Brain Jog

Few of my childhood memories of school now remain as crystal clear as my gym class experience in fourth grade. I can remember some of the teachers and some of the kids, those faded halls and dingy classrooms, but the majority of the details have slipped into blurry, flashback quality reveries that only seem to become real again just before I fall asleep. Of all those teachers and kids, one came back to me recently, as I tried and failed to run for a second duration of three minutes during my morning exercise. I could suddenly hear shrieking across foggy and muddy fields as I tried to remain upright. “Run you maggot! Run you useless animal! Keep running! RUN!”  

My fourth grade gym teacher, Ms. Merrimack (name changed for historical reasons) was a stout hulk of a woman with a perpetual scowl and a sadistic love of running—at least for making kids run. It was obvious to me, even back then, that she had never run one step in her life except maybe toward a buffet or away from a sabertooth tiger. When other gym teachers at other schools were letting their kids stay inside because of frigid weather, Merrimack was having her miserable charges run in the frostbitten subzero January temperatures. Bruce Allen and Jerry Earhart both lost fingers that winter. We could never find Danny Harrigan again until the thaw. Some of the kids stumbled over a small pile of frozen snow in March and realized that it was Danny and dragged him to the nurse. He had fallen and froze solid and had been laying in the muddy grass, a solid kid-cicle, for most of the winter. It took three school nurses hours of consistently pouring warm water over him to revive him. Once he was partially free of the ice, he wept bitterly and asked to be excused from gym class. The next week, Danny was back running with the rest of us. He never lost a tint of pale blue around his lips and fingers.

Shannon Fredrick, my best friend back then, said that Merrimack was Schultz's twin sister from Hogan’s Heroes. From then on we called Ms. Merrimack ‘Schultz’. Her hair cut was even done in such a way as to resemble the M35 Stahlhelm worn by John Banner on the show. Unlike the character, though, who was bumbling and good-natured, Merrimack was a tyrannical teacher with no pity and no compassion. Children who fell and skinned their knees or who didn’t (or couldn’t) actually run in her class were made to make up the laps they missed even if they had to drag themselves hand over hand. One day, Schultz was having us run during a thunderstorm, and we were equally lashed and pelted by rain and hail. Three kids were taken to the nurse after being struck by lightning. Worse than any other time, though, was at the beginning and end of the year, when the days were hot and the humidity high. Kids fell left and right. It was more than a little like the Bataan death march.

One day at lunchtime, Shannon asked me what I thought Merrimack would have us do for gym class that day. It was sleeting, as I recall. I said in merciless imitation of Schultz, “I know nussink, except zat ve vill be runnink!” Shannon laughed so hard strawberry milk snorted from his nose. It was nevertheless true. We ran in gym class. We always ran. Other kids played kickball or did jumping jacks or had dodgeball tournaments. 

We ran. 

I was about nine years old, and I had a never ending supply of energy coursing through my youthful frame. Having Ms. Merrimack for gym meant that I hated running, but I could run and so, to keep her eyes off of me, I kept my head down and ran. It was horrible. My lungs burned, my legs ached. More than once I saw my short life flash before my eyes, but I kept running.

Ms. Merrimack merely stood with a stopwatch clutched in her claw, a sharp, screeching whistle clenched in her teeth and her stahlhelm haircut gleaming dully in the bleak winter daylight, waiting for us to complete four hundred laps around the playground. It was a long time ago, so I'm not perfectly clear, but one crisp spring day, I'm pretty sure I saw classmates fashioning a stretcher from pine boughs and their winter coats and carrying some of our fallen comrades off the field.

By the time I started my final year in elementary school, “Schultz” Merrimack had retired—she had to have been about ninety back then—and Shannon Frederick had also moved away. As a result of the endless laps, I had developed a skill for running that I didn't know I had. As I progressed from awkward nerdy kid in hand-me-downs to a gangly, nerdy pre-teen in hand-me-downs, I grew taller, and it became apparent that, if nothing else, I could sprint well. Mr. Huff, the middle school gym teacher, often asked me to go out for track once I reached the seventh grade, but my parents and The Lord had other plans for me. I spent the next few years in parochial school where running was forbidden except during gym class, when the school's bullies (teachers and students) had freedom to pursue students in the gymnasium to torture the nerdy kids.

By the time I got back to public school, I was too busy navigating the vicissitudes of puberty to care much about running. My parents wanted me to go out for the soccer team and I did and wound up sitting on the bench for all the games. I did run my skinny backside off during practices, though and I still marvel that I once could smoke Marlboro cigarettes and run five miles without getting winded back then.

After high school, running became something that I rarely did if I could help it. I could run, and run fast, but I didn't opt to do so. For a brief moment in my early thirties, before we moved the family to our current residence, I went through a period of trying to run, but I found it intolerable. Both the heat and the humidity exasperated my asthmatic nature too much by then.

