Not to talk about the weather, but…

Posted March 19th, 2005 by Michelle

… it is truly extraordinary outside. Not 72-degrees-sunny-breezy extraordinary, but crazy confused and wonderful. It POURED all morning, and then it just got mad outside. Bursts of downpours followed by warm sun, sprinkles, then wild winds. You’d need your whole closet to properly dress for this day.

I’ve realized how much New York is still in me. (No bad jokes here, Sean.) I was able to rent my cottage because I was the first to respond, and then I systematically romanced my landlady-to-be. If I ever get this car, it will only be because I was the first to call and because I have persevered. I’ve been waiting to buy a VW Golf for over a month now- it’s exactly what I want- but it has had some issues passing smog and now is in the shop awaiting a new catalytic converter. Anyway, there is a good chance that on Wednesday it will be mine. People were calling for both the cottage and the car up to a month after they were listed, thinking they might still be available. There is a tempo here, a lackadaisical pace that runs the whole valley, and as of yet, I’ve been unable to fall in step. I’m accustomed to everyone being at least fifteen minutes late to hour-long meetings; it seems as though if we can’t fix it in forty-five minutes, it can’t be done. Anyhoodle…

Yesterday, for the first time since I moved here, my body felt different. I was walking up the stairs to my work and my legs felt strange in my pants. It’s hard to describe. Just a week ago today, last Saturday, I finally figured out how to run. Not, you know, how to sorta hop from one foot to the other whilst propelling myself, but how to keep going when every part of me is screaming “THIS IS BORING AND STUPID AND DOESN’T FEEL GOOD AND LET’S EAT FRENCH FRIES”.

I cycled almost 400 miles in four days during the Northeast Aids Ride a few years ago, and there must have been a hundred moments during that ride when I crested a hill just to see a vast, steep, new one waiting for me on the other side. One day on that ride there were forty “hills of note”. Of NOTE. That didn’t count any of the little ones.

When you hit hill of note 25, and you know you have at least 15 more to go, and you have at least 40 more miles to go, and you rode all day yesterday, and have two more days ahead of you, you are presented with a choice. You stop, let the sweep truck pick you up, and get to camp early and get first dibs on the taco bar. OR, you keep going. You seem to lose the connection to your legs because you are so far past your breaking point but they keep going, they keep circling, they keep pushing and pulling you up the hill. When you round the bend of hill 40 and people are screaming and cheering and someone yells, “WHO JUST RODE YOUR FIRST CENTURY?” and you raise your fist and your friends are smiling around you and you are abso-fucking-lutely sobbing from the pain and exhaustion, you know that something has happened and you are just a little different than you were yesterday.

Nothing like that has happened to me in a long time. I reached that point too many times in my years in New York, having no idea how to pace myself, never stopping until I landed in the hospital with migraines or hemorrhoids or a bike wreck. I came to Napa to recharge, and god knows I’ve done that. I’ve learned how to be soft, I know what it’s like to be rock hard, and I want to gravitate to the space between where I can be most useful. My friends here don’t really know the authentic me; they know someone plagued with an ugly mixture of self-loathing and pride. But I feel as though I am rediscovering me, and that is what is most important. I feel like I’ll be able to do it right this time.

I’ve been power-walking/jogging almost every morning for a couple of months now. I’ll jog for a minute, then power walk for a while, then jog, then walk. No matter the weather, it’s gorgeous down my road, so it’s easy to get up at 6:30 AM and get outside. But last Saturday, I was jogging, and then I realized I was past the marker where I usually start to walk again. And I kept on going, and kept on going, and suddenly it was like that feeling I had as a teenager when we went on a road trip to Santa Cruz and I didn’t eat meat for three days. Then, I said to myself, “Well, if I can do this for three days, I can do it for the rest of my life”. And I have. Or like in high school when I was in yet another unbearable class and I would say to myself, “I can do this for forty-five minutes. What’s forty-five minutes? I can do this for twenty. For ten. For five” until the class would end. So, Saturday, I passed the next marker, and the next, and then realized that if I could run for ten minutes, I could run for twenty. If I could run one mile, certainly I could run two. Two translated into four this morning, in the pouring rain. Because yesterday, my legs were different in my pants. They were markedly stronger, barely smaller, as if the last few months of exercising were suddenly slapped awake by my short runs.

I’m still chubby as hell, and by god, my writing about it is not an open invitation for anyone in my family to give me shit about it. And this is probably no big deal to any of you runners out there. But it reminds me that I can climb hill 40 and still get back on the bike tomorrow.