Plastic and Cement

The boy ran, his sweat dripping downfrom his cheeks. Each and every drop got blown away by the wind. The air was still; only the boy was piercing through the seemingly nonexistent air, his every step a massive effort of his soul. He almost tripped on flat ground, and he stopped. His facial expression was a mess; the summer sun shone down directly, boiling every inch of his body drenched with salty water and covered with cloth, and frying every other part that was exposed.

The boy was just another me, doing his laps, three years ago.

I was a boy of mediocre stamina when I was in primary school. I walked to school with my grandpa; yet he walked sofast that I could hardly catch up. That was how half of my stamina today was built.

I was not a good runner in any way: I did not have the explosive power for the school sports meeting; I could not stand any more than 5continuous laps-that was 1000m for my primary school.

Yet teachers do not really make you do over 3 laps in primary school. So that did not really seem to be my problem-until I entered junior high.

They immediately have the 1000s in the junior high school. That was when the weakness of my body actually revealed itself:

We should all have experienced the feeling of painful fatigue when ourstamina was pushed to its very limit. That was your body complaining and struggling for a stop.

Yet it was just a vain effort for your body-when primitive reflexes encounter the human mind, the mind could easily override the previous. Not for everybody.

Especially when the reflexes are causing enough discomfort to break your mind.

Plastic, Part 1

I remembered the time when I tried hard to improve my 1 km timespan. The laps in my previous school was 250m each so it turned out to be 4 laps.

Those 4 laps were of different qualities, with subtle andmassive differences.

As an experienced sufferer of the 1 km runs, I shall try to deliver the feelings of mine to you, one lap by one.

Picture this:

You are standing on the starting line, with half of your classmates. Comfy shoes, bright sun, cool breeze, and plenty of adrenaline. The scores today count for the mid-term of your PE class.

Tense and relaxed faces turned sideways, shouting bets and jokes; legs stretched and laid upon the plastic runaway. Slow silence. Just the next second, the roar ofthe whistle will puncture the air.

Then, you go under this procedure with my body:

Lap 1:

This was doubtlessly the easiest lap.

I sometimes even chatted with people on the 1stlap. My legs feel at large. I had no problem controlling them and pushing my body forward. The entire world was under my control. Relative to me, the entire galaxy moved, just with the rhythmic progression of my footsteps; yet I did not have the mind for such topics. My breath was regular, yet slowly accelerating and deepening. I would try to catch up with the frontrunners that always exceeded the full score limit (although I knew I could not. Not so now :-) It was like regular running, when you tried to catch up a bus, or just in a hurry to fetch something you forgot.

Lap 2:

This is the border of ease and suffering. My feet would slowly become heavier. That meant-legs slowly losing their stamina. My breath would turn less serene-the body was more oxygen-hungry by each step. Easily, your suffering could slowly invadeyour soul in this lap.The core dynamics of your body could beslowly calling out for a rest-only to realize you are just half-done.

Lap 3:

This is an even harder lap: All the tiny discomforts of the second lap would be amplified and directed to your mind. All of your body would be hard at work, keeping up the oxygen level-thus, for me, I would gasp for air. Up till now it is still a hard lap, for me, and for every runner.

Lap 4:

For the final lap I would only have one word: ecstasy. As you dash toward your destination that does not exist as an entity, all the power you have left would be unleashed with pain. This is the lap of faith-the final decisive battle of your mind and body. Usually, minds win.

And bodies collapse.

After just thinking of the procedures for a second, the whistle roared.

I set off, along with many others, competing for the frontier of the group. The gentle autumn breeze swept across my face, like hands of a delicate, fluid species; the sun shone on the sports field, dragging the shadows of the basketball stands long and distinctive. Outside the school fence, trees watched, their twisted branches with slowly yellowing leaves across the top. All the rough faces of the plastic runway blurred into a slightly misty brick-red under the speed, while the stadium, canteen and the dormitory, stood defiantly and shone on the opposite side, grey and yellow, like they always have been. A low growl came from the air duct of the kitchen, busy with steams and a trace of cooking fumes hanging around near its windows.

It was the second last lesson that day, with a clear, cloudless autumn sky for a particularly refreshing afternoon. Yet no possibility of relaxation would be allowed, at least, until you finish the 1 km ahead of you. On the first lap, I enjoyed my surroundings… and soon I passed the starting line into the second lap, only with a heavier breath, and a seed of fatigue already sprouting from deep within, threatening todrain my entire ocean blue reservoir of perseverance.

