I’ve recently rediscovered running and finished my first 10K.  I say “rediscovered” because I did a brief cross-country stint my sophomore year in high school.  (I admit now that 20 years ago I was motivated only by cute boys and the cool preppy windbreaker that came with being on the team.)

Running is boring and had been a last resort when low funds or scheduling kept me from other forms of exercise.  For a long time I preferred dancing, work-out videos, exercise classes, and watching TV while climbing steps in place for timed intervals.  Although I’ve been a dancer my whole life, I don’t have nervous physical energy or even a natural inclination to move.  Exercise, even the most enjoyable of activities, has always been a chore.   For most of my life I needed to do something to preoccupy myself while moving my body like following someone else’s instructions or watching Seinfeld re-runs.

Now I love running.  I want to wake up at dawn and run through my neighborhood to the nearby forested park trails.  It’s not only the endorphin release – that “runner’s  high”.  It’s the fact that there is nothing else to do while moving my body.  I welcome the quiet monotony – the very thing I used to dread.

The rhythm of the run clears my head and fuels my writing.  It brings me to an introspective place where I can listen.  It was while running through an old Pittsburgh mill neighborhood, feeling the topography under my sneakers and looking at the remnants of a 20^th century immigrant community, that TyukTyuk, the sassy female boarding house character in my book Circle of the Silver Birch Trees, started.  It was by watching hawks circle above me that I remembered my grandmother’s holy fear and reverence of owls, a theme I also incorporated into this novel.  I am certain that in my daily routine I never would have seen the dilapidated, forgotten houses and the birds of prey in the same way.  It was only during that quiet place of the run that I could see TyukTyuk standing at the back door of a boarding house and recall the long-forgotten memory of one of my grandmother’s sacred Old World beliefs.