Lost Identities

For the first time in a long while I felt like runner: walking through the Minneapolis airport a month ago, tight for space, I laced my running shoes to a strap on my backpack. They bounced awkwardly and had to check, again and again, that they had not fallen loose, until they became an unforgettable presence to me, and, I thought, an obvious emblem to others. For what kind of person, passersby must have thought--at least in my imagination--, would care so much about shoes but a runner, someone who could not even afford to miss a day (never mind that I ran only once on that trip)? For years I had been committed so thoroughly to the sport that I felt I exuded some kind of runner's aura (or maybe it was just the gauntness of my cheeks); when I was visiting Amherst as a senior in high school, I took great pride when an athlete on the cross country team told me he has picked me out, when he saw me at a prospective students' banquet, as a runner. Form met function: I was living my athletic purpose so thoroughly that it was written in the lines of my body.

Somewhere in the last year, as long runs have given way to days off, the intensity of that aura has faded. I will always run, a few miles here and there; I may even try my hand (and foot) at a few more seasons of true, two-runs-a-day fitness. But without a team at my back, it is something I will never really do again, not so completely. Sixteen-milers and quarter repeats have ascended, like too much else, into the realm of daydream and nostalgia.

And a pair of shoes, conspicuously placed, were enough to bring that all back: to live again, for a few minutes, in that treasured persona.

I am now, quite possibly, on the eve of my South Dakota journey: on Monday, the final quarter begins, and with a dozen or so weekends left, I am mentally prioritizing the adventures still to complete. Hustling through the airport that day, reminded of what I had left behind, I wondered: what, in turn, would I be leaving here? When I go home--if I go home--how long could I play the cowboy, weatherbeaten and venturous, sleeping in tents and on couches, discovering the ways of the world? And, no athlete and no adventurer, what would be left of me?