Running Ruminations

For a really long time this past spring, when it came time to envision what the 2020-21 school-year would look like, I couldn’t see beyond a mental wall. The likelihood of still having distance learning was unfathomable yet completely predictable, if that makes any sense at all, and for every hypothetical example that I could envision of what “normal” would look like, I could easily rattle off a litany of reasons why hell would first freeze over before we’d be seeing “normal” again anytime soon. 

And yet here we are, at the beginning of the 2020-21 school-year, where fourth grade takes place in my girls’ shared bedroom upstairs and I’m shoulder-to-shoulder with my kindergartner at the kitchen table, where she’s learning excellent sightwords like mute and virtual meeting and distance education as a five year-old while also learning the usual kindergarten-y things, like being a good listener, following directions, and reading and writing. 

Let it be said that teachers, educators, and administrators everywhere right now surely must be racking up all types of sainthood points for their herculean efforts to make education work in the midst of a pandemic. This probably wasn’t what they had in mind when they envisioned their career in 2020, and yet here we are. There isn’t enough praise for them and what they’re doing. We need to say this loud, and clearly, and often. 

We are only a few days in so far, but for us, for my kids, it feels pretty good. The district has organized the kids’ days into “learning blocks” of varying lengths, and there are strict sign-on/sign-off times each day, too, lending a lot more structure than what we had in the spring. My 4th grader is self-sufficient and manages her day without a lot of overhead on my part, but my kinder daughter understandably needs more assistance, so that means I’m getting a kindergarten education at the ripe age of 36. Without question, if I had a non-mom job, there’d be no way that this could happen because she needs so much more hands-on help. (And just for fun, imagine teaching a bunch of 5 and 6 year-old kindergartners over Zoom. Just imagine).  

Before the kids sign-off, the teachers communicate what the kids should be working on and what they should finish by the time they sign back on. The district calls it “synchronous” and “asynchronous” learning, and so far, it seems to be working. Of course, the asynchronous stuff is easier to come by for my older daughter; for my K girl, it’s in those three hours of time that I’m constantly redirecting and helping her satisfy everything her teacher has laid out for her to do because she thinks when the screen is down, it’s play time, not more school time. Again: this would be damn near impossible if I had a non-mom job to do and non-mom responsibilities. And, bless her soul, my K daughter has made it abundantly clear — just as she had when COVID forced her out of her beloved preschool — that she much prefers her non-Mommy teacher, thank you very much. It’s challenging (and hilariously humbling), but she (we) are doing just fine. 

But since it’s the year 2020 and up is down and right is left and One Big Thing isn’t enough to deal with, much of California (including here) is in the throes of a triple-digit heatwave for going on a week now. Because it’s so hot, PG&E has been cutting people’s power to lessen the strain on the grid, so let that sink in: it’s triple digits outside (and has been for the past ~week and looks to be quite warm for the foreseeable future), school’s back in online session, and some people — through no fault of their own — are having their power cut. 

(ICYMI, you can’t do online school very well when you don’t have power. You also can’t WFH well when you lack power). 

Oh! And yea, like the aforementioned it’s 2020 and One Thing Is Never Enough reminds us, added to the laundry list of a pandemic that’s 23-weeks strong now, distance education, triple-digit heatwave, and cut power, is the inconvenient reality that the bananas-bonkers thunder-and-lightning (but no/very little rain) storm that we had on early Sunday morning has sparked over thirty fires in northern California alone, with much of it barely contained. 

I don’t recall ever having fires this close to us since moving here – the SCU Lightning Complex Fire is on the east side of Mount Hamilton, which ain’t all that far from us – and since yesterday, the air quality has been very poor and seemingly worsening. (You can’t *not* smell it. People’s cars are getting covered in ash and soot, and when you go outside, the foothills to the east are barely visible, and it smells like you’re swimming in an enormous campfire). At the moment, the closest-to-us border of the mandatory evacuation zone is 1.6 miles away — thank you, running route, for knowing that distance to the tenth of a mile — which is a bit too close for comfort. Right now, we don’t have to evacuate, but even the prospect of it makes my mind absolutely go into a fucking tailspin.  

So: pandemic. Societal-wide racial reckoning. Distance education. Triple-digit heatwave. Cut power. Poor air quality. The state’s on freaking fire. Maybe — hopefully not — we’ll have to evacuate.  

Is this the part of the story where we all wake up tomorrow with tails or something equally bizarre? Or are we just living in the here hold my beer meme, while we think that things can’t go any more sideways than they already have?

It can be incredibly challenging to try to find the silver linings, to focus on the positive, when it feels like everything is effed right now. So many of us (raises hand) prefer to feel as though we have some semblance of control and agency over our lives, yet right now, it sorta feels like we’re getting served a heaping serving of humble pie as we realize that we’re along for the ride, just like anyone else. You want control?! I’ll show you CONTROL!!! 

