Body-ody-ody-ody
Running through mental and physical changes
One of the hardest things we do with any practice is to change with it. If we have a good groove with something, if it’s coming easy, it can be so hard to bounce back when something comes up to throw us off. What we tend to focus on is how easy it used to be, and how hard it seems now. That type of nostalgia is killer to any practice.
I’ve been through several major changes with running in my life, but one long ago, and another one very present come to the fore when I think about managing change. These times in my life require that I not look at the runner I have been, but at the runner I could be, right at the very moment, with the resources I have. That’s easy to write, but anyone who’s tried to keep up a practice through change knows how hard it is to do.
The first one for me was when I walked away from competition running. With one phone call to my college coach, I lost the rhythm that had structured my days and years for 12 out of the 19 years of my life. I lost the support of a team who all had the same focus as I did. And I was afraid that I would lose the identity I still loved: being a runner.
I had to choose: would this be the end of running for me, or was it just the end of competition? I chose to end competition, and I learned how to run with people who didn’t have the focus I had, but did have the love, even if it looked and expressed differently from the way I had always experienced it.
That first year, I don’t think I ran more than 2 miles at a single stretch, but what I did do was learn how to be a great runner who didn’t need time trials or intervals or race times to think of herself as “great”. Instead, I learned how to value myself, and my efforts for the day, and to be interested in how other people run. Not just the competitive athletes, but the people who hit the roads and the parks every day for their health, for the camaraderie, and, yes, sometimes for the challenges of racing. It was a big learning curve for me; maybe the biggest one. It took me about three years to really say goodbye to racing, and I never have really looked back. I’m done with that life.
That being said, I’ve just been through another big change: the birth of my second and final child and the end of breastfeeding her. She stopped breastfeeding abruptly, and I wasn’t ready for it, but I’ve worked through my feelings with the help of some therapy, and I’m ready to try to figure out what my body is and the runner I am in it after 4.5 years of gestating, laboring for, and breastfeeding two children in succession.
So I’ve entered a race. I ran one last year for fun, but now it’s just me: no baby to feed before or after. I’m in much better shape now due to some major changes I’ve made in my posture, and I think I might be ready to race a little race. The one I’ve signed up for is the Pasadena Trail Run on October 21st, and I’m both excited and terrified. I don’t know the runner I am in this new stage of my life, and I’ve never raced a trail run. I could very well be much slower, or I could get hurt. But here I go: looking forward.
Because what I know through all the changes I’ve run through is that I’ll never be the person I was or the runner I used to be before those changes came. The only person any of us can be is the we are now, and the only way through change is to go forward. So value who you are now, not who you might have been.
I’m getting out there on some start line on some hill in Pasadena in a couple of weeks. With me will be scars from surgeries, injuries, and years of training. But that’s the runner I am now, today, C-section and VBAC and foot surgeries and all. So whoever you are today, the way forward is to accept that person. So focus up, and for today, remember: go run.
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Right On! Accepting oneself “as is”. What a relief!