Learning to Walk: The Beginning of My Goodbye to Running

I conjure up a life of movement, for these minutes, this hour, all is movement. When I'm not running, I'm sitting. When I'm not running, I'm writing. Running is the opposite of writing, though there is a point – if you're lucky – when you forget what you're doing, the words, the effort of each step as you move across the surface of the page. Every movement is a movement across a surface, a plain. The dream is to lift off from the awareness of what you're doing, one step then another, word after word along a single line. For most of my life, I've been a runner. Some people might say a jogger, but in my family we've always used that phrase: I'm going for a run. I've not always loved going for a run, but when I discovered that running, and especially long-distance running, made me feel free and capable, I kept doing it. I kept running.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live without running, to not be the kind of person who relies on running to keep moving, every day, every week – if you're lucky – two or three times a week.

These shoes. It might be time for a new pair. They say Proust only wrote about people he was ready to say goodbye to. The soles of the shoe, tiny stones caught between ridges of the sole, who knows from where: along the river, in the woods, something brought back from the outside. A sole with so many parts, lines crisscrossing, designed to make running safer. This is what a shoe does: separates us from the ground. The black, the yellow, the whites, the curved spine running down the middle, a kind of tail from heel to big toe. Everything is like a spine, the crisscrossing of the laces, interwoven, keeping everything together, holding everything in place.

On the inside of the shoe, the warm soft cushioning that cradles our feet. How many textures on the shoe? It's a complicated thing, a running shoe, and every time I write that word it seems like the wrong word, like their should be another word for a running shoe. Sneakers, but that's too American, not a word I'd use. And if I called them tackies like we did in South Africa, who would know what I mean?

When I think of the beginning of my love of running, my life in running, I think about one particular run in Ashkelon. I'm 14 or 15. We've just moved to Israel and there's this guy who lives in our block, an American with a healthy name like Tom or Tim. He runs regularly. This is before I know anything about San Francisco, anything about California, where Tom or Tim is from, and the way people live there. We're running along the street between the beach and our building, asphalt bleached by the sun. It's early evening, it's cooler, it's probably summer because it's always summer in that part of the world. It's 1978. It's a time when men wore very short shorts. There's an audacity to the shorts that Tom or Tim is wearing.

Saturday Night Fever had just come out and we'd all seen it at least two or three times, and on the weekends, Tom or Tim teaches us the moves to night fever, night fever, we know how to do it, or one of the other songs the Bee Gees sang while John Travolta danced. If I think about the place I come from and the place I'm in now, this place where something like this is not audacious, a bunch of immigrant teenagers dancing to the Bee Gees, I see how Tim or Tom might have been the one to introduce me to my life in running.

After twenty years in the cold and grey of England, I have landed in the summer heat of Madrid. My body craves this, the hotter the better. While the locals stick to the shade, I'm running on the sunny side of the street. In a couple of years time, I will know that there's a limit to the amount of heat and sun the body can bear. It's August in Madrid. It's 2pm in Retiro Park and I am the only one running. It is hot but I don't care. Every few hundred meters I stop for water, put my head under the tap to cool my scalp. I feel my head might explode from the heat but I am so hungry for sunshine that I keep going.

I am reaching my limit, not just of words, but of my life in running. I knew the danger of starting to write about running, that the more I wrote, the nearer the end would be. It's been almost a year since my last run and as time passes, I miss it less. My walks into the woods grow longer, go deeper, and my hands are doing other things on the page, running more freely, not just with words but with longer lines, not just with ink but with paint, with charcoal. Some days I take off my shoes to walk on the stone paths, kilometer after kilometer, the ground on the soles of my feet, nothing between me and the surface of the earth but my skin, which, too, is a surface.