Running Ruminations

Hard to believe that we’ve passed a year of (waves hands frantically) this now, but here we are. 

Looking back on my entries over the past year, my first mention of COVID was on 3/11/21, in a post about a book report and a race entry giveaway to the SF Marathon in the summer (which, retrospectively, wth was I thinking?). 

I didn’t start my numbered COVID series until the following week, on 3/18, and by then, C started working remotely, and the girls had started doing the same. 

I steeped much of my initial ruminations in unease, fear, and heaps of this is really weird, and no one knows what’s going to happen, so I guess we just stay in the present and keep doing the day-to-day and see what happens types of sentiments. For a bunch of Type-A personalities like many high-strung, control-freak runners, staying in the present, indefinitely, has been taxing, unsettling, and unnerving, at the very least. 

What that’s meant in my little corner of the internet here is that I devoted zero, zilch, entries last year to races I was training for goals I wanted to realize, stuff that’d, in any other lifetime, be my usual blog fodder. It didn’t matter and sure as hell wasn’t relevant. 

Instead, I just, well, ran. 

Sometimes I talked about that over the past year. 

Most of the time, however, I didn’t.  

Of course, a lot has changed in the past year. While we know significantly more about the virus, many of us are still hamstrung by our inability to plan for the future right now: myself included.

It’s hard to think about next year when thinking about next week is challenging.

Coming to terms that “normal” won’t be “normal” for a while is pretty tough.  

To be sure, enormous segments of our population have been profoundly, adversely, disproportionately affected by the pandemic, which — if nothing else — I think hammers home the importance of addressing and correcting systemic, structural racism in our society. That so many people question the veracity of this baffles me. 

And of course, at the other end of the pandemic spectrum, it’s hard to grapple with feeling like you’ve been “fine” for the past year — in terms of enjoying similar/same employment status, health, finances, and whatever else as you’ve had pre-pandemic — when you know that so many people have had it rough, to put it mildly. 

Again, the pandemic has laid bare the dire stratification in our society and the onus that all of us should be feeling to advocate and champion change that would benefit the most vulnerable in our society. It’s a thought that I’ve returned to again and again on my runs for the past year. Even if I’m fine or “pandemic fine,” so many others aren’t. What can I do about that? 

It’s hard to fathom the immeasurable loss over the past year and the finality of it all, how so many people died alone, how so many families had no choice but to say goodbye, forever, to their loved one over a video call. 

For those who were unlucky enough to get COVID-19 but fortunate enough to survive it, it’s hard to know how and if and whether their health will be implicated long-term by the virus; I imagine staying put, in the present, can be unsettling, especially if they’ve “gotten over” the virus weeks or months ago but are still feeling unwell. 

Will they be this way forever? Or will their health improve eventually? 

More unanswered questions, something this virus has supplied in earnest over the past year. 

In my effort to try to make sense of everything over the past year, I’ve run: at this point, every day for a year (and a day), something I’ve never attempted before and something I’ve never really had any interest in doing. It has been one of the few things that has made sense over the past 52 weeks, though.  

So much has already been said elsewhere, much more eloquently than I could ever produce, about where we’ve been and where we’re going with all of this. 

We cannot do a thing to bring back all the 529,000+ people whom we’ve lost over the past 52 weeks. 

Figuring out how to move forward delicately, carefully, correctly seems as fraught with competing priorities as one can get. 

So many have suffered so profoundly over the past year; it’s hard not to think of the long-lasting impact all of this will have, particularly on our most vulnerable brothers and sisters. 

The emergence of a COVID-19 vaccine, and its slowly-increasing availability, finally brings light to a tunnel from where it has felt, at times, we would never emerge. I (very! enthusiastically!) look forward to taking my turn and to the time when I can stop writing about this.