For many years, I have struggled to communicate why music
and running are so similar to me. I have understanding for any person who looks
at a symphony full of tuxedo wearing trained prodigies and fails to see why I compare
them to dirt covered runners. But this past week presented me with the perfect
parallel to communicate why these two VERY different groups are actually quite
similar.
The first time I played the trombone excerpt from Mahlers’ 5th,
I cried. I played it in the safety of the basement of my mother’s house while preparing
for an audition when I was 16. When I played it again at a college interview,
though I did not cry, the same emotion bubbled in my chest.
When I was 21 years old, I had a cancer scare that challenged
my whole world view. I was in college, earning a degree in music performance
and two weeks after my initial diagnosis, I played the Barnes Third symphony
for Wind Band, written to honor his son who died of cancer. I did not have a
car at the time and rode my bike to rehearsal three hours after hearing a
doctor tell me they needed extra tests to determine or strike down the
prognosis they feared. I crashed my bike, cosmetically damaging my instrument, 20
minutes before my first read through of a piece that lives in my veins to this
day.
The night we played that piece in concert, I was silent and counting
rests for much of the actual run time of music. Every beat counted
was intense and important because when the Trombones entered in the third
movement, my musical role was that of the hand of God, telling a father, “you have
lost your son.”
I was waiting for my test results the moment I played that phrase’s
beginning note. I will forever remember how every second of that performance felt.
The air into my mouthpiece and past my lips, the muscles flexing in my embouchure
and the sound my horn emitted. The fourth movement ended beautifully, for which I was thankful.
This weekend, I watched a man recover from muscle spasms and
cramps, stand up and keep going. I watched a dear friend chase a sub-24 hour
goal, fail, but make the most of every second of every mile. I watched my
beloved partner listen to her body and decide to choose joy over pain when
deciding to drop from the 100 mile distance. I met and paced a compete stranger
to a goal that only months ago had been a phantasm of her imagination.
The weekend I played that symphony freed my soul from fear
that my brain was no where near embracing. This weekend, amid pandemic and
personal hell, I was reminded that the fourth movement will always be played,
and will always be beautiful.
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