It finally happened, the day that I suspected would come sooner or later ended up coming sooner. Due to persistent and worsening chronic back pain, and the rising cost of the healthcare I needed to treat it, I have indefinitely retired from running. Aside from some consultations about autoimmune disorders that could be causing systemic inflammation, I have tried every option available to me, and because we live at the mercy of capitalist healthcare, my insurance coverage ran out and I had to cut my losses. It was too costly. My pain levels and functionality were not responding to treatment, and there are some other things in my life I want to invest financial resources in for a season. I’m not omniscient, and I know things could change and allow me to reintroduce activity at some point in the future, but I also don’t want to fixate on recovering something that I need to let go of. Doing that, I could miss out on good things that lie ahead.
It is only beginning to sink in. It has only been two-weeks since my last run, so my body hasn’t felt substantially different. I still have all of my shoes and running gear in arms’ reach, my gels and sports drinks on the shelf ready to mix up. I powered off my running watch and stored it away, and that felt sad. I uninstalled Strava from my phone, then installed it again, but not on the front screen and with the notifications off. My Instagram feed is full of trail running content, and my legs still get a little twitchy when I’m scrolling and watching my friends’ stories. So I don’t scroll as much.
I think about some of my favorite places in the mountains and realize they are out of reach for me now. The trails around here are what connect me to the place I live, and so my sense of groundedness, my sense of place, feels uncertain. When people ask me what I love most about living in the Shenandoah Valley, the answer is always “the mountains.” But if the mountains are only something I can admire from afar, what holds me here?
I can walk and hike, and I’ve done a little of that. I can’t do much else. I’m staying off my bike except for short commutes. This is an opportunity to find out what my baseline pain levels are in a sedentary lifestyle with no medical treatment. In the few days after my last run my pain levels plummeted to zero. A four-hour car trip got me four bad days. It got better, then I tried harvesting some ears of corn in my garden. I picked five, then crumpled when I reached for the sixth. 48-hours of touch-and-go and now we’re back to reasonable. Gardening as a vehicle for connecting with land is not an option as my functionality has diminished in recent weeks and months.
I woke up this morning wondering about my relationship to my body in a possible post-athletic era of my life. My metabolism will change. I might gain wait. My weight and body type have always been pretty stable (long and lanky), and I’ve mostly been comfortable with that. I think even my junior-high peers calling me a string-bean mostly rolled off my back. But still, being strong and athletic has given me some confidence I might lack otherwise. At one point in my early 30’s I was 25-pounds heavier, but then I started running for my mental health and I dropped to the very stable weight I’m at today. Will I feel comfortable in my body if that changes? When I have to buy new clothes (again)? Will I sign up for the gym and use the elliptical? I would be surprised if I did – fitness was never my primary motivation for running, much less managing my weight. There are truths about body image that I know intellectually that I will need to actualize as things change.
The question that was doing orbits around my head last night and this morning was “what is this body even for?” Trail running was my primary vehicle for experiencing embodiment and connection to land. It was a seamless relationship. The feeling of exertion, pushing my muscles and breath into movement with the land that sustains my body felt visceral, direct, in a way no other form of movement has. Hiking by itself doesn’t do it, at least not yet. That unity between the power of my body and the vitality of land, air, and water has driven my connection to community. It has brought me out of my individuality into community and what I call “movement movement” – the use of bodily movement in the service of political action. I have always said that any movement counts. Now I have to figure out what that means for me. It is another truth that I need to actualize for myself.
But that still doesn’t entirely answer my question. What is my body even for? It could easily end up feeling like a brain maintenance system: a complex metabolical machine that exists for the sole purpose of sustaining my intellect – a mindset that is particularly western and white supremacist and male, one that I recognize from my days in academia. But the thing that most engages me right now is writing. What does embodiment have to do with being a writer if all I technically need is a brain and the means to transmit thoughts onto paper?
As I drifted off to sleep last night I had the sensation of being a mere brain attached to an extraneous long and floppy flesh-appendage sprawled across my mattress. This new reality is challenging my sense of embodiment itself, my sense of being at home in a body, of my experience of a body as something that can give me anything other than pain and inconvenience. What if my body is no longer a vehicle for joy, pleasure, and connection? What if I experience my body as a barrier to the things I want or need? How do people with disabilities navigate these questions and experience embodiment within limitations?
Building collectivist relationships beyond my bubble will be critical for my long-term well-being. I’ve been intentionally cultivating community for the past few months, trying to establish connections and rituals that transcend my nuclear family and work. I have a faith community that offers these things – strong, stable connection rooted in ritual – but it is a tradition I don’t identify with any longer, and I don’t show up to that space as my fullest, raw, potty-mouthed queer anarchist self (I mean… I don’t even show up at home that way). These kinds of relationships are something we all need, and I think I will be less likely to experience my body as a barrier if I am in reciprocal relationships that aren’t based on any goal other than being together as an end in itself.
The past year-and-a-half has been a pressure cooker in a good way, and that is largely because of what I have gotten to do athletically. It is the time I felt like I came into my own as a runner-activist, it is the time running helped me engage with my ancestral history, it is the time I became part of Renew Earth Running and learned a shit ton of new things about Indigenous communities and traditions and land back, and it is the year I ran three 50K’s and a 50-miler, placing strong in all four, plus throwing in two hot half-marathons and some epic solo adventures for good measure. It is the year I started a blog and named it Runarchism.
I am proud of what I got to do and be a part of. I am trying not to dwell on what I could have accomplished if I’d had more time, if I’d had the opportunity to live up to my body’s potential. But the body I have came with this particular spine with all its woes, so I think it did pretty well all things considered. My coach would caution me not to say this is forever, because speaking with finality registers differently in the body. But even if I do come back to running in four months with renewed insurance and a fresh deductible to pay, my body will not be better. But my life will be different. I have no intention of waiting in a holding pattern for four months. The world we live in is in crisis and I am not getting any younger. In four months I will be working on getting a novel published, and I am already supporting land defense work with the funds I am not spending on healthcare to keep myself in running condition. I can see my priorities shifting, and my life will shift with them. If I start running again, it will be four months into a new era of my life.