Seven months into the pandemic and I’m close to cresting one of my favorite hills in a beautiful park full of fall color when “Hurricane” from the Hamilton soundtrack starts playing in my headphones.
It’s been a rough couple of days, full of bad news and worse sleep, and I feel my emotions bubbling up with the opening piano chords of the song. I grab those feelings and use them to fuel my charge up to the hill’s peak. As the lyrics kick in, it occurs to me that my runs feel like the eye of a hurricane in these pandemic days.
Fear, anxiety, and uncertainty swirl around me every day: Will one of us contract the virus today? How will we keep everyone safe? Are we making the right decisions for ourselves and our community about school, activities, and work? But despite this continuous eddy of existential chaos in my head, when I’m out for a run, “there is quiet, for just a moment” and sometimes even “a yellow sky”.
It’s not immediate, this quiet. I’m often propelled out the door by some overwhelming feeling of anxiety or helplessness, and it takes a good warm-up before I am able to replace those feelings with a focus on my feet hitting the trail or the breeze on my face. The process is accelerated if there’s a technical component to that day’s run (e.g. Pick Ups or Tempo), but regardless, after that first mile, my head is clear and my heart is lighter. It’s pure joy that carries me through the day.
On this day, though, Day 200 of My Pandemic Life, the tears I’ve been holding back for months are unleashing themselves at this lyric “And when my prayers to God were met with indifference, I picked up a pen. I wrote my own deliverance.”
Suddenly, in this crisp fall day, I’m careening downhill, the scenery a blur as I’m picking up speed and salty tears are carving paths down my flushed cheeks. The levee that my running usually creates is being washed out by emotional storm surge.
I keep running, my prescribed 3 mile “easy” run transforms into 7 miles of pounding the terrain beneath my feet, as I picture the trail of sweat and tears I’m leaving in my jagged wake. “Leaving” in my wake. It dawns on me that, as I run hard and cry harder, I’m jettisoning these feelings of grief and hopelessness, and that affords me more space to pick up gratitude.
I CAN do this: My legs pump and my lungs inflate, my body is a fully functioning machine. I GET to do this: I have the time and the privilege to run 7 miles in a safe park with fresh air and sunshine. I WILL run “my way out” of this pandemic, over the flotsam and jetsam, carrying more of the good stuff with me through to the other side of this hurricane.
Read more Seven Months into the Pandemic essays.
Crying can sometimes be so cleansing. Great ending!
I so needed to read this this morning. Thank you!
I find myself crying or just emotionally bubbling over on many runs lately when I used to not. I think it’s just the overflow of the stress we are living in can finally break free on my runs. Thanks for sharing. So true!
Great analogy—I can fully appreciate the Hamilton reference and also the gratitude for what the run gives you. I had one of those moments earlier in the pandemic on my bike and was flooded with emotion and gratitude. I was riding by a hospital where I had to go for middle of the night ER visit that at the time felt horrible (serious gash above my eye leaving a scar) but was a week before the pandemic really hit us and how fortunate I was that my fainting spell wasn’t more serious (an inch from taking out my eye) or that it hadn’t happened as the ER was flooded with sick patients. Instead I have a scar but a healthy body that propelled me up the big hill the hospital sits on. Thank you for this writing and moment to remember!
This is wonderful!!! So proud to know you.