And how astonishing the seed’s growth was.

As you could imagine, when I finally finished the fourth lap, I was painfully exhausted; and I did not even make it within 4’.

Just then, I decided just to accelerateto 3’40”. However, this was no easy task. Absolutely not.

Cement, Part 1

The orange lights shone, radiating spheres of light from their sodium cores, down the entire street, lifeless and unpleasant. People really tend to look like corpses under these street lamps. They turn pale and literally vanish when they just enter a shadow.

I ran, on the pavement.

The moon was hidden from view, by the thin clouds tricking around in the sky. Blocks of cement blurred into a grey mass under my feet. They joined forces, and dragged down my footsteps, although they almost provided no drag.

They just stayed there, yet I felt they had a certain gravity that really pulled me.

Well, it was just my feet, getting filled with nonexistent mercury. I watched the road in front of me, and bit my teeth to continue. I checked the location of mine and got totally surprised-I haven’t ever reached such a distance before!

Everything started from the gate of my neighborhood. I rotated my neck, wrists and ankles, and did a few stretches. The determination of doing a bigger lap around the streets nearby had settled in my mind.

Usually when I go out jogging, I would slow down a considerable bit-the speed shall be about 5–6 ^min/_km. That reallyeases the entire journey.

However, if you go further, you would experience fatigue, in a less painful yet more thoroughly way.

What kept me going was music.

My storage of music wasjust mental tonics for running. With every beat drop of the songs your body would be filled with a new force you would never experience otherwise. Honestly it just provides you with a source of distraction, to keep you farther from the pain you would normally experience. What’s more, you could be energized by literally any music you love.The momentum storage of your body would be boosted like a test tube of boiling acid. For me I stepped down in a sort of half-consciousness, while rocking a part of my soul with the music inside my skull. The continuousness of my steps became effortless in the ocean of electrolyzing bits of thrilling audio dope.

On the way home, my body must have been complaining with pain. Before that I could just do about 3 km at a time, yet the step counter showed that I was reaching 10 km! I’ve been running for about 1 hour, non-stop. Honestly, my legs felt almost nonexistent then. They seemed to turn into a soft gel. Yetthe force inside me was literally unstoppable, something I’ve never experienced before. Thus I got more confidence for tackling the problem.

When I stopped I literally felt my body shatter… I could barely stop walking after I had finished. I did 13 km that day, and the longest distance I’ve ever covered before that was 3.5 km. My sweat covered everything-the headphones, my clothes, and myphonein the pocket-they were almost drenchedin water. My sneakers seemed to be totally burning without a flame, and my feet slowly began to hurt. Soon I felt a great discomfort-great disorientation and a slight, deep revolt. I bent over and tried to puke, but failed. Yet I looked up at the clouds, now breaking apart and drifting eastward, and almost waved towards the moon, now a beautiful, cold and radiant crescent. Its craters were slightly blurred by the stains on my glasses, and the night sky glanced at me and looked away. Yet I felt absolutely fantastic.

Plastic, Part 2

Comfy shoes, bright sun, cool breeze, chatter from the crowds, and tons of adrenaline. The scores today count for the sports meeting scores of my class. The very best runners all got enrolled into many other events and could not really apply for the race, so I was in.

The waistcoats glistened blue, with a big white numbers printed across their chemical fiber surface. Eyes tightened, and bodies bent forward; all the athletes focus their entire mind on the starting gunshot. The crowd became distant, like a faint voice in a massive, ambient hall. Everything faded on the extreme attention and tension, leaving only the teachers and fellow runners…

BANG.

Without any hesitation, all the runners poured out from the invisible barrier.

I tried to keep in front. Yet slowly I just fell back, and stayed at least in the previous half of the entire line. I kept my pace at almost maximum, without overusing my stamina for the first lap; yet if you fall back at the first lap you would usually lose your mind for more struggle. So I tried hard to keep up.

Soon I slowly began to exhaust in the middle of the second lap… I closed my eyes.

I was sitting before the dormitory desk, crazily working on the leftover mathhomework of last night. In desperateness I lookedat my watch. Goodness gracious! – 3 minutes left before the morning exercise, and I was still in the dormitory…

I collected my things with ultimate haste and hurried to the classroom, successfully skipping breakfast. Only when I got in the classroom did I recall it wasthe day for the sports meeting… that was ultimate stupidity, skipping breakfast on the sports day…

And when noon came with the usual boxed lunch, I ate just a little. When you skip breakfast you tend lose appetite and vigor for the entire day.

