For a few years I ran with a man who made it a personal challenge to emerge from the muddiest, wettest, wildest trails as clean as possible. Stream crossings were a spiritual test. Always at least fifteen feet behind I watched him glide from stone to stone, barely alighting before making the final leap over a limpid pool of water and turning around to stand calmly on the opposite bank, as if nothing had happened, watching me make my much wetter, much less graceful passage across.

I was fourteen when I ran my first cross‐country race along a paved road that quickly degraded into dirt, through a recently mown field and into a forest that was just beginning to smell of its own slow decay. In spite of the spray‐ painted arrows and make‐shift cairns telling us where to go I still managed to get lost, take a half‐mile detour, slip on a stretch of road made slick by recent heavy rains, and cross the finish line looking like a bedraggled swamp creature. Ever since that moment, however, running cross‐country became a welcome chance for me to get dirty. Letting the elements do what they will with me is a way of rewilding parts of myself that grow complacent in controlled environments. It’s not only my body but my mind that’s running rampant, roaming over old and new territories, coming to realizations, holding on to some and letting others slip away before segueing unawares into daydreams. Unlike my former running partner, I like seeing the mud spattered across my legs because it’s a measure of what’s happened to me. 

Many years later, when I was a junior in college, I ran in the ECAC Championships at Franklin Park, in Boston. It was early November and the course was already covered in snow and lined with spectators obscured by heavy jackets and scarves. It was so cold runners were rubbing Vaseline into their limbs and waiting until the last possible moment to disrobe from their warm‐up gear. As soon as the gun went off we were flying across a field, slipping on the slush and jockeying against one another to get into better positions.

More than once I wondered about the choices I’d made in my life that had led me to this excruciating and utterly avoidable moment. People fell, got up, slipped again and went on, because the ability to endure and make constant adjustments—of pace, strategy, psychology—are as much what a cross‐country race is testing as ones speed. I’d say racing was a useful preparation for life if the comparison weren’t so tidy.

There’s a devotional aspect to running that requires not renunciation but abdication. One could be doing something else, something more productive for society, but instead you’re running against time, against yourself, against the elements. You are also, in many instances, traveling through beautiful country. There are now high mountain lakes and ranges, rivers and streams, forests and fields imprinted in my cellular memory because I have run through them, but when you are motoring up a hill or through the last mile of a race with every cell in your body screaming in severe oxygen debt, it’s hard to appreciate the view. And yet, it’s the landscape one is running through that makes cross‐country races recall more primal acts of survival—when we were running because we needed to—and reminds us that, for one reason or another, we are running because we need to still.