Slow and Steady

There’s a section of the Honolulu Marathon where you run along a highway. It is long and monotonous. You take the road out, away from the city, and into a little neighborhood where one kind soul has a big bowl of gummy bears and another has a carton of pretzels. You think to yourself, who would eat pretzels during a race, and the answer is you. The crunch revives you as you prepare to leave the neighborhood and head down the highway again, back toward the finish. If you are slow, like I am, the sun has risen by now, and it beats down as you trudge along miles 18 to 21, the part of any race where you start to feel delirious. You sing one foot, two foot, one foot, two foot, over and over again in your head just to keep yourself moving forward. 

My husband, who ran this race with me, and who had run it already four times before, warned me not to stop and walk during this stretch. If you stop running here, he told me, it will feel impossible to start again. So I keep running, slower than I can walk, but still technically running. My husband also warned me about the hill at mile 24. The race goes back up the side of Diamond Head Crater, and you have to do a full mile straight uphill on legs that have lost all structure. The crowd cheers you on. Drums play. But still, it’s brutal. I take it faster than any mile since the first half of the race just to have it over with. By the time I reach the finish line, I’m genuinely worried I’ve somehow shredded all the muscle fibers in my quadriceps. My thighs are chaffed and bleeding. Later, back at the hotel, I devour a giant bag of peanut M&Ms and sleep like I’ve slipped into a coma. 

* * *

Yesterday, I went for my first run since the baby was born. I remember this same run after the birth of my first child—the dissonance of a mind that feels ready and a body that is far from it. My legs were like bricks on that run. I had a sharp pain way up inside me like a hot cattle prod zapping somewhere behind my cervix with every step. It was unpleasant. This time went a little better. No sharp pain, just dull, heavy legs. It was nice to be moving my body in that way again, though. 

You hear a lot about getting your body back after pregnancy, which is an obnoxious idea that willfully ignores the many ways in which pregnancy and childbirth irreparably change your body. There is no returning to your pre-pregnancy state. That person doesn’t exist anymore. But I find the often encountered vocal and vehement rejection of this idea to be equally tedious. What if the body you want back is one that can freely and easily run? That doesn’t feel like too much to ask, or like a shameful acquiescence to the patriarchy. I can’t speak to other types of fitness, but I find it deeply unfair that it takes so long to build up running fitness, and yet you lose it so quickly when you stop running. When you are not doing it well, running is such a vulnerable experience. You jiggle and you pour sweat and you slog along huffing and puffing and looking like you might collapse at any moment. I used to coach a Cancer to 5k program and I would remind the runners in the group that only they knew how far they had run when they were struggling. The person passing on the sidewalk, or speeding by in their car doesn’t know if you are on your first quarter mile, or if you’re suffering through mile 10. Nobody knows that I gave birth only seven weeks ago as I shuffle along, breaking every couple of minutes to walk and catch my breath. Nobody knows that my pre-pregnancy body was one of nearly constant pain and discomfort, plagued with endometriosis and adenomyosis. It is not a body I want back. 

My writing lately is a bit like my running—I am out of practice and taking it slow. It feels vulnerable and a little embarrassing. I have started a thing where I write down something I see in my immediate vicinity and go from there, writing whatever comes next without any editing. I do this for a full minute and see what comes from it. For the most part, it’s nonsensical garbage, but perhaps from the clutter I’ll be able to extract something good, something useful. 

Here is a recent example of this practice:

the dog rests 

by the back door sun

soaked on a spring morning 

wet grass against

my soles my soul

is tired years marked with

streaks of silver

I tell my son

hair turns gray

when it dies and he wonders

does the head die

first before the rest of the body

like a flower whose petals

have shriveled on the green stalk

in the garden

I pinch the wilted blossom

between my fingers and

leave it to rot

* * *

I remember when I crossed the finish line of the Honolulu Marathon, I felt as though I had given everything I had to that race. I could not have run any faster. I could not have pushed myself any harder. But in the days that followed, I began to wonder: what if I had timed my water breaks differently? What if I had taken my shot block earlier or later than I did? What if I hadn’t eaten those pretzels? Did those pretzels dry me out and slow me down? If I ran it again, could I do better? It’s the what-ifs that keep runners running. 

My incredible friend, Judy has taken my chapbook Mother Nature and set it in motion. In a few weeks, she and a group of fellow dancers will perform movement pieces inspired by the poems and short prose in this collection. I was so proud of Mother Nature when I published it. Spanning three years of work, it captures my experience of pregnancy, early motherhood, and raising a toddler during the pandemic. I love all the pieces I included in it and I am especially proud of how I structured the collection. It is raw and honest and a great example of the kind of writing I want to do. And yet, when I went in to record myself reading the pieces that will be used in the performance, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I would change now. Lines that I would go back and fix. Things I would add or remove. Emotions and experiences that in retrospect I might not share as openly. I can always make these changes if I use any of these pieces in future collections, but for this performance, what’s done is done. And really what good would it do to fiddle with those pieces now, three years removed from when the last one was written? I can’t go back and retroactively inhabit that experience in the same way I lived it at the time. I can’t be a first-time mother to a newborn again. I can’t access the specific desperation and worry I felt in the spring of 2020. I wrote what I wrote knowing in part that I needed to preserve how I felt at the time because I would never be able to precisely capture it again. I will never be able to get that body back. That race is over. I gave it everything I had.

Thank you for reading Other Thoughts. This post is public so feel free to share it.

The following poem comes from my chapbook, Mother Nature, and will be included in the Mother Nature movement performance on Saturday, June 3rd. If you live in Baltimore and would like to come see the show and support independent artists (and help us raise funds for Baltimore’s Sharebaby), check out the flyer at the bottom of this newsletter.