It feels like my schedule has whiplashed from being pretty bare, a casualty of the pandemic, to being full-throttle and non-stop, nearly as soon as this school-year has begun. It’s like a whiplash of the best type though, as I (and so many others, obviously) have missed all the normal interactions that we would have otherwise had, had the pandemic not undone society over the past 18 months.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about volunteering for the first time since the pandemic began at a local, in-person, road race in San Jose. It was amazing, and it left me buzzing for the rest of the afternoon.

Luckily, I was able to replicate the feeling again over the past weekend, a day after my first 20 of my 50k training.

Just as we had before the pandemic, Wolfpack Running Club, my beloved team, hosted the USATF Pacific Association’s Golden Gate Park Cross Country Open meet (GGP XC) in Lindley Meadow, in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco.

Hosting an XC meet is a shorthand way of saying that our club — and more specifically, our RD, Andy — put the thing on, top-to-bottom, start-to-finish. “Labor of love” probably fits the bill.

The last time our club hosted this event (pre-pandemic), I opted to both volunteer and run the race. This time around, with my 20 miler the day before and the convenient reality that I’m in a different mode of training right now, I opted to exclusively volunteer, and even brought A along for the experience.

It was so fun to see so many teammates (and meet new teammates!) during race day, as well as see so many friends whom I hadn’t seen in a while because of the pandemic (Meredith! Angela!).

It was fantastic to see so many people at the race and to feel like we were doing it as safely as we could. To be honest, if there’s anywhere in the world I want to be running right now, it’s here, simply because the vaccination rates in the Bay Area are so high and because an overwhelming majority understand the gravity of the situation; see also, Tuesday’s recall results.

It is nice to begin to feel like we are nearly touching “normal” (or at the very least, “modified normal”) again.