The Roots

The Roots

I’m exhausted.  My legs are numb and sweat is cascading down my skin, gathering in puddles near the collar of my t-shirt.  My Adidas sweatband is saturated with the perspiration flowing from my scalp.  But I’m so close.  So close.  So I keep going – throwing one leg in front of the other. Thud…thud…thud.

I’m at what runners call “The Wall.”  That damnable spot where your physical inadequacy and your mental weakness team up on you and demand that you stop running.  “This isn’t right.  It hurts.  Can’t breathe.  Stop! Stop!”  It’s an abstract divider that separates people who love to run from people who don’t.  If you’ve never made it through the wall – if you’ve never pushed through that barrier, and you always stop running, put your hands on your knees and heave in defeat, you hate running. 

However, for those of us who muster every ounce of resilience in our bodies and clumsily scale that Wall, we have found a thing on the other side called “Runner’s High.”  Just across The Wall, the Runner's High is the place where the body and the mind say, “Well, shit I guess if we can’t beat him let’s join him.”

When this happens, rather than working against you, your body and mind begin working with you, aiding you, showering you with a rush of endorphins.  You’re still gaping for air, but suddenly there is an invisible smoke in the air that gets you high.  

Thud…Thud…Thud…I’m almost there, but there’s one thing in the way.  And it’s not a weakness in my body or in my head. It’s a palm tree in the road.  What was once a 50 foot, towering palm tree shading the road is now tropical road barrier.  It obstructs both sidewalks and the road in front of me.  

At this point my legs are far too docile to jump the colossal tree, and if I slow down and crawl over it, I’ll lose my momentum and never get over “The Wall.” How do I get around this?  I decide to veer off in the direction of the tree’s base, leaving the comfort of street and sidewalk for the loose sand in the roadside ditch in an attempt to bypass the fallen palm. 

Still heaving for breath and a good minute or two away still from breaking through The Wall, I pass the uprooted trunk of the tree. My feet fight the thick sand and trudge through the ditch when I see them.  The roots.  I’ve never seen the root structure of a palm tree before, and I’m shocked.  I figured a palm would have deep roots.  Thick roots.  The kind of roots that foraged about in all directions under the parched sand searching for water deep below.  I expected a sturdy foundation of woody orange roots swerving off in every direction from the tree’s trunk.  How else would the tree get water?  But that’s not what they look like at all.

I didn’t really want to run today. In fact, I’ve been putting off running for three weeks.  The thing about running is when you are not doing it yet, but you’re thinking about doing it – it sounds insufferable.  When my alarm clock squeals at me in the morning, and I start thinking about running, it sounds dreadful.  So for three weeks I’ve neglected running, opting instead for twenty more minutes nuzzled against my pillow.  Every day for the past three weeks, when I’ve returned home and buried myself in my lounger to read a book – I’ve considered taking a run.  But the consideration sounds terrible.  Pretty much any time I’ve asked myself “Do I want to go for a run?” The answer has been no. 

I never like running until I’m actually doing it.  I know it’s good for me.  I know I should go for a run.  But the more I anticipate the act of running, the less likely I am to do it.  I never want to run until I'm doing it. 

Once I’m out running, defeating my demons with every step – once I’ve hit The Wall, shimmied up it, and I’m enjoying the euphoria of the Runner’s High on the other side, I love it.  I really love it.  A good run is one of life’s finest physical pleasures.

The roots.  Back at the trunk of the massive, fallen palm tree, I’m struck by just how short and gangly they are.  They’re about two feet long, stringy looking, and thin.  They look like the hairs on a Raggedy Ann Doll.  Just not at all what I would expect from a once-towering tree growing where there is so little water. 

Back home in rural Missouri, the trees have massive root systems – thick hearty roots forge proudly through the rich black soil until the trees they support are propped up sturdily enough to handle Missouri’s heavy summer winds and icy winters.  You can stick a spade in the ground and dig a hole twenty yards from a Missouri tree and suddenly the spade will hang up on a thick orange root.  Often, the branches reach out as far underground as they do above ground.

And the people in rural Missouri, my people, they mimic the root systems of their beloved trees.  They stay in one place and sink their roots deeply into the fertile ground.  They forge proudly into the earth until family names are part of the very makeup of the soil.  My Great Grandfather, Grandfather, and Father all lived within the same five-mile radius of rural Missouri land.  The Showalter root system is almost 200 years old and extends three generations deep.  That sort of thing is not uncommon there.  In the Midwest, there are thousands of families just like mine – their roots so firmly planted into the ground that it would be near impossible to uproot or move them.

