Running Ruminations

Well.

Predictably, SCC and the surrounding Bay Area counties added further restrictions to the Governor’s initial guidelines after I posted last week; just call me Sylvia. As of this morning, the ICU at Regional — (presumably) the same ICU where I spent a week after my subarachnoid hemorrhagic stroke — is full, with 66 COVID patients. 

It’s important to remember that Regional’s also the only county-designated Level II Trauma Center on this side of town. When (not if) community members have to be hospitalized for whatever — COVID, heart attacks, strokes, bad car accidents, gunshot wounds — presumably they’ll have to go elsewhere instead and/or may end up getting sub-standard care. People often quote that not many people die because of COVID (today we surpassed the 3k+ COVID deaths mark — a new record — but I guess that’s not enough?), but we fail to acknowledge all the others who are dying because there’s not enough care to go around in a pandemic.    

I read an interesting column the other day in the NYT, from a physician author, about the need to reorient our collective COVID messaging so that people — people who don’t really “get it” right now — will really begin to understand the ramifications of this virus and ultimately (hopefully!) change their behaviors. She argues that our Mr. Rogers-esque “do the right thing because it’s the right thing” messaging so far hasn’t moved the needle for so many people because, well, it’s too kind. 

Instead, she argues that we should go for the more disturbing, in-your-face messaging, like some of the anti-smoking videos that we all saw growing up that featured former smokers (remember those?). The author links to a COVID warning video from the State of California, hosted on the City of Cupertino’s page, that’s eerie as hell, particularly once you realize what’s going on. Maybe it’s a step in the right direction, but maybe more is warranted.  

It feels like a bit of an impossible ask: how do you get people to care? How differently can you package the same information to get people to change their minds, to change their behaviors, to give a damn about something that may potentially kill or very badly hurt themselves, someone they know, or other humans? (It’s a bit of a thought experiment as well; what would you do if you had to make these decisions?). 

Also in the last week, the governor announced that CANotify would go live, statewide, on 12/10; it’s the state’s opt-in exposure notification system that would serve as yet another layer in COVID prevention efforts. If you haven’t yet heard or read about the “Swiss cheese model” of pandemic defense, I’d recommend it, and then you could see how opting-in to a notification system — in addition to doing everything else that we should be doing — can help. “I don’t want more notifications on my phone” — yes, but.

But all of this ultimately goes back to one central question — one that has near-ecumnenical applicability to various aspects of our lives, over and above pandemic spread prevention: how do you get people to care? 

By now, I mean, we surely know that having massive, indoor house parties is all but promised to fuel the virus’s spread, but people do it anyway. 

We know that we should exercise, that we should move our bodies in meaningful, intentional ways, more days each week than not, but people still don’t do it as often as they should, if they do at all. 

We know that we should eat whole grains, fruits, and vegetables on a daily basis more than we do, but most of us don’t eat as healthily as we know we ought to, even if our doctors have said our health is on the line.

Surely this is sounding familiar. If knowledge is power, what do we do when people gleefully ignore said knowledge because it’s inconvenient?  

It’s beyond bizarre to me that nearly forty weeks into this pandemic — the length of a full-term pregnancy!! — we are still having this conversation and that public health officials, scientists, medical professionals, and COVID-19 survivors are still pleading with people to take it seriously.

If everything we’ve done up to this point hasn’t worked, seriously: which options remain? 

I sincerely hope that you were able to get whatever r&r you could come by in the past week, over the Thanksgiving holiday. I also hope you didn’t travel anywhere, or travel super far, anyway, and see a lot of people in the process, indoors, to get said r&r. 

COVID-19 stats were terrible basically everywhere going into Thanksgiving, and predictably, about a week later, they continue to rise. The news is saturated with stories about hospitals across the country that are just about at their breaking point — to say nothing of the staff, the human beings that allow the hospitals to function in the first place — and if the current trends hold, many hospitals are predicted to simply lack the space, the means, the power, the everything to care for the huge number of people who are becoming COVID sick, to say nothing of how the pandemic takes away the ability to care for the non-COVID sick. 

