There are good and bad patches during a race, and it’s your job to get out of the bad ones as quickly as possible and hang onto the good ones.
Deena Kastor
One of the universe’s gifts is that the right words tend to find you at the right time. I stopped during my evening walk a few nights ago to copy the above quote down from my audiobook (Deena Kastor’s Let Your Mind Run). Obviously there’s a big life metaphor here but when it struck me it was all about where we are now: isolated in the midst of a pandemic.
This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint — the cliché adage has been repeated in different contexts over the past few weeks. For my life, it means working from home, self-isolating, and dealing with the collective uncertainty and anxiety we’re all experiencing in some measure. On week four of social distancing, I can safely say I feel like we’re out of the “sprint” phase (if there ever was one).
Deena Kastor is a marathoner (a medaling Olympian, at that) and I find it fascinating tracking distance runner’s thought processes as they race. It’s why I keep consuming so many of their books. And just as in the long run, we are going to go through good and bad patches as we deal with the immediate and lasting impacts of COVID-19. I feel that in my day-to-day: good days where I’m dancing, bad days where I’m struggling, mediocre days where I seem to run the gambit.
We can’t control that there are going to be ups and downs — at least I can’t — but I can use all the tools I have to work through the downs quickly and hold onto those ups. Honestly some days that means I just need to reset and try again tomorrow. Others it means switching up my environment (lighting a candle, playing some music, standing up to stretch) to try to shake some negativity or lethargy out of my body.
That’s all I can do: deal with what’s happening in the moment and pull on what I know. That’s my job: to get through it.
With Love,
Natalie