I must point out that I have always hated exercise for the sake of exercise. I've always found it repetative and boring. Things like rock climbing or dance or roller blading or wrestling (in high school) have kept me in shape, but things like lifting weights or running on a treadmill, when I tried them, seemed like an annoying waste of time.
I tried picking up jogging last year because I had to get in shape for climbing Mt. Whitney, but I always did it in the morning with Charles, during a Febuary in Oklahoma and through our ghetto neighborhood. Butt ass early + cold + concrete jungle did not make for a fun run. My training lasted only until the trip itself.
This is different. I started jogging with Steve to get in shape for the Extreme Marathon, and have just kept doing it. The reason I enjoy it so much? Ukraine.
I jog in the early evening, as the sun is setting and the day cools off, on a path that goes through a forest before breaking to a wide meadow covered in yellow flowers.
Steve, jogging through the field ahead of me
The trail then winds down to farmland where people are planting the summer crops by hand, bent over and digging at the dirt with metal tools. With my mp3 player on, listening to music as I glide past these vingettes, it's a other-worldly experience. I don't mean to sound like such a city boy here, it's just that I am.
A babucia by her field
Every time has been something new: a heard of cows grazing beside the path, babucias heard goats with sticks, a horse-drawn cart piled with wood. On the day I brought my camera, a horse-drawn cart with an old metal plow rode by. Holding onto it, talking to the driver, was a man on a bicycle, and there was me, in my tennis shoes and my MP3 player, feeling like three time periods were converging.
Everything I ever imagined a pastoral society to be turns out to be half a mile outside of the city. Did you know I had never seen a scythe used before? Have you ever seen a scythe used before? I was jogging down the dirt road, mind somewhere else, when all of a sudden I looked up and there was an old man on the side of the road, holding up a scythe like death personified. Scared the hell out of me. But after I jogged past, I looked back and saw him bend over to start clearing the grass with it. For some reason, I found it utterly fascinating.
A man with scythe
In any case, it's this sort of calm tranquility, this sort of connection with a more nature-connected life that makes jogging such a good stress reliever now. I understand that it's back-breaking work and maybe the Ukrainians I pass would give it up in a second, but--I don't know--it still somehow feels natural and right. I am jealous of their stability: now is the time to plant, now is the time to grow, now is the time to reap, now is the time to store; their lives have been refined over hundred of years and mine sometimes feels it's about constantly reinventing the wheel. I respect them because they feel the seasons and the cycle of life in a way I never will. It's all I can do just to pass them and try to catch a glimpse.
Which is why I now like jogging.