How Running Saved Me
The lockdown started last March, and like most New Yorkers, I was scared. Sirens were a constant and people were dying by the minute. We were at the epicenter and had no idea where the virus lurked in our very public urban lives. We sheltered at home. Purell, Vitamin D, and Tums were my daily staples.
My husband found calm by keeping his routine. As a banker, he was allowed and needed to go to the office. So as a result, like a very few, my routine didn’t change either. I was alone in my apartment during the day. Very alone. Alone with my thoughts. Alone with my fear. Our close friend contracted the virus and was very sick. We worried and hoped he’d make it through to the other side.
I was deep in post-production on my latest feature film shot a few short months prior to when the pandemic swallowed us all up whole. While working remotely on finishing a film about finding metaphorical Paradise should’ve been a safe haven, sadly it was traumatic since several of the key people I trusted, including one I considered a close friend, turned against me in the most toxic of ways.
All the stress constricted my lungs. Since anxiety symptoms mimic some COVID-19 symptoms, it created a vicious cycle; I was barely hanging on.
Working out has always been my form of meditation. Getting my heart rate and endorphins elevated brought calm. My daily cardio activity of choice for my over-used athlete body was the elliptical machine at our local Equinox. I would get lost in a high-energy playlist and export my mind someplace else.
But all the gyms were closed, as was most everything else.
To run away from the pandemic, I started running. Although it was something I had done competitively in the past, I was on a break. A lifelong athlete who played Division One tennis in college, I ebb and flow with running. It was a cross-training activity that didn’t bring its own thrill. Until it did.
The last time I consistently ran was 20 years prior when my now grown kids were growing. At that time, I too felt claustrophobic, trapped, and restless as a suburban stay-at-home mom. It wasn’t natural for me. My kids were in preschool, so I found myself with two and half hours of child-free time when I wasn’t running after them.
I received a colorful purple flyer in the mail from Team in Training inviting me to run a marathon as a fundraiser for childhood Leukemia. They provided training and running groups. Normally, I would’ve tossed it out. A marathon? 26.2 miles? I got bored driving 26.2 miles. The most I had run prior was three miles and always picked up the pace to finish faster.
But it intrigued me. It seemed like a natural time filler, a perfect charitable challenge, and a way to have a little life outside of my family.
It would also be a lesson in slowing down, as running and life were about speed, not endurance. I purchased a heart rate monitor and to build a base, I ran for time, not miles. I determined speed by maintaining a heart rate specific to my age. The goal was to complete the time.
Sundays were the long group runs done over the four months leading up to the marathon. We became a tight-knit training group — runners of different ages, races, backgrounds, and genders whose common denominator was that we ran at a similar pace.
I looked forward to our Sunday long runs and the races and joked that our out and back course was the perfect metaphor for my life — I was running away without actually running away. I called it therapy on the run, as the more miles we ran, the more open we became.
Four marathons and many races later, with more child-free time, I started working and pulled back from distance training. I became a fair-weather short distance runner as the need to run away waned. I did an occasional 5K race, but my back was tight and knees shot from a life of pounding the pavement, so the gym became my new cardio sanctuary.
Central Park and its reservoir are half a block away from my apartment — a beckoning pandemic Shangri La. As my shelter-at-home house arrest outing, I started regularly running a route I had created a few years prior. It was roughly 4 miles — the Northern baseball fields and the infamous reservoir. There is something so quintessential Manhattan about running the reservoir.
In the not-so-distant past, the course had been easy, but now it was a challenge. My chest was tight from anxiety making breathing hard. Like heart rate monitor training, I did not calculate my pace but had to retrain my competitive brain not to feel defeated when I had to slow down or walk part of the course. Anxiety robbed me of speed and endurance.
While I knew that running didn’t ward off the virus, I heard of too many people in the best of shape who succumbed to it, I believed that if I could run, it was another day I didn’t have the dreaded disease.
I found joy pulling down my mask when no one was nearby to deeply consciously inhale the crisp early spring Central Park air. New York City never smelt so sweet.
I ran every day and looked forward to it like my twenty years younger self did. I had gratitude for each day I had good health and that the running Gods allowed my body to get through each run without breaking down.
March became April, April became May. I was a runner again, but still struggled emotionally. Healing from trauma during a pandemic wasn’t easy. Additionally, my anything but boring spontaneous colorful, creative life was now a monotonous drab Sisyphean one.
With May came the opening of golf season for my husband. I knew that was his emotional rescue, but for me, it signaled more time alone.
That’s when I hit the pandemic wall.
My daughter and her gypsy millennial tech friends were temporarily living in Newport Beach, California, and I did the reverse of most of my empty-nester friends — I moved in with my kid. My virtual running away became actual running away. I needed out. I was emotionally crashing and had to escape. I was willing to take the flight risk as I was desperate. I accepted it may put me in the hospital, but I was a fox willing to chew off her paw for freedom.
