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Author: Erin

COVID, week 47 + pandemic fine

COVID, week 47 + pandemic fine

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SJ had a ton of rain last week that resulted in power outages in some places (including in our parts), lots of downed trees, and in ARP anyway, a metamorphosis of the usually bone-dry Penitencia creek into a veritable river, replete with a current and everything. I stopped mid-run to document the novelty of it all (videos! photos!) and even went so far to show my kids my footage during breakfast, as though it were breaking news.  

I should find a summer photo and do a before/after

what rich irony

Growing up and living the first thirty years of my life in the midwest usually means that I kinda shrug off the experience of precipitation, of any sort, falling from the sky. I think after living here for a little more seven years, I have finally begun to appreciate and maybe even look forward to the infrequent change, the novelty that comes from buckets’ worth of atmospheric river rainfall. I didn’t know what an atmospheric river was before a couple years ago, either; midwest friends, here’s your primer. I know these atmospheric rivers can also bring a shit-ton of destruction — look no further than highway 1 for proof — but fortunately, at least around these parts, I think they were far less devastating.  

Otherwise, the new month hasn’t brought with it much in terms of noticeable pandemic change, at least to us. Sometime last week, Gov. Newsom lifted the regional stay-at-home orders, even though SCC remains in the purple category, almost all schools are exclusively virtual, that sort of thing. I’ve gleaned from social media that outdoor dining can reopen, as can hair salons and tattoo parlors, and I think maybe zoos and outdoor museums with diminished capacity, but it’s not much beyond that. Our day-to-day isn’t much different than before. It’s just another month. 

In non-pandemic life, this time of year is always hoppin’ because it’s Girl Scout cookie season, which usually means that almost every single weekend between early February and mid-March, A and her troop sisters (and their parents and I) devote several hours each weekend outside various banks and grocery stores to fundraise for her troop, in addition to walking the neighborhood, going to workplaces, the whole shebang. It’s an awesome experience — so good for bonding with troop sister friends, instrumental for their budding entrepreneurial skills, and pretty incomparable in terms of people skills-building for grade-school kids, among other stuff — so it’s a (completely understandable) drag that we can’t do anything in person this year because of COVID-19. Everything screeched to a halt last year, right at the final weekend of the 2020 cookie sale, when COVID first emerged here, so it’s somewhat unbelievable that nearly a year later, at the beginning of a *new* cookie season, we’re right where we left off last year.  

The girls have such inspiring attitudes about it though and are still determined to do everything they can, which is cool. I know there’s all this talk that “kids are so resilient” and everything, so much so that it sometimes feels like it has become a pandemic platitude, but dang. We ought to give kids more credit. They’ll figure stuff out, if given the chance. They’re doing the best they can, given the circumstances, and I’m so proud of them. 

a still from this year’s video she and C made together. so cool!

In addition to being the GS cookie time of year, this weekend is often like the unofficial beginning to spring marathon training, beginning with my favorite local race, RunLocal’s Race to the Row 8k. I haven’t run the race in a couple years — last year, I was at a swim meet in Tracy all weekend, if memory serves — but the race and the distance are among my favs. 

2019. sorry I can’t resize it

Seeing flashback pictures is bittersweet — oh look, yet another thing we can’t do this year because of this pandemic! — but I’m stoked that RunLocal has made lemonade over the past year by throwing their efforts into various virtual races and challenges, my favorite being last year’s California Coast 500. Earlier this week, I finished RunLocal’s San Jose 408k challenge, where the mileage you run between January 1 – May 2 lights up a neighborhood map of San Jose, and you aim to complete the entire map, 408 kilometers (253.5 miles), before May. I really enjoyed getting the emails saying “congrats! You’ve unlocked [neighborhood name here],” which went on to list more information about the particular ‘hood, such as what it’s known for historically/politically/culturally as well as RunLocal staff’s fav establishments there. And for someone like me, who hasn’t lived here my whole life or for very long, it was a very fun way to learn a lot more about a lot of different neighborhoods, some to which I’m pretty certain I’ve not traveled often, if ever. 

I enjoy a good map

And of course, I’d be remiss if I failed to mention that this is also the time of year that I was reminded three years ago that bizarre and strange things happen every single day; tomorrow (February 4), three years ago, out of left field, I had a subarachnoid hemorrhagic stroke at the ripe age of 34 because… because weird stuff happens sometimes.  

