When any kind of national or local tragedy occurs, my
default setting is a frenzied devouring of any information I can find on the
subject, voraciously reading and trying to make sense of it all. On September
11, I stared open-mouthed in my Honors Geometry class as news rolled in, on the
cusp of 15 and full of fear, unable to look away. When I read about the first
reports of the Sandy Hook shooting, I was glued to my computer, gchatting with
Casey and crying. We called our moms, reading and keeping each other in the
loop as more and more information surfaced. Yesterday, I stood dripping in a
towel, just emerged from the shower when I heard my phone vibrate. I could
barely choke out the words to tell Bailey what had happened as I saw the
headline.
Explosions? At a finish line?
As a runner, the finish line is the pinnacle of a job well
done; a place to do a little softshoe that your body withstood the test you
just gave it. A place to celebrate the fact that even if you had to listen to
your PowerSong 7 times and took a minute per mile longer than normal, you
finished the race.
It’s where my friend Emily propelled me forward the last
half mile of my half marathon when I was feeling weak and woozy and unsure why
I’d ever decided it was worth it to run 13.1 miles to begin with. This was the
place these people had trained and worked and missed happy hours and sleeping
in on Saturdays to be.
I read more and more yesterday. The discussions of the
sounds of the explosions, the blood on the sidewalk, the limbs torn from people’s
bodies. I thought I might throw up. I kept reading. Searching for more
information, needing more information, desperately needing to understand how
and why something like this could happen. Needing to understand why people are
so full of hate and rage and violence.
I run for a lot of reasons; one of them is certainly as a
way to offset the anxiety I feel and have always felt about the world, to give my frenetic energy
another space to take hold that is not my brain. When I am in motion, my brain
can stop obsessing about things like dark gathering clouds and thunderstorms
(the weather phobia I saw a psychiatrist for as a child after Hurricane Opal),
the odds of a stranger being able to break through a deadbolt AND a regular
lock on my front door and steal everything I own, or the likelihood that I
might be in the wrong place in the wrong time.
Yet, in the wake of events like yesterday or Sandy Hook or
September 11, I can’t stop or slow down enough to put myself into physical
motion. I can’t process. I can’t do anything but feed the manic frenzy inside
my head. The frenetic fear gives way to hopelessness about the state of
humanity, something that can’t be reconciled with my ceaseless, normal optimism,
leaving it feeling shredded. The echo of a stomachache, not unlike the ones
that sent me to the nurse’s office weekly at Forest Avenue out of fear from
puffy white clouds that might carry thunderbolts, still remains. Something
absent, vacant fills my head.
My first thought this
morning, as I opened a news app to see if there was new news, new information,
was how I was ever going to coax myself across another finish line again. My
race buddy, Laura and I, just signed up for a 5K next weekend; my legs felt
paralyzed at the thought.
And the first article I came to was about a 78-year-old man,
who had been knocked down by the blasts, so close to the end of the race. AND
HE GOT UP AND FINISHED IT. Seriously. I don’t know if I could finish a marathon
in the best of conditions, but good lord, this man who is clearly hearty of body
and spirit, finished it.
The next article was about dehydrated runners who had
finished the race helping to care for victims in the medical tents after the
explosions. Weak and exhausted, they
helped to carry and lift and aid those who had been hurt. Such is the
constitution of the kind of person who runs marathons.
A third told stories of people racing inward to assist,
coming together for a “27th mile”, just like the Mr. Roger’s quote
says. Rather than running for their lives, people were giving each other coats,
helping to move the wounded, coming together to get to a safer place.
So, even though today, my mind is manic and my heart is full
of sadness and fear, I have found my optimism justified. The world is bursting
at the seams with people who are good, who are willing to help, to love, to
come together; it’s just really hard to see that sometimes in the wake of
events that are terrifying and huge and inexplicable. I am training for the
Soldier Field 10 Mile and today, my training plan says I need to run 4 miles. I
will ignore the anxious ache in my stomach, the fear of being in the wrong
place at the wrong time and I will run my run and keep crossing Finish Lines
because of what they are and have always been. I implore you to find a way to do the same.
Boston, you are on my heart and in my soles.
