Remember in grade school when we played Red Rover?
Sprinting all out toward that line of linked hands.
Red Rover, Red Rover, send me right over.
It was my first time learning what it felt like to be a runner.
Heaving chest, breaking held hands, a kind of race tape.
I’ve heard now this game is nearly banned, a danger.
Later, I had cross country, a blur of grass loops
and team breaks sitting cross-legged on hot asphalt.
I can’t recall a single meet, just one long practice.
Joking with the team was more fun than burning lungs.
Maybe it was the pneumonia I survived as an infant,
I shrugged, an offering of plausible excuses.
High school PE forced the mile on us all, which is one way
to make sure running is dreaded, a thing to suffer.
Four laps of the track, staccato breaths and beet red faces.
I can still picture my red gym shorts, pale legs shuffling.
Not slowest or fastest, not ready to find joy in the process,
but those laps mattered. I was still a runner.
So what if I labored years to find a rhythm, to own it.
If I needed miles and miles of road beneath me
to learn ease in gasping breaths and feet pounding.
Still a runner all those times, same as now, as tomorrow.
It took no time at all to start becoming:
just one short lawn sprint to be a runner.
#WriteAsRun Prompt No. 4: Becoming a runner…
Tell the story of how you became a runner. Maybe it began in childhood. Was it joyous? A suffer fest? Something else entirely? Or, perhaps it came later. Think back to the first time you felt like you were a runner. What was going through your mind? What barrier—real or imagined did you have to move through?