On Running

I'm running home from Crown College, the local University that Jalyss, and virtually her entire family, graduated from, and which her Dad teaches at. The day is hot; as hot as it ever gets in England. It's the kind of heat that is best explained outside of the conventional binary of Celsius-Fahrenheit. It's more the kind of day which can best be measured in Katy Perry lyrics, a day hot enough to melt your popsicle.

We've been exploiting the post-wedding calm and nearly empty University facilities to work out. I've very swiftly realised that being able to run, and having a generally good level of fitness means nothing when exercising with the Zapfs.

Working out with Jalyss's family is like playing Cluedo with Batman. The humiliation is near total. Still, I'm faster than them, so I've been taking the opportunity to run home afterwards. But because I'm doing this after an hour in the weight room, by run I actually mean limp. It's a dragging, wheezing lope; unglamorous, and unhappily completed. The gym is not my friend, and it ruins me for my run.

Still, running the few miles home is a unique view of America. A continent spanning nation, virtually every trip out is by car, and consequently everything is at one space removed. I recently leafed through a friends copy of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', which puts it perfectly that:

"In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realise that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you."

There's a self imposed disconnect between people and nature that's in part to do with the fact that travelling cocoons us from the outside. We are swaddled in steel and plastic, perpetually air conditioned and temperate, wrapped in layers of habit and convenience that keeps us away from the reality of life outside our houses and offices, and the vehicles we use to travel between them.

But as I run, I do not simply pass by this world, but through it. I run, and the steady tramp of my shoes, the low impact vibration of sole on kerbside, disturbs the life that exists on the periphery of our own.

The side of the road is scrabble. A top layer of sandy dirt and gritty pebbles, broken up with the choke-weeds and wild grasses that thrive in the dust and sun. As I kick through it, the floor around me comes alive with crickets, their movement akin to running within the Gallimimus herd in Jurassic Park.

Every step disturbs another, and they leap heedlessly into my legs, beneath my feet and away. Bounding and rebounding from me and into the long grass. They're big, bigger than any grasshopper's I've seen before this, as long as my thumb. Their movement carries them in a quick arc over a few feet, and they routinely smack straight into anything in their path, their ascent interrupted by whatever unmoving feature they failed to take into account before launch.

It's glorious, and serene, and so quintessentially foreign, to be running through this swarm of leaping, kicking nature as its most unheeding and unheeded. Everything about America still has the freshness to it for me, that sense of wonder at the everyday. Birds and insects that are totally commonplace here are a source of real excitement. Every day is different, everything is new.

I'm enjoying it, I suppose you could say, That's new too - but the real enthusiasm here is contagious. I guess I'm becoming one of them already. This is what assimilation feels like.