It’s mind-boggling that just a few short days ago, on one of the triple-digit days in SJ, the family and I escaped to Skylark Ranch, one of the GS properties near the coast, where the weather was nearly 30 degrees cooler (!). We were the only ones on site, and the air couldn’t have been crisper or the sky bluer. It was a great little escape from the heat and from humanity for a few hours, and the kids had a blast hiking on the trails and sprinting through the open fields. As of 5pm tonight, GS communicated that it has since evacuated Skylark, as well as two other properties on the Peninsula, because they’re dangerously close to the CZU Lightning Complex Fires. 

(There are so many individual fires right now, situated pretty close to each other, that instead of naming all of them individually, they getting categorized together. A group of fires is a complex. It has nothing to do with an apartment complex or anything like that [although from that wild lightning on Sunday morning, a condo HOA less than a quarter-mile from home got struck by lightning. Yeah. :/) 

This year is weird. A pandemic has forced most of us to work and go to school at home, and one of our only reprieves through all of this was spending time outside, provided we do it safely. Now, a series of fires — over 300, according to Governor Newsom — are threatening our outdoors, the very sanctuary that lets us get away from screens, breathe fresh air, and at least momentarily forget about the gravity of the times we’re in. Tons of people have already been evacuated from their homes, and I cannot imagine the litany of decisions that evacuees must be confronting right now.  

And this is all to say nothing of everything that’s happening politically right now! How many crises can we manage simultaneously before everything (everyone) falls apart!?!

It’s not my intention to be such an alarmist as I talk about changes from one week to the next in these COVID times here in my tiny corner of the internet, so I apologize. It’s reasonable to expect that at any given time, everybody is going through something or has something burdensome on his/her plate. It’s just that this year has been exponentially and profoundly more challenging for so many people than usual, and it’s heartbreaking (and infuriating, and so many other emotions!) to witness and experience. 

I so wish that I could do something or say something — anything — to help because inevitably I’m at a loss in the conversation when we just kinda acknowledge yeah, this shit’s bad and just getting worse, isn’t it?! My family and I have fortunately (and luckily) been spared the worst of this year so far, but that absence doesn’t allay the injusticeS, plural, that so many people are experiencing this year. 

So look at this, another entry in this weekly COVID journal — where I used to write about running and racing and training — where after more than 1,000 words, all I can say is yeah. This is hard, and my soul hurts for so many right now. 

Local friends, please stay safe, heed the warnings and take them seriously, and take care of yourself and your loved ones. Sending love and please drop me a line if we can help you at all xx

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On occupying time and settling mental unrest

Reading. I’m in the throes of Motherhood So White, and it’s fascinating. I don’t recall where I initially heard about this book, but I’m glad I procured it from the library’s digital reserves because it talks about motherhood and parenting from a completely different lens than anything I’ve ever read before. Admittedly, I know next-to-nothing about adoption, fostering children, or Black adoption (the author’s words), so reading her memoir has opened my eyes in ways few (if any) parenting books have before. I’d highly recommend it to anyone, regardless if you consider yourself a parent or caregiver. 

Listening. I go through lulls with podcasts, and I’m in one of them, where I’m downloading a bunch of content that I’d like to listen to but then just haven’t been feeling it in the past couple weeks. Most of my most recent runs have been with my kids or with Janet, and in the few times I’ve been solo, I don’t recall listening to much recently (aside from a couple SWAP podcasts). My backlog is getting embarrassing. 

Running. All good here. I enjoyed the past two stepback weeks (~45 miles/week) and have begun adjusting my schedule to squeezing in an hour or so before coming home to get the girls up and ready for distance learning. On Saturday, Janet and I learned that ARP was closed due to the high temps and the high fire risk, and they weren’t playing around: every fence that could be gated closed was, and the city even put a huge digital board up that said something to the effect of “park is closed,” / “minimum fine $1,000,” / “it is not worth it,” all in caps. It has been closed since Saturday, and with the weather and fire risk being what it is, I can’t imagine it opening anytime in the next week or so. 

Otherwise, to help with motivation (and because it’s an excellent cause that I’d like to support), some friends and I joined Oiselle’s Womxn Run the Vote online relay that’ll be taking place at the end of September. It’ll be fun, educational, and a cool way to keep motivation up right now. LMK if you want to join our team! 

Racing? Ha – remember when all I wrote about was my training and racing? Of course, everything is cancelled or postponed due to COVID, and I’m not at all expecting to be able to race anytime for the rest of the year. That said, however, I am registered for CIM in December because I had deferred my ‘19 race entry to this year, before COVID completely changed everything. CIM has a “worry free” registration policy this year, but it’s mind-blowing to me that the race hasn’t already made the official call to cancel this year’s race and defer all racers to sometime between 2021-2023, their choice. 

