#run31: running and my one little word(s).

My one little word for 2020 is resilience.

I haven’t written about it much here, either pre- or mid-pandemic, mostly because I have been too busy trying to live it. Resilience seems an obvious choice, perhaps, for someone rebuilding after a divorce; I wondered if I didn’t need a word that sounded a little brighter, more joyful. But resilience, it turns out, is the perfect word for this crazy year, which keeps throwing us new curveballs even as we scramble to field the latest ones. And, along with several of my other recent words, resilience is a perfect companion to my running.

Like so many parts of our lives – exercise, relationships, housework, even getting out of bed in the morning – running sometimes depends on an inner toughness, a willingness and an ability to keep doing the damn thing. This morning I woke up to grey skies and misty rain (though at least it wasn’t cold), and I had to decide to lace up my sneakers and go out for a run, knowing it might be miserable at first. (It was.)

I’ve run when I was tired, when I didn’t feel like changing clothes or getting sweaty, when my hamstrings were protesting from an intense yoga class, when it was cold or dark or I was just not in the mood. I’ve been lucky so far to mostly escape injuries (knock wood), but I have also run after a few minor incidents that had me worried about the state of my body. I want to keep running for as long as I can, and that means not just running when the weather is glorious or when I feel like it. My running is resilient: it has so far survived three winters, a divorce, a move, a stone bruise and the first eleven thousand months of a pandemic. As I keep on with it, I remember that I am, too.

I started running in 2017, when I was following magic to unexpected and sometimes challenging places. Running, as you know by now, has proven to be both. I kept running throughout 2018, when my word was grit – a word applicable to running on every level I can think of. And in 2019, when my word was thrive, I ran miles and miles on paths both new and familiar, determined to thrive even though I had no idea how to navigate the collapse of my marriage and all the attendant changes.

We are two-ish months away from 2021, and I don’t know as yet what my word for the year will be. But I’m betting that whatever it is, it will resonate with my running life in some way. I’ll carry it with me, the way I carry these other words in my bones and blood, all of them invisible but vital to who I am.

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