I run obstinately, fists bludgeoning the air. It's been months since I last pushed myself around this track, long months of sloth.

With each footfall, thoughts reel and rattle through my skull. By lap six—a mile and a half, my inner pedometer informs me—Hiawatha Park is deserted, except for me and the tumbling autumn leaves that flinch and shatter beneath my feet. Trees dance above me. The park lamps are opal ghosts that wink from the seething gloom.

By lap nine, I'm sweating vinegar and emptied pie tins: work sweat, earned sweat. Fractions of miles dance through my head, five halves and eleven quarters and then Three, neat and clean. Lap thirteen rolls past, and I'm convinced I can whittle a college essay from the last half-hour—what a fool notion.

I'm running because I'm running because I'm running. The effort distills the world into a thing of concepts, symbols, spirits, free from lines and words and numbers; something nebulous and beautiful. Or perhaps I run to transcend my panic: With three days before the Garfield Messenger deadline, two famous authors are speaking in town (Walter Moseley! Jonathan Kozol!), I've got an advance pass to an intriguing film, and there are new developments to report in the fight over military recruiters. Not to mention whipping into shape every sentence in the newspaper—and how about a political cartoon? Maybe I’ve returned to my old running ritual for the strength to pull the rabbit from the hat, the sword from the stone.

Lap eighteen now: Muscles plead with fiery tongues; joints entreat, clicking their disapproval. My steady footfalls on the ground speak: "Give-up-give-up-give-up-give-up." The racing shadow at my side makes his way without a single sinew to hold him back. Lucky bastard.

My sweat is a warm soggy mask. The cold night nips my skin and I nip back, gulping the frigid—scalding?—air. Saltwater tickles my eyes, lending the lamps a spectral nimbus—red orange yellow green blue purple—just before they sign off for the night. Shadows swarm the park. Clouds drip across the steel dome of the Seattle sky, then tumble, pelting me, rinsing me, filling the air with a smell like summer Tuesdays.

I spy a scimitar lurking in a shadow's curve and begin to sprint, to fly, leaping imprudently, bounding, slicing the air, drumming the track's muddy grit; and as my flesh turns to shadow, to airy nothing, I become that lucky running bastard himself. Everything seems possible, and it takes forever to decide to stop…here.

Six miles. More than twice as far as I had ever run. I'm still not sure what kept me moving, so long after I'd given up on my body. For one year of seventeen, I was in shape, and then I simply lost my will, as if one day I'd blinked, and the strength had fled from my limbs. But I don't regret having let my muscles turn to jelly; it's another experience to file away; something, too, that the chronically fit will never feel. But I resolve to rejoin their ranks. I'm not going back. I run farther and faster every night. And as I slouch home, the helmeted streetlamps stare down at me, humming their flat tune.

 This essay was written by William Martin, Garfield Class of 2006, Brown University Class of 2010.