Transit
This essay was written in tandem with the animation ‘Filament’, linked here.
I spent the first day of the blizzard that passed through from December 23rd to 26th 2022 as a body in motion. This was first by foot and then by train– I was booked for an afternoon trip from Toronto to Ottawa. Travelling went against all responsible advice to stay inside and stay put, and the weather delivered its consequences. My train reached Ottawa 5 hours late, but the train which left after mine was stranded for 18 hours when a tree blew over and landed on the train’s engine. My delay was a minor inconvenience by comparison, but being stuck on the train was still disorienting. Our pace was often at a crawl, and it was dark, so there was nothing visible from the car window that could confirm whether we were moving or not. My idleness and frustration produced false sensations: when we were stopped, I would constantly feel like we’d started moving again even when we hadn’t. This illusion was a reminder that the opposite is true – that all moments of stillness disguise the reality of being in a slow, heavy orbit that proceeds without my notice or choice.
Earlier in the day, before I’d boarded the train, I’d made the decision to go out for a run. I was able to go out early enough that this was still possible. In the morning the snow hadn’t accumulated significantly, and the wind wasn’t yet at its full tree-snapping power. The storm was intense, but its effect seemed more ethereal than dangerous. The atmospheric mass of the air and snow formed a near-opaque scrim, and this layer offered partial concealment when outside. People would pass in and out of visibility on the street, and I assume that I did the same. I picture myself running that day as someone passing into transparency, like in my stubborn insistence to keep up this part of my routine I had caused myself to dissolve. Even on the edge of this possibility, it ended up being the rare kind of run that felt fantastic. The snow was thin enough that I still had good traction, but thick enough that it completely absorbed my stride, erasing the impact on my joints. I ran home with a tailwind and felt weightless as I did; the whole run felt like floating.
I’ve been trying to find language to explain why I run. It’s hard to do this without adopting sports-bullshit platitudes that reduce running to a mechanism of self-improvement, as if running could only be an expression of discipline or work ethic. It’s true that running can be incredibly boring, and that it can also be an unforgiving measurement of your current physical limitations. A friend asked me in the fall if I genuinely enjoyed running, and I responded to say that the parts which weren’t painful were often very peaceful. I meant this as a joke, but I do also mean this. My history with running has been intermittent because of injury: I ran half-marathons as a high-strung teenager but was forced to take a long hiatus from the sport after experiencing a concussion that lingered for several years. Being able to run without incurring the repercussion of worsened symptoms was one of the last milestones of post-concussion recovery. I was first concussed in June 2014, but by the time I was able to run without triggering a migraine it was March 2020.
This process measured running in relation to pain, but in the absence of this barrier I mostly think about running in connection to location. Wherever I’ve lived while I’ve been able to run, I’ve acquired a shortlist of personal landmarks that delineate routes of predictable length. I’m much more likely to run these routes over an over than I am to explore and establish new ones, and this has led to an understanding of place shaped through repetition rather than through the contrast of novelty. In Toronto a significant amount of available trail is dictated by the water, and the most appealing continuous routes lead you to the lake. If you follow the lakefront eastwards you’ll find Leslie Spit, and for the last two years I’ve lived about 5km away from this point. In the late winter and early spring of last year when I was still developing the habit of going for long runs, I would run to the Spit, run 5-10km in the park and adjacent trails, and then run home.
Part of enduring winter in Toronto is coping with being colour-starved. One of the reasons that I would run to the Spit was to see anything that wasn’t grey. I’m convinced that the best part of winter is the colour blue – specifically the blue of the sky in winter sun, and the blue cast that shadows have when they fall on the surface of snow. The refraction of sun off snow is equally intoxicating if you can get it, but the winters I’ve lived through here have had such limited snow that the combination of these forces seems scarce. If colour and light are fastened tightly to the experience of joy, then running to the park (which was still intensely chromatic even in hibernation) was a way to bring myself closer to these elements. When I was there I would take pictures of the landscape with my phone, and when I got home I would make post-run notes of what I’d seen. There would be muted yellows in the dried grasses, deep navy from the lake, and brisk reds in the exposed branches of dogwood trees. As the spring progressed and the greens rebounded these notes changed in character. By June I started making notes of the smells of the place when the dogwood trees were in bloom. I realised that I’d been smell-starved as well as colour-starved.
Running offers a kind of disappearance into place, but it also offers a kind of disappearance into yourself in the effort of doing something intensely physical. Managing this headspace can be its own challenge. As temperatures got warmer last summer, my concentration while running would get kind of hazy - by the 10km mark I would start to lose focus in a fugue-state of dehydration. Being in this state was a strain, and in it my thinking would shrink in scope but intensify in fervour as I withdrew into a water-obsessed trance. My ex, who would go on long backcountry hikes, once expressed that she was struck by how little time could be spent thinking about meaning when the basic realities of fatigue, hunger, and the difficulty of the trail were the unresolved problems of the day. Physical exertion can provide cheap access to the profound, but I think it’s unusual for this to be consistent or guaranteed. In any case, a surplus of epiphanies would undermine the whole point of having an epiphany.
Running is also a sort of flight, in multiple senses. It’s a means of escape, as well as a specific kind of movement. When you walk one foot is always on the ground, but when you run every stride includes a moment when you are completely midair. In this cycle of launching, flying, and landing, running becomes a form of repeated and failed levitation. The most recent time I was in an airplane I was taken up with the feeling of what sustained flight felt like, even if it was achieved by machine. I was enamored with the sight of the ground as seen at high elevation in the same way that I assume everyone who is an infrequent traveller does. The distance and bird’s eye view miniaturized everything and made it precious, because everything at human scale reduces to a speck when viewed from an elevation of 2000m. This is also true in reverse: when viewed from a great distance, your body in flight is a speck that disappears into the vanishing point of departure. You reappear, or settle back into shape, upon arrival.
I imagine the flight of running as being a way to grapple with the clumsiest kind of infinity, like in its capacity to balance the contradiction of being both in the air and on the ground, it becomes a way to be in two places at once. I wonder if infinity is even the right word. Maybe the word is simultaneity, or even compression – like before you can be open and porous to the world, you need to make yourself quiet and small. I think of this perspective as being both one of self-effacement and one of strong attachment, like spending your attention on a person you love. Maybe awareness of motion and distance allow you to see the rupture between each consecutive moment, in companion to the compensations of close observation while keeping still. This would fracture time in new increments of footfall and flicker, and these fragments would collect and refine alchemically to something precious, as if memory were an alloy of storytelling and image that could be stretched into filament, coiled into a spring held under tension, and transformed into clarity when released.
I have experienced a few flashes of this clarity when running. The visits of these insights jump geographies and skip years, and they’ve had various triggers: it could be a song from a running playlist I made in high school, or a spot at the Spit that I’ll return to after a pause, or a moment of intense feeling in the presence of a particular view. I was confronted with one of these moments last year in January when I was running towards Riverdale Park. There’d been fresh snowfall and the park had attracted groups of kids who were taking the day to go sledding. When you approach the park from the west, you come to a hill that slopes down to the Don River, allowing for a short glimpse of big sky. While I ran into this opening, all I could think of was how beautiful it was to be running in the daylight and the new snow and the quiet air. As quickly as this thought bubbled into euphoria it was punctured by dread – in the exposure of this affection, I realised how sad I would be if I lived to a time when there wasn’t snow anymore.