It still blows my mind that I walked away from that seemingly random event unscathed and with no long-term (or even short-term) deficits because damn: thinking about what could have been gets rather humbling — and harrowing — pretty fast. 

And here’s where it gets really scary: add COVID-19 to the mix of sometimes inexplicable events happen to people — and that so many people who have/had COVID-19 go on to have strokes, often because there is a “bodywide increase in blood clot formation” (src)– and … it’s breathtaking. 

Strokes are bad enough on their own, but to have a stroke after having COVID? 

COVID is terrible by itself, but to endure (or be killed/severely injured by) a stroke afterward? 

How can such a terrible trauma get much worse?

I worry about a million things related to COVID, — everything that we know and don’t know about the virus, of course — but some of my worries stem from my experience as a very healthy, “normal” person who had a freak health emergency that could have fundamentally changed the course of my life (or ended it). 

When I see the COVID stats in SCC (103k cases; 1,474 deaths) or in the US (26.6 million cases; 451k deaths) or the world (103 million cases; 2.24 million deaths), I often wonder about all the other people who have died — or whose health has suffered a life-threatening malady, like a stroke or heart attack — who simply weren’t able to get top-notch medical care because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

All this bad stuff that unfortunately happens every day doesn’t magically go away when medical practitioners also have to deal with an airborne, respiratory pandemic. I think it will be a very long time before we know the scope of harm and death COVID-19 has wrought. Thinking of the magnitude of the loss of life and the degree of injury, compounded by COVID-19, just … sucks. If you want a solid way to feel powerless, that’s one way to go.   

But! But! Here, allow me to add that rather going down that route of powerlessness and existential crisis, rather than fixating on everything that this time of year doesn’t **yet** have in the 2021 iteration for you — and for me, fixating on the fact that it was at this time of year three years ago that a freak, bad thing happened to me — fixate on what you **do** have and what you **can** do. I implore my daughters (and myself) to do much the same. Easier said than done, for sure.

Try desperately to stay in the right here, right now, and be grateful, and do what you can to help move us all forward. Wear the damn mask (correctly); give space; don’t needlessly endanger yourself or other people. 

It is so easy to fall into existential crisis mode, feeling completely helpless and aimless and powerless. At least for me, the self-care helps tremendously — namely, running as much as feels right, eating healthily more often than not, aiming for at least seven hours of sleep a night, and minimizing social media consumption — as does asking for help. Aiming for pandemic fine levels is noble. Acknowledge that some days are peaks, while others are valleys. Remembering that this is all short-term helps me, too. 

Be and stay well and safe. xo

also good for wellness: enjoying the details (hummingbirds!)
COVID, week 46 + a different channel

COVID, week 46 + a different channel

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There’s this saying that “running isn’t cancelled” during the pandemic, which I have interpreted differently at various points in this forty-six+ week catastrophe we’re all living through. 

Depending on where you call home, running has probably looked very different than before: in some places, high school or collegiate teams have been allowed (or forbidden) to practice or compete; in others, some road or trail races have gone on, with COVID modifications or “safeguards” in place; and at various points in the pandemic, at least around here, some local running hot spots, like tracks and parks, have even been closed to mitigate community spread. 

remember when ARP was closed for months on end in the early days of the pandemic? that made me so sad.

So many runners are itching to get back to racing because for many of us, racing is part of our running equation. Sure, we may love the sport with all our heart, and our daily sweat on the run may feel as essential as oxygen, yet if we’re being honest, many of us are also extrinsically motivated to show up every day because we’re working toward a race-specific goal: destroying a PR, covering a particular distance for the first time, whatever. 

With many traditionally-run, in-person, mass-gathering type of races offline for the better part of a year now, getting out the door every day can be really hard, even for the most devoted among us. That’s not to say that extrinsically-motivated running is inferior to its intrinsic cousin; it’s simply an honest assessment that some days, it’s hard not to say F it, what am I doing this all for and just bag it before we even begin because there’s not really anything on the line, so to speak. 

Running because we can, because we are fortunate to be in good enough health that will allow it and to have the privilege of time to do it, is beautiful and important and obviously a gift to be cherished … but we’re humans. Some days, in the past forty-six weeks, at least for me, running has been meh, not bad, not good, just there, a placeholder, an item to check-off the list each day. 