I wouldn’t abandon my husband, so I asked him to stay with me in Newport Beach, but he preferred to return to the city and keep his routine of work and golf on weekends. He said, “If I were you, I’d stay.” The best Mother’s Day gift. I got the permission I desperately needed to stay.
I made Orange County my temporary home and took my running to Southern California. For six weeks, I ran the beach. I still popped Tums for heartburn, as I couldn’t fully run away from my anxiety as the pandemic and film drama raged on, but I no longer needed to take breaks on the run. My pace was coming back too. Running with the ocean by my side and the smell of the sea air helped my mind escape to another time.
But eventually, I had to go home. The weather back East had improved, I missed my husband, and there was a more active outdoor life to return to.
Back in the city, I entered a virtual 5K race. I felt strong, and the anxiety was now intermittent. I was ready to bring competition back and transport my mind to the nervous energy of race days of a different time.
It was weird to run without the thrill of a starting gun and other racers to challenge me, but 3.12 miles is a little more than two laps around the reservoir. So I committed an arbitrary day to be my official race day.
My lungs burned differently when I pushed my legs as fast as they could sustainably go. I was pleased with my finish time, which was not nearly a P.R. but a respectable personal pandemic best. I got a fun race shirt and medal. I recorded my time online and still fell in the top percentage of finishers.
I did another virtual 5K and then an ambitious longer race — Manhattan to Montauk — that had to be completed over two months. It was fun to record my miles on their website and watch my avatar move along their course from the city to the beach.
Late fall brought the reopening of my local Equinox at 25% capacity, so I returned to my gentler pre-pandemic cardio work out. I continued to run, but not daily as I was a fair-weather runner who hibernated during winter. Normalcy was slowly returning. The anxiety subsided.
But like the Appointment in Samarra, COVID-19 found me.
Over the year, I took several PCR tests when I felt exposed. When I saw negative, I exhaled with relief like a woman after a one-night stand who tests negative on a pregnancy test. While we wore masks, we dined inside, attended some indoor dinner parties, traveled, and saw more people than most. We played COVID Russian Roulette; it’s how artists are conditioned — to take personal risks. It was always in the back of my mind that while I didn’t want it, one day I’d most likely get it.
Almost a year after the shelter at home order and vaccines starting to be administered, and while on a ski vacation with my husband, daughter, and her friends, it happened. My daughter had a twenty-four-hour fever, and while my husband wanted to manifest that she was just run down from moving out of her apartment, I had a bad feeling. As we had done another time with a similar scare, a couple of us road-tripped to a testing site.
All of us in the ski house tested positive — except for those who already had the virus. It was surreal after the negative test results, that at times felt like craps… ‘show me antibodies’… Negative…. CRAP! And then to see in a report the word “POSITIVE” for SARS-COVID-19. After I read the results, I sat back in bed resigned. I hoped for the best knowing it was a marathon not a sprint and the end was not always in sight.
Fortunately, we all got it mildly. I temporarily lost taste and smell, was exhausted at the end of the day, and had brain fog. After the requisite ten days of isolation, I still wanted to reintroduce human contact slowly, and the gym required a full fourteen days to return. I was restless from being trapped in the apartment, so I put on my running shoes, a double mask, and headed for Central Park. Almost a year to the date, I started running.
While no longer considered contagious, I was still recovering from the virus. My blood oxygen levels were normal, but I was weak. The course that had become easy was a challenge. I allowed myself to not be upset, nor have regrets, as on that first run back, I had to walk a large part of the course to complete it. Each day, I slowly healed, and my endurance returned. I can now run without stopping.
It was unseasonably warm for early February in New Orleans. I was running the Mardi Gras marathon. My Team in Training running group did our peak training in the coldest of winter days up North, so we were not prepared.
As I stood on the starting line, I imagined with dread twenty-six-mile markers. Twenty-six miles… What was I thinking? To ward off performance anxiety, I consciously decided not to think about the finish line, but to enjoy the journey. Run in the moment.
I also recalled my physically draining childbirth of intense painful contractions that lasted over three and a half hours — the time I expected to finish the marathon. I said to myself, “You survived childbirth. You can survive this!”
I was running strong, feeling good, and making good time, but then after mile twenty, I hit the infamous wall. It’s this unknowable thing that happens to your body. There is no mind over matter. Your body just stops like a car on its last fumes of gas.
I was determined to complete the race I trained diligently for. I dragged my limp, cramping body through the last miles of the race, and then I saw the finish line in the distance. The adrenaline took over, and I broke through the wall. Out of nowhere, my body started running, sprinting actually. As I crossed the finish line, at that very moment I proudly became a marathon runner and nothing else mattered.
