How to Fall
During this pandemic I use my additional time each day — no commute, no work trips, 350 fewer people to manage — to take long runs. From three or four runs a week of 5 to 10 miles prior to COVID-19, I presently run 8 to 20 miles a day six or seven days per week. I am happily surprised that I can do so. I’m living and running in delightful Kyiv, Ukraine.
A three-month pandemic lockdown last spring shut down the country but permitted outdoor exercise. Most days while running 90 minutes, two hours, or more, I wouldn’t pass anyone near St. Andrew’s or St. Michael’s Churches, in Mariinsky Park, down by the Dnipro River, or even in Podil. When the lockdown morphed into pseudo-quarantine and sparkling summer transitioned to incredible autumn and thus far temperate winter, my running solitude changed and more people emerged, almost all without masks. I do wear a mask when I run; I’m a guest here, an oddball I can tell by the stares.
Much of my time during runs are over Kyiv cobblestones. In the dry times I enjoy the “cobblestone core workout” and lift my knees just a wee bit higher than if I were running on asphalt or a track. In times of moisture, I’ve learned which color stones offer the most traction and which ones are slippery when wet (the dark black, larger stones). The ice was treacherous my first two winters here and I ran over frozen sidewalks and streets with Yak Trax strapped over my running shoes. But last winter brought minimal snow and very little ice, the warmest winter in Ukraine’s history, apparently since weather has been officially recorded here. Few people fell.
In my three years in Kyiv, however, I have seen dozens of people fall, especially during my walking commute down the slope of the National Botanical Garden. When most folks fall, they seem to injure themselves. This is unnecessary.
Here’s how to fall: when a cat falls unexpectedly from a tree or a high wall, you will notice that she prepares to hit the ground by relaxing her body. She readies her bones and muscles to absorb the blow by going limp. When I fall, I do the same. When I slip or trip and fall, which I do every few months, for that millisecond before I hit the ground I make my entire body flaccid and consciously refrain from bracing myself with my hands.
Before I learned this technique, I fell outside the former Russian KBG building on Volodymyrska Street and automatically braced myself for my collision with the sidewalk with my left wrist. Bad move and I injured myself. I couldn’t do push-ups for three months. The other five times I have fallen since that time — all while running — I have not hurt myself at all. I say this without boasting but as a matter of fact.
I fell again last week after 10 miles of a 20-mile run. I tripped, became lithe like the cat, and turned my torso slightly in order to land on the muscular side of my right shoulder and triceps. This adjustment provided almost a foot of surface area as a landing cushion. I hit the pavement hard, rolled over once, and popped back up like a gymnast after she or he has finished a routine. I kept on running, uninjured, without missing a beat. This time no one saw me fall since I was down by the river towards the Kyiv Founders’ Monument and it was too chilly that day even for fishermen, often dressed in army fatigues, nibbling homemade sandwiches, and drinking bottles of strong Chernihivske local beer.
When I told my wife of my latest fall, it reminded us of the time when we were living in Savannah, Georgia, riding bikes one weekend amidst mature oak trees draped with dreamy Spanish moss. Although the local young woman admitted to the policeman that she was looking in her rearview mirror as she drove across the intersection, striking my bike and sending me sprawling over her hood and windshield, she did not get a ticket or compensate us for the totaled bike. I know I was lucky since the car hit the bike, missing my leg by a hair. The young lady apologized when she drove us home to our rented apartment on the Tybee River in Thunderbolt. It happened quickly and I do not recall consciously making myself loose as I rolled over her car’s hood, like I do now when I fall. Nevertheless, I popped up again like a gymnast, somehow unscathed, lifting my arms in victory like at the end of a successful gymnast routine.
There might be a metaphor to elicit here about not being rigid or about being flexible to new ideas or open to new experiences even in difficult times, or not taking things so seriously. But in the midst of this outrageous American shitshow and globally tumultuous time of pandemic coupled with unrelenting and unabashed populism, racism, and anti-Semitism, I will suspend philosophizing other than to say that when we fall, whether it is literally or figuratively, we should fall with humility, grace, and an elusive yet attainable lightness of being.
That’s how to fall.
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