The Night I Don’t Train
Thursday is the empty day of my week. On my training sheet it says rest, a single word in a column where every other day stacks up miles and minutes at threshold pace. I come home, my shoes stay by the door with the laces still knotted from Tuesday’s run, and for the first hour I drift around the kitchen with the itch of someone who left a job half done. My legs feel heavy with a fatigue I didn’t earn today. My hands go looking for my phone to check tomorrow morning’s forecast.
It took me years to understand that the column with one word in it is training too: the body adapts in the hours when I ask nothing of it, and the muscles rebuild while I’m convinced I’m wasting time. Knowing that isn’t enough. I need somewhere to put my head, something that holds my attention without spending my legs.
For a few winters now, that somewhere has opened onto the wide Montana horizon.
I switch off the overhead light, leave only the lamp above the couch on, and let the screen open up a valley.
An Atlas of Wide Open Spaces
Taylor Sheridan’s shows almost always begin with a landscape, and I’ve learned to watch them the way you study a map before a trip. Yellowstone took me into the valleys of Montana, where the grass bends under a wind that comes from very far away and the mountains close off the view like the walls of an enormous room. With 1883 I went back nearly a century and a half, trailing a wagon train out of Fort Worth, Texas, across the Great Plains: miles of prairie on foot and on horseback, with Elsa Dutton’s voice narrating the journey as she makes it. In 1923 the family is back in Montana, in the years when the land has to be defended against drought and against anyone who wants it for themselves.
Then the map widens. Landman heads down to West Texas, into the oil fields around Midland, a flatland where the horizon is broken only by drilling rigs and the dust kicked up by trucks. Tulsa King takes a New York mobster, Dwight Manfredi, played by Sylvester Stallone, lets him out after twenty-five years in prison and ships him off to Oklahoma, where he knows no one and has to build a new crew from scratch. The second season of Lioness was shot in Texas landscapes. The Madison, a standalone series with a story all its own, returns to Montana along the Madison River valley. Dutton Ranch, which Chad Feehan built on characters created by Sheridan and John Linson, plants Beth and Rip on a ranch in South Texas.
Watching these distances from the couch, I realize I measure them with my body. I work out how many hours it would take to cross that prairie on foot, how much breath you’d need to climb one of those pine-covered slopes under an August sun. It’s a runner’s distortion: every space becomes a possible route, every horizon a distance to cover. In Sheridan’s country, bodies work from dawn to dark, stay in the saddle as long as their backs hold out, move herds, wait for rain. Nobody wanders through it to admire the view.
All that vastness has a precise job in the story. The bigger the space, the smaller the person inside it looks, and the more whatever they manage to do there weighs.
Characters Who Don’t Back Down
Sheridan invents and writes characters who stay on their feet. Faced with a loss, or with land that gives back little of what’s put into it, their first instinct is to hold their ground. Dwight Manfredi walks out of prison after a quarter century and, instead of retiring, gets back to work in a city he doesn’t know. Tommy Norris, the landman whose weathered face belongs to Billy Bob Thornton, negotiates oil leases in territory where every deal has a price.
I know that stubbornness. I meet it again around mile 22 of a marathon, when the race has become a matter of the mind and the body keeps going because someone, somewhere inside, has decided it will. Sheridan blows it up to a larger scale and dresses it in dust and leather, but the core stays the same: determination as a physical act before it’s an idea.
Sheridan’s Women
And yet, if I had to say who stays with me when the credits roll, it wouldn’t be a man.
It would be Beth Dutton, John’s daughter, whom Kelly Reilly arms with a tongue that cuts before the other person has finished the sentence. Beth is a gifted financier, and she uses her intelligence the way the men on the ranch use their hands. In Dutton Ranch I find her in Texas, running the business and the books of the new property, while Rip — Cole Hauser, at her side for as long as anyone can remember — handles the cattle. The division of labor is spelled out, and she takes her half without asking anyone for it.
Across from Beth, in South Texas, stands Beulah Jackson, who runs a large ranch of her own, and to whom Annette Bening gives a calm more unsettling than any loud, overbearing voice. Two women at the head of businesses made of land and animals, sizing each other up as equals.
Cara Dutton, in 1923, has Helen Mirren’s face and the straight back of a woman holding a family together through the drought years. With her husband Jacob she raises their nephews as her own children, and she defends that chosen motherhood with the same hardness you’d use to guard a border.
Lioness takes this strength off the ranch and into a military program inspired by a real unit of women soldiers that the US military once put together. Joe, the CIA officer played by Zoe Saldana, runs operations in the field. Cruz, a Marine, is recruited into the program and brings with her a body trained not to give in. Above them sits Kaitlyn Meade, the senior official Nicole Kidman plays with a coldness calibrated to the last degree. A chain of command designed for men, which these women bend to their own purposes.
Stacy Clyburn, the New York matriarch Michelle Pfeiffer plays beautifully in The Madison, is the quietest of them all. Behind her lies a marriage closing in on fifty years, daughters and grandchildren, and the house in Montana has always been, above all, her husband’s refuge. At some point she decides to load everyone up and take them out there, into the Madison River valley. Her strength lies in a single move: taking the whole family and relocating it to a place she has only ever watched from a distance, as something foreign.
Even in oil-country Texas, where the stage seems to belong entirely to Thornton, Ali Larter as Angela Norris and Demi Moore as Cami Miller hold the screen without fading into the backdrop.
Critics are split on how these women are written, and some find them drawn with too hard a line, cut to the same codes of strength as their men. To me, that hardness is the point. In a genre that for a century left the toil and the land to cowboys, Sheridan gives women the same weight inside the landscape, and the landscape takes them just as seriously.
Each of them occupies the space in front of her with the ease of someone who never imagined she had to ask for it, knowing she holds a very precise role within it.
Resting While Others Toil
When the episode ends on Thursday night, I notice something that has more to do with running than I’d have guessed. For an hour I watched people work in the rain and stake everything on a patch of land, and my body never moved. And yet something did. My breathing lengthened over the prairie shots and shortened during the Lioness operations; my hands closed into fists whenever Beth walked into a room. Watching other people’s effort keeps the circuit of my own switched on, without making me pay for it with my legs.
There’s a particular pleasure in this, a close cousin of what I feel when I follow someone’s race from home, refreshing a page of split times in the middle of the night. Fiction makes the involvement freer. No times to check, no worrying about someone I know. What’s left is determination, isolated and projected large, against backdrops so vast they make it look inevitable.
For years I treated rest day as a concession, something I had to justify to myself and to the plan. Sheridan’s women left me with a different idea, and the western has little to do with it. Each of them, in her own way, takes a place without waiting for someone to hand it to her. Seen from this couch, rest is a space to claim the same way, without asking anyone whether it’s allowed, and the only permission I was missing was my own.
On Friday I head out early. The route is the usual one, the park and then the road along the fields. In the first couple of miles, though, my stride opens up more than usual, as if my legs had spent the night measuring prairies.