Sunday Frolic
This morning began at 4 AM when my daughter came into my room, insisting that she needed snuggles (“Mama, me need suggles”). Even with us falling back from daylight savings time, it felt unnecessarily early. By the time my husband came to swap me out, I had already blown far past my alarm and, for a brief moment, I considered breaking my daily running streak and crawling back into bed. I’m so glad I didn’t.
Today’s run was MAGIC. I felt free. I felt playful. I felt alive. I had come up to meet with the mountain, and the mountain came to meet with me in return. I was my whole self again.
That has been my greatest discovery in this great experiment with running. There was a time in my life when everything revolved around running. All I really cared about was was setting myself up for the next workout, the next race. I was young, and running was my vehicle to self-actualization. I ran varsity cross country all four years of high school, three years for track. The fourth year I ditched track for marathon training. I was burnt out from the pressure, the standard that I held myself to. But running still called. So I trained to run in a distance where the mile splits were incomparable to the times I used to run. I opted to play a game where the rules were entirely different.
Eventually, the running petered out altogether. I told myself I was busy with college, with dating, with marriage, with children. And the times that I dared venturing out I came back more frustrated than I was before I left. I still lived in my hometown. I was running all the same streets. I couldn’t help but mentally run the math, calculating mile splits against my will. I was a prisoner to times I had run nearly a decade prior, and it sucked all the life out of running. So I let it go.
I’ve done other things in the meantime. Single stroller walks. Double stroller walks. Yoga. Horseback riding. Even one sprint triathlon, which gave me the motivation to finally learn how to swim some semblance of the freestyle stroke. But more than anything, I’ve been hiking. For the last few years, a friend of mine and I woke up for a 5:30 AM hike three times per week. Rain, shine, sleet, snow, early heat, pitch black darkness, it did not matter. We didn’t bother with headlamps. Half the time we rolled out of bed and hiked in our pajamas. Most days we went about three miles, though we didn’t keep track at the time. Some days we went much further, exploring summits or back mountain loops. One time we got lost to the background song of avalanche canons echoing on the canyon walls. Regardless, we went as we were, with no preconceived notions of what the hike should or should not be. And right there on our hikes, somewhere between our chatter and yapping, something inside me healed. By the time the mornings hikes had run their course, I was ready to run again.
Today felt like a cumulation of all those years. The years of running. The years of trying to salvage it. The years of giving up, of redirecting, of trying to find myself in other things. But today I got to tap back into that deepest part of me that I’ve yearned for. The part of me who takes leaping pictures in the mountains. Who relishes in the satisfying crunch of fallen leaves. Who stops to play, to take in the absurd wonder of it all.
One of high school me’s favorite activities was trying to “convert” (her language, not mine) people to running. Every time she met someone new, she invited them to come run track or cross country. She actually had a fairly decent success rate, which I still find impressive. Something she did often was explain the path into running:
The first month of running every day sucks. There’s no way around it. The first month is always awful. After that, you’ll have a month where running simply feels neutral. And by the third month? The third month is when it starts to feel GOOD. It’s a long time building, but the other side of it is so good that it’s really, really worth it.
I’ve felt her calling to me lately in several areas. We have some unfinished business. We’ve taken on a couple of projects together lately, but so far my favorite thought about her is imagining how thrilled she would be to discover that it was her who later reconverted herself back into running. She would be delighted. Absolutely delighted.
I still stand by the two-month on-ramp to enjoyable running. Building a base is frustrating business no matter how you spin it. But today gave me a peek into why I’m doing this at all. I’m running because it makes me more me. And regardless of how long it takes to be as strong of a runner as I would like, getting to have my whole self for company along the way—both on and off the trail—is worth every step.
