Running in Place

Most of us are probably feeling it, the tangible levels of tension and dread. The restless sleep. The bizarre dreams and outright nightmares.

These are the reasons I run.

Or used to, before the last time I went out and ran myself into a full-blown case of COVID-19.

I’m still recovering, still not totally feeling normal, still having trouble with concentration and focus sometimes. External events are obviously a bigger deal than my private little hassles. Still they are real to me.

We all work with what we’ve got.

I’ve been trying to rebuild my base level of fitness on a cheap, clunky, creaky elliptical machine next to my bed. I skipped a day, and I paid for it.

Wandering around all day with that anxious feeling in the belly, that tax-audit, principal’s office, performance review, collections agency, uhoh Dad’s mad feeling.

That 

Sirens all day

Running feet and panting breath in alley below our apartment

Protestors marching within a mile of us

Helicopters, sirens, helicopters

I smell smoke, where is it coming from??

What the heck is going on, will it ever stop

What can I personally do

Feeling.

Sometimes it isn’t clear at all what you can personally do in a situation. Sometimes it takes time to figure out. Sometimes it’s better to stay out of the way. Sometimes you realize you’re in someone else’s movie, and not only are you not the star, you’re not even an extra, in fact you’re blocking the shot.

Other times, it’s clear that it’s your time to step up, because you’re the one who is accountable, or you are the only person who can really fix something.

Either way, it doesn’t help anyone to have a toxic stew of stress chemicals burning you up from the inside.

Burnout is largely physical.

We have to pace ourselves, and the more that is on the line, the more important it is... yet paradoxically, the harder it is.

The same predictable things happen every time, when we aren’t sleeping, we don’t have enough down time, we aren’t eating right and we have no way of dumping all that cortisol.

Our sleep is disturbed even more

We lose patience

We get snappy, irritable, and mean

We feel weepy and we’re not always sure why (except when we are)

We can’t think straight

We get spun up over even minor decisions

Something that is the same in martial arts training and in leadership is a thing called “stress inoculation.”

It’s possible to gradually train out the stress response in your body, so that you don’t react the same way even in the most intense conditions.

In both roles, you take ownership of yourself as first responder and chief decider. Nobody is coming and it’s your problem to figure out. There is no more time and the moment is now.

Some of this comes from having a plan. Some of it comes from having a formally acknowledged title and clearly defined responsibilities. Some of it is just that training in managing the physical stress response.

After a while, you feel it. You can feel the difference between when your neurochemicals are messing with you and creating the artificial sense of a real problem, or an actual real problem.

For some of us, a crisis is actually less stressful, because it’s obvious what to do. There is a specific issue that might actually go away if the right steps are taken. All this physical anxiety is *for* something.

I felt that way when my husband badly hurt his eye and I needed to get him to the hospital. Weirdly, I’ve also felt this way during the stay-at-home order, and again when I got COVID. “Just get through this, nothing else matters right now.”

Right now, three days into a riot-induced countywide curfew, I have no idea what to do.

So I do what I always do when I don’t have a plan, which is to try to run it off.

Five miles a day, miles of nowhere, going yet more nowhere.

It feels like a metaphor for life right now. Perpetual motion, tension, stress, with no end in sight and nothing to show for it. Like a hamster on a wheel.

For now, at least, the ball of tension is gone. I can chill for an hour or two.

Later tonight, sure, I’ll probably wake myself up every two hours. I’ve been having social distancing nightmares - have you? - including walking down the street six feet apart with my ex-husband, and accidentally bumping into the Plandemic lady on the sidewalk. (We both went UGH). This is in addition to the COVID nightmares - fighting a twelve-foot spider with fireplace tools in each hand, millipedes crawling out of my veins, downloading the virus by wi-fi into all our electronics.

The sleeping nightmares and the waking nightmares.

With all this going on, it’s easy to lose sight of how great it is that I can already do five miles on the elliptical. I survived! I lived through a month of coronavirus and I’m getting my body back! Reclaiming my flesh and staking ownership of myself.

In the midst of everything else, I can hit pause for an hour. I can try to get back into my body. I can try to remember that it’s the only vehicle I have to navigate this dumb old world.

It isn’t wrong to center yourself, or to sleep, or to do whatever you need to do to restore your focus. There are still 16 or 23 hours a day to worry about everything else. World events will keep happening, whatever they are, for good or ill. One of the few things you can control is your interior ability to cope with things.