Running in the park

Wrote this years ago.  Found it on my computer

Running in the Park

Putting on the running shoes and going for a jog used to be a chore.  The only justification was “my health,” which is not a driving impulse for me or for many (witness sales of cigarettes, alcohol, and krispy krème donuts).  As my time on the paths increased, running has become a pleasure for a single guy for a typical reason: scoping.  I now go out for babe-runs.

Most of my panting compatriots on the paths are women.  I have wondered whether there was an explanation for the overwhelming hordes of women running and the relative lack of men on the trails.  Men were on the trails, but usually on bikes, alone or with significant others.  I have to jump off the path frequently for biking couples.

The couples seemed to be in that doing-things-together-other-than-sex phase that arrives when a woman’s kind impulse to fake orgasms becomes so much a habit that she loses interest in sex that has no reward for her, other than getting sweaty.  But she still wants to do some together stuff, so she pushes for bike rides, which is ok with most men, for reasons below.  It would seem to me that a woman could avoid long exhausting bike rides by not faking orgasms and demanding that their partners work a little harder or longer.  I think we have an easy choice here: orgasms or charley-horses, but maybe that’s just me.

The guys seem to prefer riding bikes over running because biking has better gadgets and equipment.   Men never grow out of their boyhood joy of the toy.  Special expensive bikes with attachments, helmets, distinctive biking-wear: all this makes a man feel like a cross between G.I. Joe and Lance Armstrong.  Also, a dozen years ago, when fashions were frumpier than today, men and women started wearing biking shorts to show off their fit butts.  Heterosexual men still get out their bikes to justify wearing tight shorts.  Now women just wear their tight pants in bars.  Again, an easy choice here: a cold gin-and-tonic or a warm Gatorade in a plastic bottle? 

So why are women running?  Butts.  As the once svelte bodies from college confront the onslaught of sitting at desks for most the day followed by happy hours, funky ethnic restaurants, and consolatory Ben & Jerry’s pints, worry about the proportions of their rear becomes steadily more real.  Confronted with the near anorexic aesthetic of their younger peers, women in their later twenties and early thirties are concerned and take to the paths to run off a centimeter a day.  Men do not worry about the steady increase of their dimensions, imagining that they are attaining the dimensions of the football-gods and the charisma of alpha males, making them even more attractive than they were before.  Women, however, are born with discerning instincts to tell the difference between a Jack Kennedy and a wonk/techno-nerd.  Nevertheless, women make do and eventually just start riding bikes (see above).

If one wakes up early enough to run, one meets the American University Women’s Cross Country team, the equivalent on running paths of the Swedish Bikini Team.  Farther up Rock Creek Park near Cleveland Park and the Zoo, the runners are young singles, with a pleasant smile on the path.  Farther down near Georgetown, it’s the world of the hostess, very Aryan in demeanor, on the path with a mission of body perfection, determined to look the same at forty as at twenty.  On the towpath, it’s mom-time, trying to be healthy and to, god-willing, lose a pound or two she put on when she had Kirsten or Chet.

Once running was a chore, for P.E. credit in high school, a hangover cure in college (I’ll vouch for it’s effectiveness, on public service ads on TV if necessary), or to make sure my heart keeps pumping for a couple more precious weeks when I’m too old to care anymore.  But there are, surprisingly, guy reasons to run after all.