Eventually, my dogged determination led to a sort of groove. Or, I at least found myself bearably lost in thought. Still, something caused me to look next to the trail and I found myself eye to eye with a deer. Startled to find myself observed and knocked out of my reverie, I screamed! The deer and I looked at each other for a split second, before it bounded a few feet to safety. That the deer didn't run for it's life,long before I became aware of it was proof (as if I needed it) that my pace was strangely slow. This simple fact was not troubling. But the deer did cause me to go to another dark place: zombies.
Let me explain. In the movie I Am Legend, Will Smith's character valiantly tries to hold onto his sanity, as the only human left in NYC, after it's been overrun by zombies. And weeds. And deer. (Apparently, for zombies, in a pinch, deer are an adequate food source.) The sight of deer bounding around abandoned cars, in the weed choked streets of New York was as creepy to me as the pale, bloodthirsty zombies.
In my mind, the math now looks like this: city + deer = zombies.
Still, it was daylight, so I was in no danger and free to continue my shuffle and think about zombies without fear. A relative newcomer to zombie lore, I know enough to see that modern day zombies are different. For most of history it seems, zombies were very slow and not really threatening. Sure, they possessed uncanny strength and a desire to kill, but they limped along, were not clever, and honestly seemed easy enough to elude -- provided one could avoid panic or stupid mistakes. These were the barely undead. In the past five years or so, though, the zombie virus must have mutated, because suddenly, zombies are fast. Wickedly, super-humanly fast. (28 Days/Weeks, Planet Terror, I Am Legend)
Suddenly, it all became clear. I realized that my earlier assessment of my gate and pace as that of an octogenarian was completely wrong. In truth, I was lumbering along like an old-school zombie. A dead wringer for a George Romero extra. And this, I realized, after further contemplation and continued shambling, was not such a bad thing. Consider the shuffling zombie, frontal lobes decimated, driven on, against all odds, by a force greater than the human body would seem to allow -- it's somehow heroic.
That was an especially brutal run. I trust that there will be times again, when I feel strong and fast, and, in a completely opposite way, will appear to defy what seems humanly possible for me.
However it happens, I'm going to keep running.
Like a zombie.
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