You can eat and run, go number 2 and run, and even cry and run.
I know I had to do my second long run this weekend to get ready for my race next weekend. I started about 9ish this morning after sleeping in. Got my ultra vest (this is a vest that is made to hold water and food) with some snacks and did my usual loop of pavement and some trail running. About halfway through it hit me like a punch. I…I just felt like shit. Anger, depression, sadness, and despair. The extreme heat added to make this all so suffocating. Like I was in a microwave turning around between these intense lows.
I’ve heard some ultrarunners talk about this state before. “The Lows”: (Sometimes it’s inevitable to be overcome with extreme negative emotion sporadically while exercising for a very long time.) Although I wasn’t in any pain, my legs and body felt pretty good. But I just felt so alone, and sad. I’m sure It would’ve been a real sight. I’m very glad I was wearing sunglasses, because otherwise the middle-age couple with their chocolate lab would’ve seen my puffy eyes and sad expression. Come to think of it, they probably did hear my curses and sobbing from around the bend. oh well…🤷♂️
After some breaths and some time alone in the woods. I pushed forward and put one foot upon the other. But Like so many other times, I couldn’t help but be concentrating on something completely separate from this experience for the rest of the run. Like I was trying to distance myself mentally. I started remembering a lesson one of my acting teachers taught our scene study class years ago.
If you’d made it to this site you probably have gained, or at least I hope you have, that I’m an actor. I still like to think of myself as a student, and have taken up running as another passion. But rather quickly, running and acting are now my only true goals. They often overlap I’ve found.
🎭
We usually sat there, either in purple stackable chairs, or in a circle on the hardwood floors. Plenty of room as the sunlight usually filtered in the tall windows in each corner. The kind of space that you could see a dance class being run, something that evokes a place of being publicly private.
We were on the Chekhov section, moving into the Russian playwright’s territory. After a riveting handout about life during this period of the czars rule, Steve, our professor, went on to describe how to best think of the acting pitch to approach these characters.
To the best of my memory, he described a sort of emotional swing or pendulum, that these people quite violently and quickly move between. Happiness and sorrow for example. In these plays it’s perfectly normal for a person to move quickly between them, or experience them simultaneously. You needed to try and hold on to these and then let yourself go between these emotional points with the textual clues that Chekhov gives us. It wasn’t so much as a sharp turn, but trying to have a good awareness of where their swing was at that time.
🏃♂️
While going over the small iron bridge that was the last landmark for the final push. I got sight of the last blacktop hill. I think I could smell the rubber on my shoes melting from the climb. On a particularly steep or long inclines I tell myself, “pull the rope”. I imagine a rope is extending out my belly and pulling me up like an anchor, and I grab on to it by swing my arms out forward and start charging up. This helps me switch gears like I’m riding a bike. I could feel myself rising out of the low melancholy that was the theme of my entire morning. But i still repeated and climbed. Pull that rope. Pull that rope. Pull that rope.
Then it was over. I was at the top, and my watch vibrated saying I’m done. It wasn’t some marvelous achievement. And there wasn’t a crowd. It was still really hot and disgusting. But I didn’t feel as bad as I did when I started. I think the rope was the track, or path of my emotional swing. I was the swinging pendulum that went so far in one direction that it needed some serious muscle to shake myself, or to readjust and go in a different direction.
I wasn’t overly happy. I didn’t get that runners high that everyone talks about. It just brought me to a new awareness of how to hold things in as an actor and an athlete; how you can pull that swing and ride it to get somewhere new emotionally. I felt I learned a little about how to not try and power through those lows, but how to just let them go with you and make you adjust accordingly.
Pull that rope, but don’t let go, hang on, and see where it takes you.
-Jesse, An Actor that Runs