I began this little run-streak on March 9 probably out of a desire to maintain some sense of control (and a shade of normalcy) during the pandemic but also because I knew that even without any races on the calendar, continuing to run and “train,” even “for life,” would be beneficial to my health.

To be sure, some days it has been extremely hard to show up — especially if I’m tired, or I’m sore, or the weather is sub-par, or whatever — and I’ve put off my morning run until some later time in the day, which more often than not makes it incredibly hard to fit in and just annoys me, but it’s important enough to me that I’ll still go do it. 

Keep the thing, the thing, and just do the thing, right? It’s as hard as we make it.   

For most of the pandemic, given that there are no races to be had in these parts (and I’m unwilling and disinterested in non-essential interstate travel during an airborne, respiratory pandemic), I’ve had very little interest in going HAM in any virtual racing challenges, though I’ve been happy to participate to support the small biz organizing them and lollygag my way through it.

Sometimes these silly little challenges have been enough to get me out the door, which I can certainly appreciate when I’m having myself a day. (That, and the fact that I don’t want to quit on the streak simply because one day I felt like I don’t wanna.) It’s like this promise, some commitment, that I’ve made to myself.  

At any rate, for the past couple months, interspersed in all the vanilla miles was the smallest sprinkling of faster stuff. It wasn’t until the end of 2020 that I began mile training, and from Halloween until last weekend, we (friends Lisa, my lovely coach and Wolfpack leader extraordinaire, and Janet, my forever-pacer on the track) got my time down from 6:15 to 6:08, which, admittedly, felt really good and like a sense of accomplishment. Not gonna lie: I was thrilled.

gritting through it (PC: Janet)

I’ll likely continue this mile project for a bit longer because at this point, why not? It’s low-hanging fruit; it’s something I’d probably not pursue in normal times because I choose to marathon train, more often than not; and you can’t beat the recovery time, compared to the longer distance stuff. 

Plus: it’s fun to run fast and try to get to that point where all you can think is it’s on. Shooting for something sub-6 and more audaciously (and arbitrarily), 5:4x, sounds like fun right now, especially since marathons appear to not be in the immediate future…

…except that that’s not exactly true anymore, depending on your definition of “immediate.” hm.

I think many of us are in this weird place regarding racing and looking forward to all of it returning but not necessarily knowing when or how it would (should, could) look right now or in the soon-ish future or how we feel about participating in it. 

I mean, just this week, the BAA announced that an October 2021 Boston Marathon is in the works, contingent on a bazillion variables. Never before have two World Marathon Majors been on consecutive days — if it happens, Chicago will be on its usual Sunday in October (10/10), with Boston on the following Monday (10/11) — and this all on the heels of London earlier in the month (10/3), with 50,000 in-person runners and another 50,000 virtual, as it goes for a Guinness record. Plus, there’s Berlin on its usual late-September date (9/26) and Tokyo, usually a February race, on 10/17. NYC, if it happens on its usual first Sunday in November, remains to be seen, particularly if it’ll even publicly advertise an attempt at an in-person race through the boroughs this year.

That’s a *lot* of marathons, for a lot of runners, in a very short period of time, and these are just the World Marathon Majors we’re talking about. 

Smaller, more local races (including marathons) are surely plotting about their fall plans as well by now. Autumn feels like it’s so far away that who knows, maybe we (globally) could be in a profoundly different place by then, but at least for me, it’s hard to conceive of right now. At the same time, though, autumn isn’t really that far off.  

Even simply considering the likelihood that my more “local” marathons in 2021, like Mountains to Beach (late May) or CIM (early December) — both races that’d necessitate a good amount of driving and a hotel stay but that are completely accessible to the thousands of runners in and around the Bay Area, like me — could go on this year seems more like a weird, philosophic thought experiment than a statement predicting what may, in fact, actually happen. 

If you ask me when I’ll be ready to race again, the best I can give you is a shrug. 

It’s a weird spot to be in and definitely one where I’ve never been before, especially at this time of year, when I’m usually excitedly looking forward to a full, robust year ahead of training and racing and goal-chasing and poring over all the details to get me to where I want to go.

In the interim, I’ll just keep plugging along, mostly lollygagging with periodic bouts of it’s on-type of running, because for now, that’s good enough for me. 

Running isn’t cancelled, sure; I guess we’re just watching (experiencing?) a different channel right now.