Pickle juice and the perfect race

I may have peaked at age 30

I did not think of myself as a runner prior to March 2020, which is to say, before COVID ground communal life as we knew it to a halt, I considered myself to be a writer, a climber, a business owner, a misfit, an extrovert, an aspiring novelist, a recovering perfectionist, a collector of accomplishments, an appreciator of sunrises, and an owner of exactly one pair of running shoes — all before I called myself a runner, despite having run more than one race of a mind-numbing distance.

But when my climbing gym closed indefinitely, my co-working space went on hiatus, and my social circle shrank into a grid of animated rectangles on my aging laptop screen — all in the space of two weeks, running became my solace.

I filled the eerily quiet weekends with long runs in the woods and peppered my weeks with shorter runs through my muted city. On crisp mornings, on scorching afternoons, on breezy evenings, you could find me wearing out the instep of my two pairs of running shoes, kicking open scabs on my ankles, and rubbing away the skin below my boobs with the rhythm of the only thing outside of my home I could still depend on.

Which is why, when races returned at long last — after a brutally cold winter spent trying and failing to find ways to keep my sugar-water endurance fuel from freezing in my running vest — I had begun to resonate with the identity of runner.