By Lilli Hime

Some of you call us crazy, lunatics even for doing what we do. Why else would we subject ourselves to such torture day in, day out? You might think we are exclusive, that only the ability born comprises our ranks. If that were true, I wouldn’t be here. You may even envy us a little for the Rocky-like montage we epitomize. No matter what you think of us, the fact stands that you know our name. And soon, you’ll know our story. Who are we? We are runners.

The issue with running is, it’s addicting. It’s addicting because we fall in love every single day. We fall in love with the city life of gleaming skyscrapers, the melodies of pedestrians in conversation, and the beat of our feet pounding the pavement as if some ancestral drum echoes within us. We fall in love with nature’s raw uninhibited beauty, the way a cool breeze flounces our hair playfully and blades of grass tickle our ankles as we tread on, faster. We fall in love with change. Others will blink and time will have flown by – favorite coffee shops will have closed, the leaves may have fallen, and newborn apartment buildings will be grown up. Not us. We don’t blink because we run everyday, we see everyday, every little change. Most of all, you fall in love with running: the awareness it gifts you, the new world it opens up, the steady beat of my heart in my shoes. Who wouldn’t want to fall in love everyday?

But, what love has the right to call itself love if it does not include pain? Just like all great romances, even running embraces those bittersweet moments of joy and pain. Mine is born from a self-inflicted pang from the past, an overly acute sense of nostalgia. That awareness of change sharpened by this daily escape also draws out its share of ghosts. My ghosts. As I fly through this city of mine, I see them everywhere: festering, polluting, plaguing. In Butler Park, I see ghosts of my friends and I dancing and laughing youthfully in water fountains, barren today. On the courts of my former high school, I see the ghosts of us wannabe Globetrotters, throwing around the word family as much and as carelessly as the basketball. Everywhere I run, these people, these memories pervade today’s realities. For some strange illogical reason, rather than tear more at the cuts in my heart, it seems to mend them. The holes in my life left by people I once needed are slowly but surely, healed by running; maybe because the past is dead. Yet, running is alive; it lives in every day, and so, just like all living beings, it heals. It heals to the beat of a heart echoing through the pavement, bidding peace and farewell to the ghosts and making room for the company of the future. As human beings, runners revel in all that is life and all that makes us feel alive, so perhaps that is what draws us to the sport.

Even more addicting are the endorphins that course through the bloodstream with the vitality of wild horses released from a cage. Upon reaching the finish line, that bittersweet culmination of persistence and stubborn devotion, something completely new fills up within. It is born from that essence of achievement and success, that “I did that! Me!” feeling. There is an irresistible urge to raise both arms in triumph and express the invincibility that has been so dutifully earned, to scream from a rooftop that which makes one feel alive.

Swarms of people join our ranks for reasons as vast and unique as they themselves. The most extraordinary and most bountiful contradictions have often been born from the initial reasons to lace up a pair of running shoes. At first we sought to lose and instead gained something more. We hoped to flee and ended up conquering. We sought reckless abandon and found purpose. There is something sacred in that rhythmic lullaby that rocks your troubles to sleep. It’s here, where the din of the outer world hushes, that we become more of ourselves, our true selves. It’s like that moment right after diving into water of utter immersion, complete peace. For once, we’re not broken or weary, not afraid or disappointing. We are whole.

What better time to seek out that wholesomeness, that clarity of self than when a huge part of us has been ripped away? For me, that huge piece had a name. That huge piece was a friend named Ezra Polter. It was during the blossoming of our senior year in high school, that time when excitement of graduation buzzes louder than the florescent lights and the soon-to-be-graduates are determined to pack as many wildly memorable stunts into their last weeks as possible. Looking back, we should be committing our friends to memory and all those minute details that make us love them because it’s in those details that we feel the pain of their absence the most. Ezra passed away in a car accident. His car slammed into a guardrail on the highway and flipped over, throwing him from the car.

I had known him since fifth grade. I had known that larger-than-life smile that not only emanated but also spread this guileless joy to everyone he knew. It felt dimmer now that it was a memory, like a silent dusk was encroaching early on a bright day. In his absence, I grieved for who he was, I grieved for who he could have been.

I grieved for the piece of myself he had taken with him: the piece that played tag on the playground, that studied our Latin declensions, that finally grew up and apart into “just someone I went to elementary with”. I felt something new during my run that day. I felt my arms pumping, my legs burning, my breathe raging not for me but for the memory of those who couldn’t feel those sensations anymore. For the first time, I was running in honor of a privilege many are no longer a recipient of. For the first time, running had meaning outside of myself.

This deed of ours is the single most important act we could do for, it reveals the meaning of what it truly means to be human, the alacritous attitude of doing something larger and finding a calm inside and out.

A pair of shoes, some clothes fit for getting drenched in sweat, and a little raw will power is all it takes. Don’t be afraid of the speed. We’re just some ordinary people running towards an extraordinary end.

In loving memory of Ezra Polter.