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Author: Erin

COVID, week 53 + looking ahead, based on what’s behind

COVID, week 53 + looking ahead, based on what’s behind

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What do you do after you’ve passed the year mark on living through a respiratory, airborne pandemic that has caused unimaginable suffering (536,000 deaths in the US; 56,700 in California; 1,876 in SCC) and profoundly disrupted everything it has touched (which is to say, everything)? 

Assuming you’ve been doing what you should have been doing all along, I think you just keep going. 

The only way out is through, y’know. 

we had this bizarre thunderstorm-hail storm last week; there has been visible snow on Mount Hamilton on and off for the past two weeks; and I actually slipped (but didn’t fall!) on ice yesterday on my run. strange.

We’re also at the point in recent history when all of our devices are reminding us where we were a year ago, in the nascency of the pandemic. Remember when we all — including the CDC! — were dubious about masks’ efficaciousness? And that we all spent so.much.time meticulously wiping down groceries, hoping that we didn’t inadvertently taint our strawberries with our lemon-scented Clorox wipes? 

For those of us lucky enough to have the choice, a year ago, many of us so sweetly thought that working, or schooling, or everything-ing from home for a couple weeks wouldn’t be so bad and hell, maybe it’d even be fun! Working from home in my underwear? Count me in! 

Immensely awful and shitty that the pandemic may be, though, I think there has been some good that has arisen from the dumpster conflagration that has been the past year. Admittedly I’m a bit torn to even bring up the subject though because I’m not sure if finding some “silver linings” in the midst of the past year, one of such immense, incalculable suffering, is toxic positivity or is, in fact, helpful and perhaps even a little grounding.

Arguably, some (or all) of these developments might have been borne more out of necessity than choice, but I nonetheless hope that these (personal and/or structural) changes will stick around in post-pandemic life. 

Off the top of my head, the banal and the massive include but aren’t limited to:

  • Regular virtual hangouts with friends and family who live far from each other. That I hadn’t thought of doing this sooner is embarrassing and probably qualifies me as a bad friend/relative. 
  • Running, just ‘cuz, not because a race is on the calendar. Prior to the pandemic, I was always training for a race on the horizon, with the exception being training through both pregnancies. When I ran during pregnancy, it amounted to a near-daily reminder of how freeing it is sometimes to just run for the hell of running, simply because I could. The pandemic forced my always-training-for-a-race mentality to training-for-life-because-life-is-always-enough. It’s a seismic shift and one I needed probably more than I realized.  
  • Order-ahead and drive-up grocery pickup options 
  • The same, but for Target. So much of my time is my own again! And I’m probably saving a lot of money! 
  • Less commuting, and consequently less traffic, because more can be (possibly should be) done remotely. See above. 
  • Well-orchestrated virtual opportunities for racing companies/organizations to engage community members who want to be supportive without necessarily participating in a local, large-scale, in-person race. I have zero interest in actually racing-racing the virtual stuff, but if my registration means a local race company survives, I’ll sign up for all of ‘em.
  • More visible and ubiquitous hygiene practices, especially during cold and flu season. There’s nothing wrong with the birthday child blowing out a candle on an individual cupcake instead of spitting all over a massive cake. (!)
  • Increased accessibility and attention paid to free, local outdoor spaces as a means of recreation and community-building. I have never seen as many people in ARP as I have in the past year. There’s growing pains with that for sure — trail etiquette, littering, that sort of thing — but overall, I think at the end of all of this, parks win.  
  • Greater visibility of, and respect toward, mental health concerns. It’s shitty to think that a pandemic that has affected everyone, in some capacity or another, may have been what it took for frank conversations about people’s mental health to transpire. The pandemic has disproportionately affected some folx more than others — BIPOC and mothers come to mind right away — and I hope that the pandemic leaves in its wake better evvvvvvvvverything than we had before. BHAG, I know.  
  • Greater visibility of, and respect and commitment toward, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives at structural and organizational levels. The pandemic woke up huge segments of society who have been asleep at the wheel. It’s another BHAG on all of us, individuals and organizations alike, to be better post-pandemic than before. Ultimately, I think it comes down to this: know better; do better. 
  • Basically everything the library has done for so many. Major kudos. I’m a big fan.

What comes to mind for you? 

COVID, week 52 + a year of this

COVID, week 52 + a year of this

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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.  

being ridiculous mid-run to celebrate 365 consecutive days of running. I paused my watch to take this pic, and apparently my ups set off my “incident detector.” thankfully I stopped it before it called C!

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.