The Places You'll Go

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On the two-mile stretch I run every day, there is one last bend that curves to the right, camouflaging the much larger and busier highway where my running route dead ends. Until you’ve rounded that final corner there is no hint of this well-trafficked artery to the outside world, and so if you are at the ranch where the smaller road begins or simply plodding along on your daily run, it can be surprisingly easy to forget there is an outside world at all.

If you’d asked me two years ago whether I’d ever live in a place where the closest town population was 72 and it took 40 minutes just to reach a McDonald’s, I would have laughed at the sheer absurdity of the notion. I went to high school in a small town, and when I graduated I thought I’d had my fill of ZIP codes where the heart of the action was at the local Walmart. The objective was always more lights, higher heels and bigger cities - to move up in the world, it seemed to me, required moving higher and higher on the urban food chain. I lived in Boston, Seattle, New York City and Denver before finally returning to my home state of Texas and taking up residence in Dallas. For ten years I tried out cities where every modern comfort was at my fingertips, and yet the key to my happiness seemed perpetually out of reach.

The running habit I picked up in college followed me to all these cities. I looped the Charles River, ran the New York City marathon and conquered trails across Colorado. On the day after I moved to Seattle, I went for a run and, unbeknownst to me, a photographer from the Seattle Times snapped a photo when I was running by a group of protes- tors. Not only does the picture show that I am sweaty and tired, but when I opened the paper that next day and saw my own face staring back at me, I also spotted a determination I don’t often see in my reflection. At first I thought it was a byproduct of the run; after all, I was concentrating on not getting lost in the crowd, keeping my pace steady, and finding happiness at my finish, but after thinking about the unexpected moment that photographer captured I realized those parts of the run were also what I wanted for my new life in that new place. Maybe the determination in my face was more than just a runner on the move; perhaps it had a lot to do with where I was going as a person as well.