My Feet On the Ground

I started running again. It’s fall, it’s cool and it’s getting dark early. The days of long cycles are almost gone and the truth is if I don’t have a goal, I won’t do anything. I don’t love running much. I have never loved it or really liked it at all to be truthful. Upon being encouraged by Cate, I signed up for a run in the spring and now I guess I’m prepping for a 10k. I took my old dog out with me today and we both slowly and just a little bit painfully squeezed out 4k. But that’s what it’s like at our age. Everything is a little slower and a little more painful. It would be so easy to just let it all go and just stop trying. That’s what I was thinking about as I ran, feeling that familiar uncomfortable burn in my chest and the weight of my legs as I willed them to move. “Why am I doing this?”

“Why AM I doing this? Why Why Why Why” the rhythm of my feet in time to the question. It’s not because I will win any races. I am no performance athlete. I am not doing it to change my body in any profound way. I don’t have to do it to maintain anything, I walk enough to meet all the minimum standards of movement for health. I’m trying to get hold of what is going on with me these last months, some seriously profound shift in who I am is bubbling up. Somehow this choice to run again is part of it.

About a year ago, the final chapter of the second book of my life trilogy, if you will, was coming to a tragic end. I clung to movement to ground my grief. I would get up and walk or stretch of lie on the floor in Shavasana weeping and tending to my body, my literal heart, holding pieces together with remembering I was still a whole physical being, if not a whole emotional one. I tried running a few times in the spring but each run left me with a feeling of being broken somewhere, like my body was a minefield and I made a wrong step. I stuck to the bicycle. The rhythm of my legs going round and round was more tolerable to me in more than just my body. Cycling has more range of experience. I could be gradual about it ramping up and down in the intensity based on the way a hill rolled. They physics of cycling is just kinder in all the ways than running. I needed kindness.

I was learning to live alone, preparing to live totally alone as my youngest child made her way through grade 12 and out the door to her adult life. There was relief in it, and frustration, and an exhaustion that pulled me down flat so much of the time. I guess that’s depression, to be technical, a deep nearly unreachable grief. I actually can’t run from that, as much as I have said so in another blog of mine. This was a grief about myself and I couldn’t escape. Running pressed buttons that seemed to make it worse.

Then the summer happened and the ridiculous intensity of that cycling trip to Newfoundland. Cate wrote about it here, using the experience to explore the idea of Grit. Upon reflection, that trip loomed up, surprised me and broke something else. It wasn’t the kind of breaking that the attempts at running were creating. It was more like it broke me open and exposed the seeds of what was next. The intense physicality and emotional strain of that trip (there was some weeping in a ditch) reminded me I was alive in ways I did not expect. It reminded me I wanted more life and I wasn’t settled and I wasn’t done and whatever the heck was happening wasn’t quite right either. After that trip, the physicality of my life became more joyful, even as it was trying. I realized that my sense of internal brokenness had abated and my body synced up differently. I still felt pain and fatigue but I no longer felt wounded.

When I did the TriAdventure weekend in August, I decided to run the loop once (about 4.3k) and it was not horrible at all. I ran another time up north, no hills, and that wasn’t gross either. Then there was today.

It’s seems I can’t run with a broken heart. When I think of my life and with whom I have run and why, that makes complete sense to me. It’s just one of those weird mind body expressions that I have learned to pay attention to. Here I am, in the first chapter of the third book in the trilogy. I don’t know how long this book will be or whether there will be one of those really meaningful epilogues at the end. Yet I do know that I have found my way to being more profoundly embodied than I was before, with more connections and more attention paid to what that means. Moving through to menopause ups the ante even more, as I drop into the netherworld of societal location that is the post-fertile woman. Lots of attention is being paid in the media these days to this process. Maybe Gen X can make a mark after all as we question the significance of our state change. Perhaps it IS significant, this emergent Crone in running shoes who is not clinging to youth but rather embodying something else.

So ya, I’m running again and it’s kind of okay. My heart pounds but it feels in one piece now. I’m on my own but embedded in community and other people’s lives in the best ways. I’m just getting started, it seems. Watch out :).