I didn’t have some overarching plan as to when I would stop prefixing my blog entry titles with “COVID, week #,” but after *finally* getting to fly back to the midwest last week (twice! Once with my girls!) and see (and hug! and smooch! and cuddle!) with my parents and sister and her family — combined with yesterday’s official “reopening” of the state of California — it seems as good a time as any to begin to transition. 

I say that knowing that just a couple hours ago, my NYT push notification alerted me that the US has now officially lost more than 600,000 people to COVID. Tragedy is an understatement here.

Even with California’s reopening, I haven’t noticed a lot of change in my day-to-day life yet. Of course, I have no crystal ball here, but I don’t foresee a lot of change coming from SCC anytime soon. It seems that my county has been among the more/most strict from the get-go, and even with our very high vaccination rates and very low test positivity rates, I can’t imagine that the health department will re-open the floodgates anytime soon. 

I guess just like with any of this for the past ~18 months, time will tell.

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A week or so ago, I took a planned whirlwind trip back to the midwest, solo, for my oldest nephew’s high school graduation party. Prior to this trip, I hadn’t seen anyone in my family in real life since January 2020. We text and video-chat often — typically weekly, if not more — but I was really looking forward to seeing everyone in person for all the obvious reasons. I hadn’t been away from my family for that long, ever, even when I studied abroad, went to college out-of-state, or moved all the way out here. I’ve always had a date on the calendar to which I’d look forward to seeing my family. 

Not having that during most of the last 65 weeks of the pandemic — not knowing when I’d see my family again, assuming that I *would* see them again, that is — really sucked and was incredibly difficult.

If you’re still in it, my heart goes out to you because it was really, really tough. 

My Friday night red-eye got me in on early Saturday morning, and in just a few hours’ time, I got to spend most of the day with my sister and her family (and my brother-in-law’s extended family); my parents, one of my cousins, and even my great-aunt who’s *this close* to 90 and seems to be defying the aging process every time that I see her. 

It.was.amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

I flew home early Sunday morning to get back to my own familia before the work week began, and before we even pulled away from the curbside pick-up area outside baggage claim, the girls and I started planning our return to the midwest … that night, about twelve hours later. Another red-eye flight. My sister and mom hatched the idea, and they are very hard people to tell“no.” 🙂 

The kids and I took the same red-eye flight I had taken Friday night, so come Monday morning, it was all quite familiar, ha. The girls were beyond excited to finally see their cousins, grandparents, and auntie and uncle, and they had a blast with them all week long. (Save for the cicadas. Luckily, they weren’t where my family lives, but when we went to the Columbus Zoo, that area was swarming with them. They are completely innocuous — just unsightly as hell — but whoa. Encountering swarms of them is a sight to behold).  

Starting our summer with family whom we hadn’t seen in over a year was fantastic. Even running there for a week, in its uncomfortably soupy and hot conditions, didn’t really faze me as much as it usually does. Honestly, I was just so happy to finally be together. 

Plus! My in-laws will be coming to visit us here, back in SJ, in the next few days, for a couple weeks, making life continue to begin to feel even more “normal” than it has been for the past ~65 weeks. We also haven’t seen them since early 2020. 

It’s like all of us are entering reunion season together.

—

With this year being the make-up year for the 2020 Olympics, we’re just days away from the Olympic track and field trials beginning in Eugene, Oregon, in the newly remodeled Hayward Field. (I’ve run there! So cool!) There is crazy depth to nearly every event, particularly on the women’s side, making it super hard to predict who’s going to make which team. (If you especially love following women’s running, I cannot recommend enough that you subscribe to Alison Wade’s Fast Women newsletter. It’s free [though you can support her work via Patreon], and it’s absolutely one of the best pieces of writing I read each week). 

And then, just earlier this week, the running world was rocked with the announcement that Shelby Houlihan, a fan favorite and someone highly favored to make the 1500 and 5000 team (and an American record holder for both events), was served a four-year doping ban for testing positive for nandrolone, a prohibited, anabolic steroid, in December. She is blaming a pork burrito she consumed from an “authentic Mexican food truck,” and despite her contesting the ban, trying to maintain her innocence, the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS) ruled her challenge unsuccessful and has thus provisionally suspended her. 

Her emergency press conference on Zoom a couple days ago brought all of this to light, as well as an absolute avalanche of queries, speculations, and for many fans, a terrible pit in their stomachs as we’re all trying to ascertain what the fuck just happened to a highly decorated athlete, one who refuses to run in carbon shoes because she wants her performances to authentically and “purely” reflect the parameters of human performance. 

It’s pretty terrible, for sure. 

That said, I don’t have an opinion because I don’t have all the facts. 

If the allegations are true, it is pretty spectacularly gutting and a huge blow for our sport, of course, and especially so during an Olympic year, with the trials literally days away. 

If the allegations aren’t true, it is nonetheless gutting (albeit for Shelby, and for other clean athletes whose clean samples may come up falsely positive due to testing limitations, sensitivities, or what have you), and I feel terrible that this athlete’s career, name, character, all of it, have been drug through the mud and will be detrimentally affected for the rest of her life. 

Either way, it sucks. 

On my run earlier today, I was in the thick of the South Rim switchbacks listening to Dr. Megan and David Roche on their most recent SWAP podcast, and I think their quick-take on the subject of Shelby’s suspension is spot-on: start with love. Start with compassion. 

We don’t know what we don’t know right now. 

None of us know all the facts, and until (unless) we do, it’s not our place to rush to judgement. 

We’re talking about a human being and her life/name/character/career/everything, and internet sleuths’ detective work are pretty irrelevant, when it’s all said and done. 

Granted, it’s not always easy to start with love — it makes me think of my prior dean’s insistence that we “start at yes” with our students —  since we’re inherently emotional creatures, bound to get all fired up about situations, regardless if we have all the facts at our disposal.

But: we should. Or we should at least try. We owe it to ourselves and to each other.