by Elan Barnehama
At forty I turned to marathons. Though I’d been running almost daily for decades I had never given marathons much thought. But that day, I took turns that expanded my ten mile route to fourteen then eighteen and became twenty-two miles and I felt great.
I never expected to celebrate my fortieth. I’d been raised on stories of the camps that were not camps. The ones with their ovens and gas chambers. During my grade school years I was told that seeking shelter under my desk would insure that I survived a Soviet Union nuclear attack. My high school years came with the likely prize of winning the Vietnam War draft lottery. And if somehow I survived all those, the collective global disregard for diminishing natural resources would surely end life on earth. Forty may as well have been one hundred.
I started running soon after my sister Emma’s suicide. Started right after her Shiva ended. When the house emptied of visitors, and my parents returned to their regular routines, and I returned to high school. I don’t know why I started running home from school. Maybe I was trying to avoid talking to people about Emma.
I continued this habit every day till summer vacation when I set out from my house and ran through the neighborhood. It was often pointed out to me that Emma and I were very much alike. We did, after all, share the same parents, the same DNA. I was aware that she too liked running and had run track in high school. I wondered if that was why I started running. I wondered if that meant I too would take my life someday.
What I did not wonder about was that lacing up my sneakers gave me time away from the expectations of daily life. It allowed me to be in my own world. Running was the only thing that saved me from my darkest self.
As summer went on, I got comfortable with my breath. I had never done anything that hit me as hard as running. It set a new bar for what I considered meaningful. My breathing, deep and rhythmic, rebuffed life’s loneliness, life’s isolation. The Hebrew word for breath is RUACH which also means wind or spirit.
Toward the end of summer I found Emma while running. We had great conversations. Yes, I knew she wasn’t there, but I also knew she was. And I knew I would not end my life like Emma. She told me.
In college, during my Kerouac days, I took up smoking Lucky Strikes and stopped running. A month later I was late for class and started to race. Forty steps later I was bent over wheezing and coughing out of control. That was my last cigarette.
The next day I was back running. I started slow, doing laps on the indoor track that required sixteen orbits to log a mile. I could never keep count. As soon as I got my lungs back, I went outside where I rediscovered my breath. I got myself back and didn’t plan on letting go ever again. And I got Emma back. Man was she pissed about the smoking thing.
And then came forty and my need to go further without explanation. The rabbis suggested one wait till forty to study Kabbalah, an exploration of life’s mysteries. They argued that one needed to have experienced life before one studied it. Maybe the marathon was my Kabbalah.
I decided to experience marathons and let the why remain a mystery. I mapped out and ran three marathons over those next two months and then signed up for an organized one and it was good. Better than good. I liked running alone in the company of strangers. After that, I couldn’t stop. I used marathons as an excuse to travel, arriving days ahead and exploring those new locations on my taper runs.
Each time I stepped out the door in an unfamiliar place, the names of the streets and coffee shops and diners and people unknown to me, I took everything with me. My running self left nothing behind. My running self had Emma.
Elan Barnehama’s second novel, Escape Route (Running Wild Press, May 2022), is set in New York City during the tumultuous late 1960s and told by the first-generation son of Holocaust survivors, and NY Mets fan, who becomes obsessed with the Vietnam War and with finding an escape route for his family for when he believes the US will round up and incarcerate its Jews. Barnehama’s words have appeared in 10 x10 Flash Fiction, Boog City, Jewish Fiction, Drunk Monkeys, Entropy, Rough Cut Press, Boston Accent, Jewish Writing Project, RedFez, HuffPost, Public Radio, and elsewhere. Elan was the flash fiction editor for Forth Magazine LA, has taught college writing, worked with at-risk youth, had a gig as a radio news guy, and did a mediocre job as a short-order cook. He splits time between Pasadena and Boston. More info at elanbarnehama.com.
