Sodium World

Lee Michaels

The speaker feedback blares something about race yellow four, proceed to the preparation area but I can’t be sure with the biochemical reactions going on in me right now. I don’t even notice I’m following the people in front of me until we’re sitting on the benches in the runner preparation area. For a second I look outside myself and find amusement in the true phenomenon that is the human stress reaction.
Some guys stare vacantly at their bare knees with eyes like porcelain. Other guys ramble absently to the ones listening to music or stretching. The guys with their eyes closed are probably going through one of those last minute tryptophan discharges, the kind that hits you harder than a swimming pool of Dramamine and deactivates every one of your muscles. Sometimes those tryptophan guys will fall asleep right at the starting line. They’re the lucky ones though, there are far dirtier tricks your body can play on you.
My third person moment of observation ends and my camera view zooms back into first person. I can do this and I can’t do this and I have to do this and this doesn’t matter and nobody cares and everybody’s watching. That kinda stuff. You’ll tell yourself anything in those chemical minutes. Your mind will fight like a cornered animal against that slowly precipitating reality that no matter what you do or say or think, this pain will happen, it will hurt, and your struggling is only wasting precious energy.
Like drowning, you must accept it. Relax and let the water fill your lungs. Accept that your life has ended, and resolve yourself to darkness. Somewhere deep in my subconscious I must enjoy this. Probably some angry and resentful little wasteland of my prefrontal cortex relishes in it. Running is the purest form of masochism.
Everybody with machine faces and magnesium eyes. For another digressive second I wonder if this is what those ancient Greco-Roman gladiators in the movies went though. Maybe what I’m looking at is the Civil War soldiers of the nineteenth century before their charge into some vaguely meaningful death. Maybe this is what Emerson spent all those years in solitude trying to explain.
Runners to your mark.
Maybe this is what Thoreau felt when he sat and looked into that pond, wasting his days away. Maybe this is what Meursalt felt as he…
Set.
…sat in his cell and counted the moons before his executioner came…
Bang.