Blue Shutters, Red Door

Anna Stroinski, Department of Politics

Honorable Mention

I hit 3.1 miles in front of some anonymous house with aging blue shutters and a bright red door. Do the people inside know what I’ve just done? Right in front of their house?

Do they care?

I ripped my headphones out of my ears, threw my hands into the air, and screamed. My legs ached. My head hurt. The singular fried egg I’d eaten to prepare for this particular run was sloshing around uncomfortably in my stomach. But none of that mattered. I had taken a body rife with problems and pushed it to where my mind wanted it to go: some anonymous house, apparently, with aging blue shutters and a bright red door.

My relationship to exercise, to health more broadly, was complicated. Born with a rare syndrome that would’ve killed me fifty years earlier, I became a hospital regular, an operating table connoisseur. One, two, three surgeries came and went, each one more complicated than the last. The only thing I remember from it all was how popular my neon pink cast became at summer camp. Everyone signed it, even the boy I had a crush on but would never in a million years talk to. Good luck, Anna! Feel better soon.

In the years that followed, the procedures and tests accumulated. Another surgery. Multiple MRIs, CTs, EEGs, EKGs. A colonoscopy at 14. I showed up to every doctor’s office with a list, composed by my mom and fine-tuned by WebMD, an expert in my own mismatched, malrotated self.

Slowly, I shifted focus to the mind. It made perfect sense to do this; I was decently smart, somewhat creative. If my body could not be strong, then surely my mental faculties could be. And the studying and writing and reading and drawing sustained me until college, when I gained more weight than I would’ve liked.

“Honestly, if you’re unhappy, go to the gym,” my mom said to me when I came home from school that summer. “Some exercise would be good for you anyway.”

The constant hum of machines. A funky, sour smell. Strange-looking veiny people with shiny faces and fantastic butts. The modern gym was like a foreign country, and I felt like a tourist—a sun-screened, fanny-packed passerby. My body wasn’t meant for this kind of work. It was too soft and scarred, too ugly and unathletic.

I began with a simple three-machine rotation—first the elliptical, then the StairMaster, then the treadmill. There was something about the treadmill in particular, about running, that excited me. What a marvel it was to run, and how good it felt to run fast. The strongest I ever felt was when I ran.

My rotation became routine on Saturdays, Sundays, and a weekday. Every time, the treadmill dominated my thoughts. Would I be able to do it? Would I be able to run for five, ten, twenty minutes straight?

Yes was the answer. Every time. Over and over and over again.

Eventually, it became less about weight loss—not much weight came off in the end, actually—and more about miles per hour. Not a superstitious person by any means, I developed an assortment of bizarre rituals, too: 1) lunch, with at least one egg, exactly two hours before working out; 2) gym at three o’clock in the afternoon; 3) a twenty-minute run on the same treadmill, second from left, because for some reason I ran fastest on that one.

I had found my particular brand of power, my particular kind of strength, not in spite of illness but with it built into me like any other vital organ or important bone. This was my malrotated, misshapen body, and I came to love it in ways I could not after all of those pesky cardiac ablations and coming-of-age colonoscopies.

“. . . already in Italy,” I texted my boyfriend from Boston in February 2020. It was six in the morning, pitch black outside. No one in the apartment was awake, and no one would be for quite some time.

“That new virus,” I added.

“I’ll be careful.”

“You have to wash your hands for at least 20 seconds. To the Birthday Song.”

“Okay.”

“And maybe stay out of that dining hall.”

“Anna, I have to eat somehow.”

I skipped the gym that day, and the next, and the next. All of the physical dysfunctions I cherished not as individual maladies but as functional parts of a whole body became horribly distinct once again—the heart issues, the digestive problems. And if a deadly blood-clotting virus collided with these persistent problems of mine, what would happen?

Perhaps it was best not to know.

Running is not an isolated activity—well, not the way I learned to run at least. So when gym facilities shut down, my body shut down with them. It stiffened and softened and certainly did not exercise. Worse, I became hyper-cognizant of my health in searching for virus both around and in myself. What is this headache, this deep and painful cough? My toes look red; isn’t that a symptom? And what does shortness of breath even feel like anyway?

Six months, two moves, and a new job later, I found myself alone in a small apartment outside of Princeton, New Jersey with ample time to reflect on the emotional and bodily trauma of the past year. The same virus that had upended my life in 2020 would not go away in 2021.

It was I who would have to adjust.

The complex had its own gym, but I would not use it. I bought a video game that forced me to do squats and jog in place; that lasted three weeks. In the end, only the outdoors was left—not magnificent trails or elaborate outdoor tracks but the unexciting suburbs of Plainsboro.

Outdoor running, I found out, is quite different from indoor running. Still, the kinds of superstitions that got me to and through the gym materialized once again: a run at 3 p.m., three times a week along one route exactly, in the same ratty black sweatpants and dark gray fleece vest I wore the last time.

At the start of this new but familiar project, my body caused a scene. It had become extraordinarily comfortable with inactivity, accustomed to the dull but prolonged aches of the given day. Imagine its shock when all of a sudden there I was, with such audacity, pushing it to at least the stop sign down the street, to at least that person’s driveway, to at least the golf course beyond the stoplight. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes straight. One, two, three point one and a half miles nonstop. Eventually, my body and its constituent parts would thank me—slow and steady, over weeks, just like they had in the past.

The suburbs disappeared behind me as I started home, a bona fide 5k runner. But while the sun begins to set on our present crisis, I find myself with an interesting choice: the treadmill, second from left, because I ran fastest on that one, or some anonymous house with aging blue shutters and a bright red door.