With each stride the Denver Parks and Rec standard-grade gravel crunches underfoot. The friction is a backbeat, the cadence of my will to be a long distance runner. This is not my first race, and it is not fair for me to lump all the races together. I have left courses feeling battered, defeated, and dejected. With the race I am running now, I am running it through to the end. Before I ran fast out of the gate and fizzled fast. Now I am running steady, proud of the work I have put in to be ready for the challenge. The hardest thing for me is to allow happiness to seep in without hesitation, and these short distances are done. I am admitting now I will leave all pain behind as I find my course as a long distance runner. Don’t run to me tonight, I’m not a middle distance runner. I’m so proud tonight, and my darling I will always be a long distance runner. No need to run to me tonight. Grab your shoes, we run not at each other. Join me on the path where we run together with a backbeat of a hundred million unified gravel crunches underfoot, the finish line a blissful distance off.

The streets may have been the same Denver roads, but the aura was all Hangzhou.  The place I was running in, with the single-file grey sky a backdrop for vibrant trees ringing a city’s park, was the same place where I kowtowed to Buddha, where I biked through tea fields, where I sat on a park bench and watched the boats out on West Lake.  My feet were the fingers slowly turning the photo album, the album marked “Hangzhou,” the album pulled off a forgotten shelf.  I ran to the lilly pond in Wash Park and I stood beneath the willow tree.  I touched its branches and I was standing high in a pagoda, looking at all the grey and green, smiling at the bit of sun that was pushing light on to our Hangzhou afternoon.