And, lest we forget, all this talk about hospitals lacking beds and staff and being unable to care for sick patients is to say nothing of the human capital of the frontline medical workers, of the people who have been showing up day after day to try to save people’s lives or, barring that, make their dying at least slightly less terrible and as dignified as possible.   

Our national, grand experiment, over nine months in the making now, to see how many people will die, or become very ill and endure long-lasting ramifications from the virus, before we start to care and actually do something, charges on. It is sickening, infuriating, and downright depressing.

So now, in this interlude period after Thanksgiving and before Christmas, we all just wait to see if we end up breaking the fan with how much sh-t we’re willingly — enthusiastically, even! — throwing at it (and with impressive rapidity, at that). So many of us will elect to, are electing to, break and destroy and incinerate the fan with our (in)actions before this is all said and done just because … we can? 

Unfathomably, so many people — so! many! people! — in this country think that the “rules” don’t apply to them, or they simply don’t believe in science, or they “did their research” (ie they “read” a dubious “article” online, note the prolific quoting here) and somehow, inexplicably, know better than some of the most researched, published, knowledgeable real-deal infectious disease med pros in the country, and they choose to go about their lives as though nothing is fundamentally different about life now, December 2, than it was pre-March 16.  

Again: how depressing. 

Why so many of us continue to do more of the same, continue to make poor choices that may be instantly gratifying that may later profoundly backfire, when our backs are against the wall already, is beyond me. 

Locally, in addition to Gov. Newsom putting most of the state back into the purple tier a couple weeks ago, SCC, in particular, has backslid even further since so many of our numbers are rivalling — and will surely exceed — our worst stats ever. The IG pics below spell out everything in more detail. I wouldn’t be surprised if SCC or Gov. Newsom enacts more restrictive measures and business closures after this post goes live on Wednesday night; they’ve been hinting at the possibility.   

I feel like I’ve written more or less the same thing for the past 38 weeks in this space. There is so much about this pandemic that is super challenging, yet there also is so much that isn’t. I don’t think that directives from the state and local levels have been all that hard to follow or understand, nor do I think that either level has expected us to stay cooped up, indoors, 24/7, for the past 38 weeks, completely isolated from the outside world and from people with whom we don’t reside. There are safe (and safeR) workarounds.  

There is a nuanced middle ground, and that’s where we’re all existing right now. We can’t be like we were before, pre-pandemic, at this moment, but we also don’t have to never leave our homes, either. Bottom line: live your life in a way so that it doesn’t adversely affect other people’s (or your) precarious health right now. 

No one is canceling Thanksgiving or Christmas or Santa or school this year; to do it safely, we just have to modify, for the time being. Not forever and ever. Temporarily. Thirty-eight weeks seems like a long time, and it is, but there’s a big, sizable, profound difference between 38 weeks and forever.   

Figuring out how to function as well, or as effectively, as you can in the nuanced middle ground is an exercise with which many athletes can surely identify. It can be an uncomfortable purgatory for sure, but we can make it work. Even though we humans like things to be absolute, the best or the worst, black or white, life rarely affords us that lovely, simple, beautiful dichotomy. Instead, time and again, life tasks us to figure out how to do the best we can in the situation that we’re in, which usually isn’t the absolute best or the absolute worst of conditions. Most of the time, most of us are somewhere in the middle. 

Think: a marathon runner who wants to train for a big breakthrough PR but who has time constraints to work around (basically all of us non-pros!); an athlete who wants to train hard for a goal but is hamstrung by an oppressive injury history and thus has to work perhaps not-as-hard or not-as-often as she’d like; the triathlete who wants to go pro but has to spend most miles on the trainer or treadmill instead of outdoors; the athlete who wants to rise to the top of her game but who is constrained by forces beyond her immediate, easy control; the examples could go on forever here. 

Just because the athletes aren’t in the ideal situation — being able to pursue goals as hard/much/often as they’d like — doesn’t automatically spell doom. Instead, they simply have to acknowledge reality and work within their constraints, perceived or actual, to get to where they ultimately want to go. Just because they have to do something in a particular way today, right now, doesn’t mean that they’ll have to do it like that forever. They have to work within the gray, make decisions as best as they can, based on the information available to them, and keep going, reacting, redirecting, and pivoting whenever they need to. It’s exhausting, sure, but it is absolutely doable. And again: it’s temporary! 

