Something I wrote and want to read

Each weekday I run two miles uphill from my apartment in Dupont Circle to the National Cathedral and run back downhill gleefully. The sense of accomplishment is constant. I started running three years ago when a friend and I realized we both loved being outdoors. We trained each week and ran the 2004 Rock and Roll Half-Marathon in Phoenix and the 2005 Army 11.5 miler in DC. Flowing along with others, we are absorbed in our thoughts at times and engaged in discussion at others. Weak knees and muscle-cramps give way to a feeling of belonging.

Having grown up on a farm in the outskirts of New Delhi, India, with parents who reared buffalos to escape from the city, I have agrarian sentimentalities. In addition to running, this affection for rural ideals has found a home in travels, in classical cooking techniques, and in the works of the Romantics like Thomas Jefferson, Emily Bronte, John Keats, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and John Fowles. My paternal grandfather, a journalist for the Indian independence movement who survived thirty years in a British jail, would comfortingly tell my mother that a bowl of yogurt and a good night’s rest could dispel any gloom. I would add a run and a few paragraphs of the authors above to his list of remedies.