Keep running!

Yes, yes, he thought, as long as I keep running, the next lap will hurt a little less, and a little less, and a little less…

His feet slammed into the cushioned darkness of the track field, shooting rounds of bullets up into his knees in a steady heartbeat rhythm.  He could feel the muscles of his cheeks quivering with every exhalation.  Veins, quivering and swollen, wound between the ropy muscle of his forearms and biceps, growing increasingly fragile with each new heartbeat.  At least his shirt had stopped whipping against his back.  It now clung to the sweat, conforming to the chest, to the clenched fist of an abdomen, to the undulating slashes of shoulder blades.

He was fast.  He was very fast.  Only think about fast, nothing else—just the world whipping by on either side, here one minute, gone the next, presto-change-o, abracadabra, now you see it, now you don’t.  A green blur was a tree, a gray blur was the sky, a red blur was the gym.  All the pinkish blurs, strewn intermittently between the greens and grays and blues, were passing people.  Just blurs, no faces.  No souls attached, no distinctions between them.  Just a splatter of emotionless color thrown onto a vanishing canvas.

He exhaled sharply, sending a miniature explosion of mist from his lips.  His chest was starting to burn.  But he liked the burn.  He liked to feel his lungs stiffening, to almost hear the muscles in his sides screaming for oxygen, and then to press forward even with the fist of exhaustion closing in around his body.  It had been…an hour?  Two hours?  Who knows?

It was raining, too.  His track shoes’ knobbed soles were useless in the puddles, and he was beginning to feel the moisture seeping in through the rip in the toe seams.  Water trickled into his nostrils and mouth and forced the sweat to pool between his socks and ankles.

Concentrate on the pain.  Feet, knees, back, feet, knees, back, feet, knees…

He closed his eyes as he ran, feeling the rail spikes shoot up through the soles of his feet and tear through his calves and bite his knees and surge into his spine, all in a split second, ready to begin again with the next footstep, and the next, and the next, faster, faster!  Through it all, he could still feel the track.  He could feel the subtleties of its broad curve and navigate the unseen puddles even behind closed eyelids.