So much of this parallels life during the pandemic right now, just as it has for the preceding 38 weeks. It’s not that the government has told all of us that there will be no Thanksgiving or Christmas in 2020; it’s just that how it should look should be significantly different than usual. It’s not that you’re forbidden from worshipping your god at church or temple each weekend; it’s just that you have to do it a little differently than usual, at least temporarily. A lot is on the line. 

Not accepting that is simply not accepting reality and deluding ourselves into thinking it’s fine, I’m fine, everything is fine… when clearly, it’s not, and dumpster fires abound. Matt Fitzgerald recently posted an excellent column about working with reality — and how it ties into COVID, his experiences as an endurance athlete and probable COVID long-hauler, and his forthcoming book, the Comeback Quotient — that I’d highly recommend. (The book drops next week, I think, and I’m looking forward to it).    

My heart goes out to other parents who are parenting (and homeschooling or facilitating DL, and working, and still doing so much else right now) through all of this, particularly those of us who have young, school-age kids who get it but don’t, exactly. Children like absolutes for all the obvious reasons, yet their world right now is anything but. Helping them to work toward understanding why — while also being age appropriately-forthright about the severity of the pandemic — many days feels like a never-ending, precarious trapeze act. 

My grammar school-aged kids probably don’t need to know that our country alone is soon projected to post 2,200 deaths each day from COVID or that already more than 19,000 folks in California have died; telling them that a lot of people are hurting right now because of the virus, and us staying home (from school, GS, big team practices, and so on) minimizes people’s risks, is enough. It’s hard enough for adults to operate within the gray; some days it feels like an impossible ask for our kids to do the same.  

So much has been written and talked about regarding children’s resilience, and while I agree with so much of it, it still brings me to my knees that my eldest has asked for a coronavirus vaccine “so life will return to normal” for both her birthday earlier this year and now for Christmas; it’s basically the only thing she has wanted all year. Her younger sister often talks about a feeling she has, particularly this ominous foreboding that some bad things will never go away; she’s talking not about a monster in her closet but instead, the virus. And mind you, our family hasn’t been directly affected by COVID, in terms of any of us getting sick. My heart hurts for children whose family members have been.   

I’d like to think that as a country, as a society, we’ll come out on the other side better for having gone through these nine, almost ten months of incredibly awful experiences, almost like going through a hella uncomfortable growth spurt, a period of supercompensation followed by massive growth, by massive potential-realizing. To be honest, though, some days my optimism wanes considerably, and I wonder what all of this is for or what it all means about us. 

Life has continued on, unabated, during COVID — people are born and die every day, people get married or get divorced, others start new careers or retire, students begin kindergarten or graduate from college, and on and on — yet I can’t help but wonder what it means for us when such huge segments of our society decide that it’s acceptable — and right, even! — to allow for a pandemic to thrum on in the background, more of an annoyance than an earth-shattering calamity, claiming it more as a politicized hoax than an inconvenient truth. 

It baffles me to think that we haven’t yet hit a threshold of enough people dying for everyone, or most everyone, to care and act accordingly. Baffling might not be strong enough a descriptor, though. 

At any rate, as we stare down the final month of this weird-as-hell and heartbreaking year, I wish you and yours good health and safety. This time of year is so hard for so many people, even in the absence of a pandemic, and I so wish that I could, like, Mother Earth-style wrap you up and protect you and me and everyone from everything. An airborne, respiratory pandemic, on top of the holidays, on top of shortened days and not a lot of light, just sounds like a pipe bomb on the brink.  

I hope you are able to spend time together with those whom you hold dear — safely — and that each day you can somehow carve out a time or space for yourself, however that looks for you. Find your sanctuary and go there as often as you need.

I hope that you are part of the solution and that your actions allow for the health and longevity of others, as surely you would want others to do for you and your loved ones. 

For this being a running blog and all, I’ve said very little about running this year and much more about what I’ve been thinking and feeling on the run for the past 38 weeks which, surprisingly, really hasn’t been about running, or training, or goals, or anything remotely athletic at all this year. I so look forward to detailing my training and racing recaps one day again soon, not simply word-vomiting (typing-vomiting?) everything that has been percolating mentally instead.