My favorite place to run

What's yours?

Back when I was in my twenties, I ran almost every afternoon around a park in my Atlanta neighborhood. The trail around it was almost exactly 1.85 miles long, with a soft dirt path for almost the entire way. And where the trail ventured onto paved sidewalks, there were cut-throughs that took you behind houses and into the woods, bringing you back to the main path after a stretch along a creek.

I loved running there. Not just because it was close by; I also loved the space it took up in my life, the chance it offered to experience serendipity. I was single, in my twenties, and there were plenty of other single people out there too, in the park. Playing with their dogs, throwing frisbees, running around the trails just like I was.

There was possibility there. The chance of meeting someone, striking up a conversation, of life going in a new direction. You might see someone there over and over, passing them by on the trails a hundred times while never actually meeting them or talking with them. But later you might see them in a coffee shop; a glance might be exchanged.

Today, I run in a different park in a different part of the city, along the Chattahoochee River.

I run for different reasons now, so the things and people I notice are different. It feels like it wasn’t all that long ago that I took our then-new golden retriever puppy for a walk there, when he was just a few months old. We could barely walk twenty steps — no exaggeration — without someone stopping us, asking if they could pet him and play with him.

The other day, I logged into Facebook and the first photo I saw was a photo of that day — of our puppy, clearly pooped, leaning his chin on his front paws while he rests on the ground. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I looked at the date and saw it was ten years old — even though it really, really does feel like we took that walk together just a few weeks ago.

Now, of course, time has passed, and I’ve kept running there. Over and over and over. I’ve run while chasing my stepdaughter on her bike when she was eight years old, trying to catch up with her as she pedaled around the edge of the trees and out of my sight. I’ve run there with my son when he was three or four, playing along the edge of the water, when we spied a snake coiled in the branches of a tree just above us. (We didn’t dilly-dally, don’t worry.)

And I’ve run at what I thought was a pretty good pace, only to be passed by high-school kids training alongside their teammates on their cross-country team, trying to see if I could keep pace with them for a few steps, just out of curiosity, of course… only to realize (very!) quickly how futile an effort that was.

“We shape our buildings and afterward our buildings shape us,” goes the line by Winston Churchill, from a famous speech to the British Parliament on how to rebuild the bombed-out House of Commons in the early years of World War II.

I think about that line all the time — not in the context of war or anything that dramatic, but more in the context of how my friend and fellow writer

Janisse Ray

talks about place: how important it is to who we are, and how it shapes what we become, both as individuals and as communities.

Place gives us meaning, whether we’re aware of it or not. And place gives us comfort, I think in the same way routines bring comfort to, say, a golden retriever, or a young child — we need routines, familiar places, to go and find ourselves in the same way they do.

These two parks, separated by miles here in Atlanta and years of my own life — decades, really — have played a part in that for me. I wonder, do you have a place like that where you love to run, a place you’ve come back to run again and again, a place that has helped shape you?

I love hearing your thoughts and comments — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell