Four months ago I was running 13-15 miles on Mondays, 17 miles each on Wednesday and Thursday, 10-12 on Friday, and 4-8 over the weekend.
Yesterday I got out of breath because I was chopping avocado and talking at the same time.
The body, friends, has its epochs. Health, strength, and capability shift like meteorological events. Some people live in broad, stable valleys where the weather only barely nudges its established patterns; some live in a ditch at the bottom of the canyon where every day there’s another drought or flood, whatever the mercurial canyon deity serves up with a side of piss, plus an unpredictable resident scorpion named Paco.
Several people (runners) have asked me whether I’m going crazy not being able to run (with clearly visible, glistening terror in their eyes). I feel moved to make them an ice tea, give them a heartening shoulder-squeeze like a throw-back track coach, sit them down and remind them to breathe. But all that would make me wheeze.
I have no idea why I’m not climbing the walls. All I know is I can’t run right now. If I tried, it would not be enjoyable, so I don’t want to.
As for the question of whether I am still a runner:
There’s a now-defunct podcast called the SOUP (Science of Ultra Podcast) that I used to listen to while running. The host is a science-based, buddhist-leaning, thorough-minded distance runner with a talent for summary. On one episode, he brought up the very real, problematic trend in which distance runners glorify pain, as though it were what they’re working towards. The “powering through” mentality can be useful, but letting it take over is a sorry move.
Then the podcast host said something that rang a large, clanging bell in my mind. It was something to the effect of “Ultra runners love to do more, go farther, work harder. But that is not actually the hard part for people like that. You want to do something hard? Try resting.”
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When I’m not running 60 miles per week, I notice things, like all the extra yarn I have (I had) lying around; like the inappropriately sized and shaped container for all the tupperware lids (ONLY TOOK ME ELEVEN YEARS TO SOLVE); like the fact that it makes me feel A THOUSAND PERCENT GREAT when I wipe down every last coffee ground from the espresso-machine stand.
When I have to be sitting for most of the day because my lungs are under attack by an apparently concussed immune system which nonetheless retains an impressive degree of militancy, I watch my hands travel the miles through yards of yarn. Colors wound into balls are the new scenery going by. Fiber textures—the nubbles, the braids, the spirals— are the new path or road. And I mean “new” like “forty is the new thirty”, not “new” like “might as well start thinking about green burial versus that new mushroom compost thing.”
When I wonder why it is (besides the steroids deployed against that wayward immune system of mine) that I don’t feel panicked about my relative lump-hood, the 6-8 hours a day spent reclining on a bed indoors while my children and husband and friends and family churn through their summer lives outside by lakes or at work in the sky or wherever it is regular people go— I’ve forgotten by now— I look at the yarns spread across my convalescence mattress and I think something like here is a small world. And then I think, hey now, settle down, that’s size-ist.
Consider a chipmunk. Put it next to a John Deere 6380 and it’s an afterthought. But if you’re an average-sized ant, the same chipmunk is a monster— roughly 125,000 times your size. This all has me thinking that the entire concept of “size” is no more than a way to compare.
To what end are we comparing ants and chipmunks? What, pray tell, is the utility of comparing miles of running trail to yards of knitting yarn?
There is one use for it, as I see it, which is the nerd-value an attempt at one-to-one conversion yields. This is how that goes: one mile is 1760 yards. One large ball of yarn is approximately 400 yards, so 4.4 balls of yarn are about one mile. Since you’re aching to know, I’ve gone at least two miles this week in yarn, through colors that mirror, and are made of, some larger landscape I may not be able to understand, but can appreciate.
That’s where the utility of comparison and analogy ebb, and we get dropped off tired but content at one last take on miles versus yards: they are apples and oranges.
And everyone knows the best thing to do with apples, and oranges, is eat them.
'Want to do something hard? Try resting' --OMG, nailed it : ]
Healing is hard work, and yarn is pretty.