Just this week, CIM sent a survey about all the modifications that they could, theoretically, perhaps, make in an effort make the race safer, such as limiting or restricting spectators on the course, minimizing the expo, eliminating much of the finish line festivities, having runners start on a more rolling start (and possibly in the dark) than usual, running the race wearing a mask, not having much or any on-course fluids and nutrition, and the like. I have no insider knowledge here, but it seems preposterous that the race is even considering making modifications (on a grand degree! Big, big changes that’d carry with them tons of logistics and certainly costs!) instead of just bagging it early. It’s a nice gesture to the running community, but the efforts seem misplaced right now. At the risk of sounding crotchety or curmudgeonly, there is bigger and more important stuff going on — both on a global and on a local level — in 2020 than a marathon, even one that’s as revered as CIM. It just doesn’t seem right to me.   

76 days (10 weeks, 6 days) until Election Day. 

Stay healthy and safe, take care of yourself and others if you can, and keep reading and listening. xo 

With COVID-19 dominating our life for the past 22 weeks now, I’ve often wondered how history — or the people who write history, anyway — will describe this segment of time. Of course, we have no way of knowing how long life will be continuing on its COVID-dominated trajectory, and who knows? Though it’s incredible to ponder, maybe in the grand scheme of things, this period won’t end up being all that significant or all that long. 

It’s easy to think about extremely significant events that have lasted longer — wars, occupations, dictatorships, the Great Depression, that sort of thing quickly comes to mind — yet it’s also worth noting that there have also been meaningful events, like assassinations, that were shorter than COVID (in that they’ve occurred in a shorter period of time) but still had a significant effect for years or decades to come.

So — situated between a historically-significant, political assassination, and a war, how significant will history treat COVID-19? 

In the very beginning of shelter-in-place, I remember a neighbor positing how significant this COVID era we’re living in would become, saying that surely this “would be included in future history books” that my daughters’ kids would be reading. It was jarring to think about — not least because the idea that my kids could have kids of their own one day is CrAzY! — but then also because yeah, maybe he’s right. Maybe this is all going to be a pretty big deal. 

I mean, c’mon. It’s a huge deal now; it’s mentally impossible for me to think that this period somehow could be insignificant in the coming years and decades. 

It’s fascinating to consider what could be written about what we’re living through. What will be the central focus: 

• the millions of people who have been infected? 
• The hundreds of thousands of people who have died? 
• The economic meltdown and sequelae that has resulted in businesses being forced to close (or to significantly reduce or suspect operations temporarily)? 
• The medical professionals who have been unfairly tasked with confronting this pandemic with a PPE shortage, who have gotten sick or died as a result? 
• The astounding ineptitude of our federal government in managing the crisis? 
• The socioeconomic disparities, particularly related to race and class that are already entrenched in this country (in terms of a number of quality-of-life indicators), that have been even further deepened as a result of who has or hasn’t gotten COVID (and who has or hasn’t died from it)? 
• How strangely (and miraculously, TBH) that children have been mostly spared from the ravages of this disease? 

I mean, seriously, the sky is the limit here. The possible narratives set to the COVID backdrop are as diverse as the universe is broad. Read any human interest story in the news each day, and you’ll get what I’m talking about. 

And because I’m a parent, and that’s my primary job right now, my mind often wanders to how children will make of, and remember, all of this once it’s behind us: my own kids, of course, but more importantly, all children in general. Specifically, I wonder about the stress, the social-emotional stuff that’s important for children’s growth and development, that may be affected. This isn’t to say anything of the possible achievement gaps that may last as a consequence of the interrupted or altered schooling that kids and families are enduring because hot damn, that’s a whole other set of factors worth examining and deserves its own, separate 1,000-word+ essay. 

I mean, good grief: remember that the AAP initially said that children absolutely should be returning to school in the fall because their health — COVID notwithstanding — was on the line? It wasn’t until days later that they backtracked, seemingly realizing after the fact that oh, yea, kids’ social-emotional needs are important, but so, too, is their physical health. I’m no expert here, but I imagine that if your child is infected by a novel coronavirus for which there is no cure and about which we know and understand little, I have a feeling that most parents would want to focus their efforts on getting their child physically well, as soon as possible, before they begin entertaining how to meet his or her social-emotional needs. 

Everyone says kids are resilient, and I agree to an extent, but I also can’t help but wonder how COVID may influence a generation of children’s developmental years in the same way any other significant, high-ACE-score trauma would.   

