My husband and I have a joke. When we see some lone soul running along the side of a country road, we pose the question, “Is he/she running or fleeing?”  If you could see the faces of these people, sometimes you would assume fleeing, because running is painful…and hard.  Like why in the hell else would they be out there in sub-zero weather, or equator-like heat, to pound out the cement, putting mile after mile behind them with gritted teeth?

Because sometimes running really is all about fleeing.  Because sometimes when you have woken up 100 times in the middle of the night unable to work through all of the ailments, you lace up and go.  When it starts to hurt, you focus. And when you start to focus, you forget that it hurts.  And at the end of trek, you have finally reached resolution.

Tomorrow I’m heading out to do something called RAGNAR, which is a 200-mile relay from Cumberland, MD to Washington, DC.  I’m on a relay team of 12, half of whom are better runners than me.  And I honestly don’t care.  Because it means I still get to run, and pound the cement, and hand off a baton to someone waiting at the other end who is counting on me to show up.  But moreso, it means that the shadows that haunt all day at work (someone cooking raw onions, a loud coworker droning on and on about her kids, the drama, the politics, the ridiculousness of it all) that folds into the rest of my  life (my kid’s homework, what to pack for lunch, don’t forget to make the coffee) becomes compact and synchronized in my thoughts like a package waiting to be opened during a run.  UPS has arrived! Here’s your life, now open each package and address it.  And when I run, I open the packages like they are gifts…one at a time…because I’m sure each requires its own special attention.  This is my life, after all.

So I took two days off of work to run RAGNAR. Collectively, it has cost my team almost $4000, sans charity donations, just to be in this over night excursion over mountains and into city. We’ll sleep in vans in sleeping bags.  We’ll shower in local high school gyms. Somewhere along the line, a church is hosting a spaghetti dinner.

Why am I going? Why have I packed my backpack? Because I need to flee, not run…and deal with myself, all that is lingering, and all that I can’t resolve.  My husband and son will meet us at the end, which I really need.  Because the art of fleeing is discovery, a temporary disconnect to gain perspective. The answers sometimes are hard but offer fuel to go on and find resolution.  And at the end, when I’ve pounded (or limped through) that last mile, I know that I will crave what I have left behind.  And the miles in between are beautiful because they help me know the difference.

When you see someone roadside, gritted teeth, are they running or fleeing? Sometimes it is both.  Tomorrow I will run the RAGNAR relay to remember that its okay that it can be both.  And that the art of running and fleeing is LIFE.