every time he passed by.
Of course, I realize that there are plenty of kids my age who drink and smoke all the time. That’s their choice. They can play beer pong in friends’ basements or fill coke bottles with Jack Daniel’s if they want, but I lost that sovereignty somewhere down the road. Track convinced me to give that up and made it so that drinking just doesn’t seem right. It’d be the same as trashing a computer in the library or tagging a bathroom.
After all, as far as I can tell, partying is completely incompatible with running fast, with running well. After a heavy night of drinking, there’s no way I could wake up at 2 p.m., even, and run for an hour. You can tell for the whole next week when kids smoked pot Saturday — they breathe harder and drag their legs just a little more than makes sense. Four years of running made me realize that I can’t be the “Elena Chin” I’d like to be while getting drunk off my wazzoo.
The addictive quality of running, the incomprehensible union between my soul and the eight-laned red ovals at Kezar and McAteer bring out more “Elena Chin” than I thought was even there. I’d much rather be addicted to pulling up lap three of my four-lap mile, getting right behind the lead runner — letting her break my wind on the back straightaway — and flying into a shiny new personal best. I sometimes obsess over the notion that for every drink I could have, I might lose a few seconds or a part of my runner-soul.
Sometime ago I sold my body to Lowell track. Up to my eyeballs, this flesh that was once mine has to be a running machine, but I think I got a good deal — my soul is more mine than ever. |
