Every day but Sunday, for an hour each session, Stig Ahlin ran. Altogether he went between forty-five and fifty miles per week. It wasn’t as if he took a day of rest because of his religious beliefs. He didn’t have any. There were fewer staff around on Sundays, so there was no one to take him to the gym and watch him while he ran.
He knew he should be grateful. It was an almost bafflingly generous privilege that they opened his door an hour earlier than anyone else’s, just so he could run. He also knew that it was a privilege that could be taken away at any time. And then he would have to settle for running during exercise time, along with everyone else, the people he shared his life with. The common wife killers, rapists, and whore fuckers. The ones who would get on the treadmill and walk slowly for an hour, just to keep him from using it. The ones who shouldn’t even be there. They were the ones who had kicked the weight racks until it was decreed that free weights would no longer be allowed at prison gyms. Who grabbed a handle on one of the machines and wound it aimlessly in different directions before letting go. Who would shove a pencil into the mechanism, to break it, just so he couldn’t run.
For the first few years, Stig Ahlin had been assigned to run in the exercise yard. The sex crimes isolation unit’s yard was forty-five by sixty-five yards. He had run around and around, leaning slightly inward, with those unbearable fools standing and walking in the center, staring until their eyes bulged out of their skulls. He had tired them out. His hamster-wheel circus made them dizzy and the unit director had decided he could have an hour, not all on his own, of course, but almost.
Now he was allowed to work out across the yard, in the gym. The guards were all the same — sitting on a chair, reading the paper and checking their phones as if waiting for an important message.
It was never quiet. The HVAC system hummed. The treadmill rumbled. Stig landed with his whole weight. Sometimes he increased the incline to keep from running into the handles in front of him. The guard’s radio squeaked and growled.
Stig had no music; he didn’t do interval training. He just ran as fast as he could until he could taste iron. He fixed his eyes on the wall in front of him. For the first few years there had been a mirror there. It had vanished along with all the free weights. All that was left was the rectangle of darker paint that showed where it had been.
The room thundered when Stig Ahlin ran. And each booming step on the rubber belt was a reminder of what it wasn’t, what it could never be.
Over 4,700 days without the sounds of rubber soles on gravel, grass, asphalt or sand, moss, dirt, or rock. Hour upon hour without his own time or control of his own movements. The belt relentlessly moved his feet back, forcing his muscles to counter with forward motion.
The belt could be angled upward, and he could regulate its speed himself. But there was nothing he could do to get the sensation of truly running. It was impossible to produce, even as a distant mirage. The sound got in the way.
Still he ran. He ran because they let him, but also because he didn’t have to. And for one minute — he never knew ahead of time when it would happen — the sound might disappear, into the pain of aching muscles, when his brain let go out of exhaustion. Then everything went silent. Then his brain could rest.
He ran almost every morning. Every evening at quarter to eight, his door was locked from the outside.
The days went by. That was about it.