Breaking Free

Why stepping out is the only way to travel.

August 13, 2010

I tell you all this to explain why I am not (yet) crazy from all the traveling I do. I average 25 trips a year, and more and more I feel like a hamster in a Habitrail. I scurry into an entry tube, also known as an airport, and then proceed through other tubes, a.k.a. buses and taxies, and P.F. Chang's and smart new brewpubs in renovated downtowns, before arriving, in every instance, at the exact same rest cube furnished with the same paper-wrapped soaps, thence to sleep before reentering the tubes and speeding off to my next, predictable nodule. Like a hamster, I enjoy only the illusion of freedom, but unlike a hamster, I can put on running shorts and break through the tube walls.

It's not always easy, though. Outside of certain older downtowns—New York, Chicago, San Francisco—pedestrianism itself is kind of a throwback, the sort of thing done by people who also re-enact Civil War battles and play "base-ball" under 1850s rules. If God had wanted us to use our legs, say 21st-century planners, he wouldn't have given us four-lane highways and drive-thru windows. So on those mornings when I step out of the hotel entrance, and run up the inbound driveway, I feel like a felon: a hamster gone rogue.

A few times earlier this year, I used the Internet to plan my runs before heading to the airport, checking on favorite routes that others have logged, and even connecting with local runners willing to guide me personally. And that has its significant pleasures, because nobody knows the terrain like the people who've worn their grooves into it, but I also experience the loss of the possibility of getting lost. There's nothing quite like the chill of realizing I'm somewhere I haven't anticipated, with only a vague sense of how to get back, a slight but thrilling sense of unease now as rare as an urban corner without a Starbucks.

Better, I now think, to just go. That is, after all, the great advantage of our sport over all others—we don't need a ball or a team or a field or even, according to some, shoes. We just need to stand someplace, imagine ourselves in the center of a circle, pick one out of the 360 degrees available to us, and head thataway. What the Habitrail designers want, ultimately, is control: They want you to go down this street into that mall past that sign. And, stuck in cars or trains or even on downtown sidewalks, people have no choice but to obey. Once, at a Disney World hotel, I asked a hotel clerk where I could run, and she said to take one of their shuttles to a nearby resort with attractive running paths. I nodded and smiled and turned away to head outside and run on the access roads, dodging buses, breaking through tubes, a member of the Rebel Alliance.

If I didn't, I'd travel all over, and never get anywhere.