Happy Global Running Day

Every single person on the planet!

Dear Friends,

I last wrote in December. Did I realize that half a year had passed? Not really. This letter series is, in part, an experiment in embodied time—I want to find out how long my body feels a month to be in relation to this writing project. Not in terms of my menstrual cycle, or my moon tracking, or my bookkeeping and bill paying—all monthly events with built-in clocks. What is a month when the measurement is a free letter and the deadline is entirely self-enforced?

Who the hell knows!

I do know that what occupied me for the past six months was a very good thing. I was planning and training for the Smoky Mountain Relay Race, a 208 mile footrace through the mountains of western North Carolina.

I ran this race with a team of fourteen women. We had twelve runners and two van drivers. We got a discount when we registered for being an all women’s team. Other sorts of team discounts would be a good idea—BIPOC teams, for instance.

We came in second in the costume contest. We dressed as things you don’t want to see in the woods.

We ran on quiet country roads, hiking trails, and on the side of highways facing oncoming traffic. We ran through the night. There wasn’t a lot of cell reception, so we often weren’t able to communicate between runner and van. The race was unsupported, meaning there weren’t water and energy drink stations all along the way. I’ve never done anything like this race, but I’ve wanted to for such a long time.

Were I to pick a single adjective for my experience, it would be epic. Not in a slangy Urban Dictionary sense, but as in a longform poem in which the protagonists engage in battles and adventures that outline the parameters of the moral universe. Epic like The Odyssey if the protagonist weren’t Odysseus but, say, Circe—so, therefore, epic like Circe by Madeline Miller if that book were poetry instead of prose. Circe was so over the patriarchal bullshit of her father’s world. It’s hard to say if she truly got banished or if she just manipulated everyone’s biases and projections until she landed herself her own private island where she could hang out and do magic all day.

The woman in the chestlight had just run straight up a mountain for six miles: +1874 FT / -26 FT

Running up mountains in the dark on rural highways with trucks coming at you and a van full of women screaming encouragement as they pass doesn’t quite get you a private island, but it does create an internal space that is all your own, a place from which to stand empowered.

It's easy to mistake running as the most important factor in the development of that internal space. I made this mistake for the months I planned and trained.

Now, post-race, I know that the most important part is the women screaming encouragement while you do something very, very difficult, something you will watch each of those women do too. Is this the gift of women’s sports? Maybe. I had idiopathic juvenile arthritis as a teen and young adult, so I’m a newbie to these sorts of experiences and to these sorts of questions.

Speaker. Cowbell. Megaphone.

The Smoky Mountain Relay awakened a new, or maybe latent, part of my personality. I’m even listening to women’s sports radio style podcasts now. Historically, sports radio made me angry, but that was because it felt like I was trapped at a frat party listening to drunk white boys talk about being drunk white boys. I couldn’t relate.

I can imagine being a professional runner who feels she must hide her pregnancy lest she lose her contract, like Allyson Felix. I am personally invested in the bravery of tennis player Kylie McKenzie, who went public with her experience of sexual abuse by a coach. And while I’m not fond of charter flights for climate reasons, if the NBA is going to take them, I want the WNBA to take them too, dammit. I don’t care if this want is irrational and hypocritical. Sometimes a furious and hypocritical irrationality is part of healing, especially when it’s born of a newly felt sense of just how much representation matters, how much participation matters.

We’d just finished. Can you tell how tired I am?

Even if, like me, you turned fifty this year, representation and participation still matter. Time isn’t linear. We can do things now for the girls we were, and in doing so we help the girls who are watching grow into women even more capable of helping the young ones behind them.

This sort of temporal non-linearity is one way to conceptualize interdependence, the idea that we are, in every moment, co-creating reality, co-creating one another. Maybe now, as you read this letter, you can feel how my tribe of fearless running witches was sending you good, healing, epic vibes on the 26^th  and 27^th of April. Take a moment and let those vibes land. Feel them. Remember that our planet is in crisis, and we’re living through a mass extinction event, and we may be among the last of our species to run up and down mountains. With all the earnestness you can muster, cast those good, healing, epic vibes back out to the world. This is one form of prayer. May we each locate and nurture the internal space in which we stand empowered; may we each, from our place of strength, encourage someone else.

Until I write again,

ginger

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Tidbits

I read many running memoirs while I was training for the race. One that I found particularly impactful was Spirit Run by Noé Álvarez. He participated in the Peace and Dignity Journeys, an annual 6000 mile relay race that is rebuilding Indigenous cultural connections across North America. He writes, “We are what we imagine, according to the Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday. And if we imagine a better future, and speak it with words and the soles of our feet, we just might see it come to fruition.”

I find it very difficult to write directly about politics (for reasons I should write about), and this saddens me because the situation on earth is just so shit right now. More voices are needed. Raechel Anne Jolie writes beautifully about radical movements and how to invite a new future. I particularly appreciated her recent post, where I was once again reminded that that a radical new future starts at home: “Or, just be a better neighbor; get to know the people on your block, build relationships that will be supportive as we all move into escalating collapse.”

Janisse Ray is a writer and environmental activist from south Georgia. I’ve long valued her take on things, and I know from taking classes with her that she’s an excellent teacher. In the past couple of years she’s taken control of her relationship with publication in one of the ways that most any writer with important things to say will have to do eventually. She’s written a craft book I’m looking forward to, and here’s a meaningful way that you can get a copy too.

If you’re still riding high on equal representation in sports, here’s a clip of last night’s history making goal from 16-year-old Lily Yohannes. I’ve watched it a dozen or so times today.

After many months of enjoying grains and beans and even cheese, my body rebelled, so it’s back to an anti-inflammatory diet. Flares piss me off, and then they make me blue, and then I do the things that calm them down and get to be amazed anew at the capacities of the body to heal itself. Here’s a recipe I made earlier this week and loved. I served it over zucchini noodles.