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Saturday, January 16, 2016

Wanderlust

Sitting in one place for very long drives me nuts.

I recently read in The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, of a study involving rodents at the University of Wisconsin. Mice who were bred for running were restricted from running, and then had their brain activity measured.

"The researchers presumed that when the mice were deprived of running,"says author David Epstein, "their brain activity would decline. Instead, it went into overdrive, as if the mice needed exercise to feel normal" (p. 237).

In college, sitting in class, I felt an irresistible urge to walk, to move. Later, my long-term college boyfriend caught me running in my sleep like a dog whose paws move with the instinctual call to propel forward.

Along with my urge to move, traveling comes naturally to me. I travel well... as long as I get ample time moving. It's never the traveling part I dread; it's the stationary part: time spent sitting in vehicles, busses, planes...

I remember taking a cross-country trip from San Francisco through the Cascade Range across Oregon and into Seattle. I had been running avidly in the months before, and it hit me hardest in South Dakota. Watching the wild sunflowers go by in a blur along Interstate 90, my legs itched to move, to be outside, free of the confines of the hippied-out Ford Aerostar my boyfriend and I practically lived in that summer. Once, I made him stop along the highway just to run around in a field of sunflowers for awhile.



Traveling, I feel my mind open up. Sitting still, words seem to settle and stagnate like sand in the bottom of a pond. I blossom in movement.