Thud…thud…thud.  I’m still gaping for air and refusing my body's demands to quit running when I pass the palm tree, literally on the other side of the earth from my Missouri home.  It’s here that I realize that this fallen tree and I are not so different.  I don’t have Missouri roots.  I didn’t let my roots sink deeply into the earth.  I am not firmly planted into one place.  I lack those thick, hearty roots holding the ground below in a headlock. 

My roots are sinewy and mean.  They’re thinner than they probably should be.  I'm not where I grew up.  I'm not with people I've known all my life.  I have no wife.  No kids.  And I suppose that means I’m susceptible to falling over.  Like the tree that has made a barricade on my running path, I don’t possess the stability that comes with a root system that has been clinging to the deep for hundreds of years.

But thudding and gasping along, now half a mile past the palm, I’m feeling okay with that.  Maybe it’s because I know that the kind of stability most Missouri residents and trees have scares me as much as instability scares others.  Or maybe I feel at peace because I’ve just crossed the threshold from Wall to High, and a warm wave of comfort has sprung from my scalp.  I’m no longer subject to the pain in my legs or the voice in my head telling me to stop.  My body has given up its fight and dumped a pink bucket full of endorphins on me.  I’m high.  And just like any high would, the Runner’s High has me feeling fuzzy. Giddy. It’s wrapped my thoughts in a warm towel. 

What I’m dreading, though, is that when I finish my run and I’m wringing out my Adidas sweatband and the warm towel of thoughts in my mind, I’m going to think about how much I really loved Missouri.  I actually never felt the need to leave. I never pined for travel like some people do.  In fact, when people would talk about having the travel bug, I never quite understood what they were talking about. 

Thinking about traveling stressed me out.  The anticipation of booking flights, packing bags, standing in lines at airports, readjusting my internal clock, abandoning my routines – none of this sounded appealing to me.  Especially considering the money it costs to travel.  Why would I want to leave my friends?  Why aren’t travel-bug people just happy where they are?

I figured I took after my father who, like his fathers before him, was perfectly happy to stay put - to let his roots wander about underground and keep him secure where he was.   So how did I end up living in the UAE where I just booked a flight to Japan for Christmas, and made plans to visit Ireland in the summer?

What happened?  How did I catch “the bug?” I was comfortable where I was and, frankly, thinking about traveling was almost insufferable.  Anticipating a move or even a vacation to a distant place frazzled me mentally. I'm not like that now.  How did I catch the travel bug? What made me decide to shirk those thick, hearty Missouri roots?  

I think it all happened because I like to run. 

Runners know that the things in life that are really good for you, those feelings that end up being the finest pleasures in life – like the Runner’s High – those things are always the result of doing something that is unbearable in its anticipation stage. 

And traveling is running.  When I hadn’t done it yet - when I was just sitting around thinking about it - the anticipation was dreadful.  And the more I anticipated traveling the less I wanted to travel.  

Just like sitting in my lounge chair and thinking about running was counterproductive, thinking about traveling was counterproductive.  Some things you have to stop thinking about and do.  I’m a runner, so I know this.  The best thing to do is usually the thing that requires you to stop thinking and start doing. 

But just like running, traveling has a Wall.  When I first reached the UAE, my mind and body fought me.  They said, “This isn’t right.  These people are doing things differently than they are supposed to.  You don’t belong here.  Why are the days and nights backwards?!”  Many people who came to the UAE like I did left within the first month.  They hit the wall - but those people who left when things got hard, they essentially pulled up on the side of the road, stopped running, put their hands on their knees, and heaved in defeat

But I stuck it out and eventually my mind and body said, “Well, shit I guess if we can’t beat him let’s join him.”  And suddenly - see where I’m going with this? - I hit the Traveler’s High. 

That’s where the bug comes from.  The Traveler’s High gives you the bug.  Suddenly my mind was being expanded.  I was cramming new information, new ideas, new concepts, and new life rhythms into my paradigm.  I was tasting new things.  Smelling new things.  Hearing new people.  Changing my ethos to fit new people and new situations.   I was running along in a new place and suddenly my brain and body found an elasticity that wasn’t there before.  Suddenly, a newfound endurance was realized.  I felt mentally in shape.  A mental marathon.

There are two things that keep people from running and traveling: The anticipation and The Wall.  But when those two things are trampled, there is the High.

Thud…Thud…Thud.  Thoroughly sopped in my own sweat, I round off my path at a stop sign and head back in the direction from which I came.  I’ve been running for almost an hour and it’s time to head back.  Partly because the high has gone away, but mostly because I want to see it again, that palm tree.  Even with its tiny roots, that fallen tree was a towering 50 feet tall before it fell over.  It’s branches saw the world from their perch in the air.  It didn’t have deep roots.  It didn’t have thick roots.  But still, that tree managed to reach a High, and I respect that.  That’s what I want for myself - to reach ambitiously upward even if my root structure is not so ambitious.