About 6 years ago, I took to the treadmill. It is a story all its own on how I started that. Today’s special chapter is about how I took running to the next level and realized something about the world. Treadmill running is great. The aesthetic downside is that the view stays the same. Yes, there are fancier versions with screens, but you get my point. So, if you ever drove a car and paid attention to how long a mile is, it feels pretty long. Like, “that was one mile?.. and the sun is 93 million of those away?!” On the treadmill though, you develop your fitness to run a mile pretty quickly. You also get curious about what running that distance outside for real feels like. My train station was about a mile away. I drove to it every work day to commute. One day I thought I would run there for kicks. I laced up. It was about an hour before dusk. Off I went. On the way there, I realized that the suddenly banal daily route was fascinating. Every crack in the concrete, slightly overgrown shrub, and garden gnome that I came across was vivid and interesting. You might think that this was the most interesting part. But there’s more. Even more profound than the new life of the world around me was the new sense of scale that I felt. As I arrived at the station (slightly out of breath because I was still fairly new to running and because I often ran faster than I had any right to), I was surprised to feel that the mile that I just ran was…short. The ripple effects of this followed me everywhere that I went and has profoundly changed my view of the world. Suddenly everything was very close and accessible. Neighboring towns were just around the corner. Bridges were short. Highways were merely a few dozen laps around a track. I could suddenly understand how a hobbit could pack supplies and trek through a mountain pass to fight evil. (It’s just a short mountain pass folks!) The world really became much smaller and brighter for me that day.
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