Ten laps make a mile

by ABHA ELI PHOBOO

FROM ISSUE # 168 (December 2009) | IN THIS ISSUE
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It's wintry, cold and freezing with a chilly, biting wind that numbs your face, fingers, and toes. At three-thirty, the sun starts to sink behind the bare branches of the once glorious fall trees. If you wake up late and laze around, you will have missed daylight altogether. Darkness can be depressing, even when the stars are out, bribght white and shiny after freezing rain. It is winter and soon the New England landscape will be white and the streets will be iced.

We are trying to put together a survival strategy. Three graduate students, sitting around a table in the basement office that used to be a psychological experimentation ward. But we don't mind the knobs and dials on the wall; we think it gives the place some character. Two of us have our cups of tea and the third, sits swirling the coffee in her travel mug. Everybody recommends the gym, she says, still swirling the coffee. Run. Sweat it out. Get moving. That sort of thing.

We put it on the top of our list. Running can be exhilarating, running on the indoor tracks in the warmth of the heated gym, pink-cheeked and sweaty, watching the snow fall outside the big windows. Ten laps make a mile there, ten laps make a mile.
 
The chai tea smell is spicy and strong. Chai tea, that's redundant, says tea-drinking friend. But I agree, running indoors can be as exhilarating as eating ice-cream in the middle of winter after a game of guitar hero while an ice storm blasts through town, breaking branches and blowing down trees. I get carried away. They stare. We sip.

The gym is full. The gym is filled with people moving, running, stretching, walking. People trying to stay in from the cold, ignore winter. Or so we think. They've adopted our survival tactics. The treadmills, stationary bikes and elliptical machines are busy with people sweating it out, going nowhere. The coffee-drinking friend puts her travel mug on the floor and points to the sign that says, ten laps. Ten laps make a mile.

All that energy, she says, such a waste. We should bottle it and sell it.

The tea drinkers have switched to bottles of water.

Sell what?

All that energy. All those people going nowhere. All that running and sweating it out. Collect all that and turn it into electricity, we could probably run the gym on that alone. Or even export it. It's going to be winter and no-light season in Nepal again.

We might have splurted our teas out if we were around the table still. Here, we nod and lace up our shoes, thinking of candles and melting wax, burnt pencils and burnt hair. We lace up our shoes and start walking in circles around the springy tracks. We aren't going anywhere either, like the seasons, in circles. We'll go round and round and round until winter ends, until spring is here and the snow has melted. Then maybe the first thing we'll ask about again will be khana khayau?, and not the weather.