http://www.flickr.com/photos/wheatland/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
I was raised to believe I could keep bad things from happening to me, as a woman, if I just followed certain rules.
The women in my life, trying, no doubt, to protect me, taught me these rules. When a woman was abducted and killed while leaving a nighttime party in a miniskirt, I was taught not to leave parties alone and not to wear miniskirts. When a woman was raped while jogging in the park at dusk, they told me not to jog in the park at dusk.
As I grew up, I learned to be nervous in the outside world. If something happened to me, out there, it would be because I had let down my guard, because I had broken a rule, because I had not had my keys out quickly enough or hadn’t crossed the street when a suspicious man started walking behind me. It would be my fault.
The funny (or not-so-funny?) thing is that the worst things usually happened to me at home. No one gave me rules to handle those eventualities, as a child or as an adult. The outside world was supposed to be the place where it was the most dangerous for me to be a woman, alone, and, yet, it is invariably at home where I have felt the most alone and the least safe.
I have been a runner, off and on, for almost ten years. One of the major obstacles to my developing a consistent running practice has been that, in my mind, there were only certain hours of the day that were safe for me to run, outside, alone. Very early morning, evening, and nighttime were too dangerous. I could prevent violence against my person by avoiding running during those times. If I ran during those times and I was accosted or raped, it would not be because a criminal attacked me, but because I had been a woman, outside, alone.
Staying inside at dawn and dusk did not prevent me from being sexually harassed by a group of men in broad daylight in the middle of a farmer’s market while pushing a baby in a stroller, or being loudly threatened by a big angry guy over a parking space on my way to an early dinner in Hayes Valley. The rules did prevent me from running during the moments I actually had time to run — early morning and late evening, when the streets were deserted and the sky was dark.
Yesterday, I set my alarm for 5:30 AM and went for my very first predawn run. I came over the stairs at Great Highway when it was still completely dark and the street was so hushed that I could hear everything: a Safeway big rig idling, lonely, almost a mile down the road, the shushing of ocean waves, my new running shoes scraping on sandy asphalt.
I had never seen the ocean, at night, alone. The water was black and pale gray, melancholy. The predawn sky was overcast. Bonfires dotted the bleak sand. Yellow streetlamps made circles of greasy light. Some people slept in their cars. No one hurt me.
Six months ago, I couldn’t walk without pain. Yesterday morning, I ran four miles in the dark. It was safe. It was good.
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