I see people running, usually in the hottest part of the year, during the steamiest part of the day and ask myself what demon lashed their conscience to this utmost extremity of misery. Running is hard, tough on the joints and cardiopulmonary system, it burns calories rapidly, dehydrates and depletes essential chemicals from the body. Even just a very short run in hot weather can reduce an otherwise healthy human to a shriveled human raisin.

The act of running isn't an unusual thing in the animal kingdom. Almost all creatures can gallop or trot, but very few are entirely bipedal in their process. Even the great apes, like chimpanzees and gorillas can run at speed for short distances, but they almost always move with their arms as well. As the only fully bipedal primates, humans have developed over many long eons, a skillful way to use our legs to speedy advantage. Only ostriches, emus, roadrunners and other ground-dwelling birds are as keen runners as humans. Running uses a lot of energy and our bodies already require a lot of energy because of the size of our brains.

The problem is, however, almost all humans feel awareness of their running and the discomfort that it brings. Only people of exceptional physical ability, who are in mid-season shape, can run and run well for prolonged periods of time. To do so is to mentally able to overmaster the sheer horror of the act. Those people are actual runners, not those who are only desperate to try anything to be fit enough to wear a skimpy bathing suit.

I almost never see true runners out doing their chore-like exercise for all the world to see in the middle of the day. They run early or late, preferring to avoid other people's attention (unless they are participating in a marathon) and bypass the extreme temperatures of very cold or very hot, if they can help it. Running is painful and unpleasant and people look and feel terrible when they do it. It is a great workout, generally, if one can only devote time and effort to not minding, but it is not elegant or chic. Running is strictly utilitarian. We are borrowing a key survival behavior from a time when large predatory fauna roamed the countryside and molding it into an exercise.

I know all this not because I have done a bunch of research on running, but because, for several weeks, I have battled with myself on the topic. I have been feeling like running and the urge is powerful and a bit overpowering. As a result of this urge, I have been building up my tolerance for running, and I recently started a program of exercise to build myself up to running a 5K (3.1 miles) marathon before my next birthday in March 2025. 

Why would you do this to yourself, Dave, you might ask, and would be well within your rights to implore on behalf of my rational side. The fact is, I have become friends with a healthy lifestyle that isn't based on a fad diet or trendy exercise routine. I just feel good, generally, when I work toward a goal. I sleep better, have more energy, feel mentally well-balanced and am, if possible, a little more amiable. I was walking three miles every other day (9 miles a week) and started jogging short bursts here and there in my routine  just to hustle up the monotony, but also because I still could, which was an enjoyable realization. That was a most extraordinary feeling for me. The next time, I felt like running again! It made me feel almost buoyant.

Far be it from me to brag. I am struggling with this process. I am not progressing even as fast as the running program intends. I am laboring over expanding my time and it is hard work, but it is also rewarding. I have had to engage the use of a phone app that is helping me broaden my breathing and my running time and it is kicking my backside far harder than old Schultz ever did. I’m getting there, but this isn’t about a destination, so much as the journey. Upon reflection, I have discovered that, for me, it is less about the actual running and more about an internal battle of wills with myself. 

Somehow, I got a taste for the feeling of accomplishment that comes from pushing myself to do more and more challenging things and the main obstacle in my way is that voice that says, “Just lay in this morning, you’re tired, you need rest. To hell with all this running!” That voice is right twice a week, when I don’t go to the gym and I don’t run. On those days, primarily, I play my drums for about 45 minutes on my lunch break, in order to get the heart rate up. But on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, with little variation, I have to talk down that voice, move toward my goal and devote myself to a higher mental discipline. To that end, I have summoned the memory of Schultz Merrimack.

Running, it turns out, is doable, at least on a treadmill with a horrid drill instructor of a ghostly gym teacher squawking at me. Even if I never manage to win a 5K, I’ll be able to run three miles three times a week. Will it make a difference? I doubt it. I’ll know that my buoyant and cheerful mood is due, in large part, to a small and quiet urge within me to push myself harder and work steadily toward a goal. What will that goal be once I have accomplished this one? That’s hardly the point. Half of the joy isn’t in the exercise, so much, as knowing that I’m challenging myself and learning my limits.

I don’t know if Merrimack still lives. I assume that if she is alive, it is because, like my great-aunt Etta who lived to be 104, Death is terrified of her and the infernal realms are afraid she'll lead a coup and assume power. I imagine her in her chair, by the treadmill, watching as her former student runs. Her face gleams with sadistic joy, her head surmounted by snow-white stahlhelm hair, clutching a battered stopwatch in one gnarled, claw-like hand. As I flag in my training, she mouths the words, “Run, you useless animal. Run, you maggot. Run!” At least something good came of her awful tutelage.