And when I walked onto the playground I realized I had the wrong shoes with me! God no, they were not the best for running.

Thus when I stood on the starting line, I was cursing myself, silently. My stomach felt totally empty, and the momentum inside of me was almost totally lost.

Yet it was do or die.

I opened my eyes again. Still I kept at the front half, with my fellow classmate whose best score was 3’40”. Exactly what I wanted. He was trying hard too, but apparently with more ease. I tensed up with all the forceleft and kept up with his pace.

When the 3rdlap came, many runners on the frontier began to accelerate. Yes, it was a race, and it was necessary to really speed up a bit prior to the optimal pointfor yourself. Yet I felt empty at the 3rdlap then, a deep fatigue seemed to materialize and was already clinging to my back and trying to drag me behind. I resisted with all the force I could muster-well, I meant allthe force. My body, my shoes, they all fought my mind and tried to kill it. But obviously, you are not going to stop in a race. Not in any way, unless you feel critically terrible. And I wasn’t fainting at all.

My innards seems to tumble and melt with great pain; they screamed in silence, while patches of numbness came from my feet that was literally struggling to hold together. My legs were filled with exhaustion, yet still propelling my body at a fast pace. A taste of blood slowly rose from my throat, a dim scent of raw fish and iron nails, and my throat became painful, as if pierced with miniature needles. Every muscle on me seemed under a tension they could never take: many of them felt like on the edge of snapping in half. I almost feared that I would explode from the inside, as my skull seemed tighter and tighter-the rise of myskull’s inner pressure was noticeable. I slowed down by half a pace, as it was already a near-critical situation. Yet I chose to further accelerate just several seconds later, when I finished the 3rd lap and went into the final lap.

And I immediately closed my eyes on this lap. Eminem’s passionate lyrics began playing themselves around in my brain, silently pushing me forward. The fight of my mind became almost as distant as the crowd. The entire world did not

seem to exist. I only felt the rhythmic progression of my footsteps, and the music inside my skull. I accelerated to maximum speed I could reach when there was only about 100m left, and in waves of ecstasy, I dashed towards the final destination with craze and determination, and a body almost falling apart.

There were really so many people before me that I did not expect any sort of rank. (Actually I didn’t even got into the fastest 6, the first dude was 3’20”) I just passed the finish line.

At once my ears exploded with an intense ringing. It seemed to come from the whole universe, even right from the inside of my body. It was like a fatiguing resonance, a bothering call of loud bells. Yetit slowly stopped. My feet exploded with ultimate pain. It was not searing-it came deep from the inside, like thenear-snapping of a ligament. It almost felt like that your entire feet was cramping. That stopped soon, too.

What continued was the fatigue. It was first just a hollow feeling in the core of my body, yet it developed into an extreme disorientation and deep retching. Yet I got nothing to vomit. I truly suffered. And then my sight awkwardly turned greener and brighter. I could hardly muster myself anymore, but I managed not to pass out. In that near-collapse state, I was still cheerful as hell in my heart. If my heart could show itself, it would have been smiling for the whole time.

I was 3’41”. The best record before that was 3”57”.

I made it.

Cement, Part 2

I steadied myself and kept up with my running. The thrilling live recording of the music festivalkept pushing me forward. I glanced back at the Expo Axis, and went on, shaking on of my hands with the music… That was my latest run, for about 8 km.

It was a major road, with much traffic, and the pavement was quite crowded. I ran I started with ease, and finished the entire route without much fatigue. (Thoughresting a bit when I reached the river) Not as severe as before in any way. As I kept on training myself, all the running progress turned into an enjoyment, especially with music.

The cement below my feet did not have edges anymore. They were in one united piece.

The boy ran, his sweat dripping down from his cheeks. Each and every drop got blown away by the wind. The air was cool; yet the boy was piercing through the seemingly nonexistent air, his every step a massive joy of his soul. He almost knocked onto the fence beside the river, and he stopped. His facial expression was mysterious-a mixture of slight fatigue and much relaxedness; the soft breeze on the river turned into a steady wind with a slight scent of salt, coolingevery inch of his body drenched with salty water and covered with cloth, and refreshingevery other part that was exposed.

Minutes later, he hit the play button again, and started off, back to his home. His steps on the cementground was muffled, yet determined.

The boy was just me, enjoying himself, several days ago.