It goes back to my original question I present in the title: how in the world is all of this gonna go down? 

Of course, how it’s all going to go down — or how it’s going to be remembered or documented — will vary wildly. As Black Lives Matter has amplified over the past few months, people’s life experiences can be radically different in part by virtue of their skin color. A real-life, relevant example: where I live, particularly early in the pandemic, Latinx populations here (and in particular, on the east side of the city) were constituting the plurality of our COVID-19 cases, even though Latinx isn’t the majority population. It’s a profound example of health disparities — of health inequity — and the potential ripple effects that the rate of COVID incidence may cause in younger generations of BIPOC children are haunting. 

I find myself thinking more and more about this stuff lately in part because my youngest just turned five on Saturday — and I’ve been wondering how she and her sister (and their friends, and children everywhere) will remember this weird time when they’re older — and of course because school’s back in (online) session beginning Monday. Never could I have imagined that my youngest would begin her compulsory education online, along with all of her peers, but as parents, we quickly — or eventually, anyway — learn that we don’t always have all the answers and that we can’t always predict the future. It’s a sobering conclusion to reach but an important one, nonetheless.  

Unfortunately, I don’t have a panacea here to offer all my readers, or more specifically, to all my readers’ children, but what I’ll say is this: it’s on us to observe and to listen. 

I know we’re all feeling our feelings every day with this pandemic, and that sometimes our feelings magnify a hundred-fold in the same day (or hour, I don’t judge), but so, too, can those of our children. 

I have come to the humbling realization that even though I can’t tell my children when all of this will be behind us, for now, I can at least listen to their frustrations and their joys and the panoply of feelings in between when they arise. When I asked my Girl Scout troop in tonight’s virtual meeting about what they were feeling going into fourth grade, I expected a glossed-over answer, and instead I got a gushing of feelings from almost everyone — even the quiet ones! — whose answers ranged from the I’m so nervous to do all of this online to I’m really excited to get going again and everything in between. 

We’re all going through something with this pandemic — and for some people, unfortunately it’s somethingS, plural — but so, too, are our kids.  

It’s a lot. I feel like that’s all I’ve been saying for the past 20+ weeks. 

While we may have little control over how this is all gonna go down, big-picture speaking, I’d argue that we have a much more monumental role in how it’s all gonna do down in the small-picture, in the universe that exists between us and our children, and right now, heading into the school-year, that’s what matters. 

Hang in there, everyone. 

And thank you — a massive, heartfelt, gracious thank you — to all the parents, families, and all the wonderful people who help us parent, teach, support us in our child-rearing and child-teaching, visibly or invisibly, every single day. 

This school-year’s going to be a ride.   

—

On occupying time and settling mental unrest

Reading. Like I said last week, aside from reading the daily news for the past couple weeks, I felt like I have been dragging my feet to read anything else. I finally got into my library loan of Such a Fun Age, about 48 hours before it was due, and I have no idea what took me so long. It took roughly forever to get that book from the library, and I think I can see why. It’s really good (even for someone like me who doesn’t usually read fiction much anymore), and I would be so interested to hear your thoughts. 

Listening. Same as above, I haven’t listened to much in the way of podcasts in the past week, with the exception of one or two from the Roche SWAP team.

Running. Both last week and this week I’ve been trying to get a little more sleep in the mornings, so I cut my mileage (~45 last week, down from 60+) and have mostly been running with the kids at mid-day or in the evening. I won’t lie; part of me feels like I’m being a slacker. A bigger part of me knows that I’m doing the right thing because come Monday, when the kids start distance learning, I’ll have to wake up early each morning to run to still be able to come home and get the kids up and ready for school. Like anything else, it’s a balance. G’s 5k training has been soldiering on, too, and if memory serves, we have about three-and-a-half weeks left of her 5k program. Some days she loves it, and other days, the Academy would be impressed at the performance she gives as she claims that she’s so tired, that she can’t run another step, and on and on and on. 

She’s five! Yes — she turned five in the past week, took her kindergarten assessment earlier this week, and in a few short days, she’ll begin kinder. It blows my mind. 

In the last week of summer: We are trying to maximize our ability to go outside at any time of the day, so it has meant beach time, lots of running and hiking in the neighborhood and in ARP, and generally (but not always successfully) detaching from technology during the day. Sadly, the kids and I encountered a 36’ dead humpback whale on the beach last week Friday (that was still there on Monday), which was heartbreaking. I’ve seen it in movies or TV before, but when I actually saw it in real life, I couldn’t believe it and hoped that it was just a boat before I realized that it was what I thought it was. 🙁  

83 days (11 weeks, 6 days) until Election Day. 

Stay healthy and safe, take care of yourself and others if you can, and keep reading and listening. xo