The last essay, on the shape most runs have, and on the material this series deliberately left where it found it.
Many of my runs end where they began. I leave, go out into it, come back to the door I left from, and am in some small way different for it.
Not all of them — races finish somewhere else, commutes are one-way by definition, and a point-to-point run over a mountain is one of the better things available. But the loop is the ordinary case, and it is the one worth looking at.
It is ordinary enough to miss what it implies. A loop produces nothing and moves you no distance at all in net terms. The entire content is what happens to you between leaving and returning.
Which is a strange thing to have built an industry on, and a good clue about what the activity is actually for. The going out is not for the arriving. There is no arriving.
Effort can be held as more than instrument, and how it is held is what it rests on when the numbers stop improving. The ground can be a place rather than a surface. Somebody counting on you is more durable fuel than self-improvement. More force past a point is energy going sideways. The body is built for moderate movement sustained a long time. You did not invent any of this. The system that filters people out at fifteen removes exactly the people with most to gain. An external contingency attached to something you loved erodes the loving. Movement genuinely eases a bad afternoon and is not a treatment. Big country restores the proportion of things. And most people are at war with conditions that are not fighting them.
Eleven observations, none of them requiring belief in anything, all of them available on the next run.
This series drew on running practices belonging to Indigenous nations of the Americas, and it was written by someone with no standing in any of them. So an account of what it did and did not take.
It did not describe ceremonial practice, or offer any version of running as prayer. That material belongs to specific nations, much of it is deliberately not public, and the appropriation of Native religious practice has been objected to formally and repeatedly by the people concerned.
It declined to build the eleventh essay on hózhó, which is Diné and sacred and would have made a better-looking essay than the one I wrote instead.
It did not say “Indigenous people believe” about anything. Where a practice belonged to a named people, they were named; where a claim was general, it was general about running rather than about anybody’s culture.
And it did not write in the past tense. Indigenous running is a present-day thing with present-day people doing it: Billy Mills, whose 1964 Olympic 10,000 metres is still the only American win in that event; Wings of America, running youth programmes in Native communities since the 1980s; Jordan Marie Daniel and Rosalie Fish, who run with the names of missing and murdered Indigenous women on them, which is a use of running considerably more serious than anything in these twelve essays.
What I took is a set of observations about effort, attention, purpose and scale that do not require anybody’s religion. If the rest interested you, the people to go to are the ones running now, and they are not hard to find.
Note — where to go instead
Living runners, a working organization, and Indigenous authors who have published. They speak for themselves and do not need an intermediary, and their accounts are better than a summary of them.
The closing practice is the one you already have.
This series discusses running practices belonging to specific Indigenous nations of the Americas. Where a practice belongs to a named people, it is named; where a source is an Indigenous author, runner or organization speaking publicly about their own tradition, that is said. Ceremonial and religious specifics that those nations have not made public are not discussed here and are not the author’s to convert into technique. General claims about running physiology and psychology are cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.
A loop produces nothing and moves you nowhere in net terms. The whole content is what happens between leaving and returning, which is a good clue about what the activity is for.
And this ring left things where it found them: no ceremony, no hózhó, no “Indigenous people believe”, no past tense about people who are running now.