the phone rings before dawn because of a crisis on another continent, I can’t go back to sleep. I leave Kurt asleep in bed and I put on my running shoes. I follow the trails into the mountains. The rising sun feels like warm hands on my shoulders. I can breathe. When I run, I count exhales, not seconds. Time seems to slow down. Deer graze so close to the trail I can almost touch their outstretched ears.
When I run, I know whether I am doing well by the way my body feels, not by what anyone else says. Then comes the moment when all thoughts fall away and all that is left is my wild, animal body. This is who I am.
Running on a trail, alone, I am not responsible for the success of a company, or for the success of our marriage. Nobody needs me. I want to keep running and never stop.
4
One day, I wake up and try to say good morning to the kids, but I can’t. My tongue cramps and no sound comes out. Seconds pass, and my tongue works fine again, but I notice a sharp pain at the back of my head, right at the top of my spine.
“Are you okay?” ask Cole and Hazel when they see me stop and grip the kitchen counter in pain.
“Fine. Fine,” I say dismissively, and get back to making their school lunches. When the headaches and tongue cramping occur a few days in a row, I call my doctor. I think, maybe I hurt something when I carried a heavy backpack uphill recently. Maybe a vertebra is out of place.
Dr. Pedersen’s walls are a pale brown color with nothing on them but a few diplomas and an anatomical poster of the human body. I sit on the crinkly white paper on the examining table. My doctor is just a few years older than me. Her blonde hair is cut in a professional bob, and she wears a sporty skirt. She always moves quickly, talks quickly, and smiles quickly. I like her; we are not quite friends, but good acquaintances. Our kids are a few grades behind hers at the same neighborhood schools. She asks me about the headaches.
“Any dizziness?”
“No.”
“Squeeze my fingers tightly. Now touch your thumb to each forefinger. Can you touch your nose with the tip of your pointer finger? Good. Stand up. Walk in a straight line.”
“Is this a sobriety test?” I ask.
“If it were, you’d pass. You’re sober. And your brain is fine.”
“So why is my tongue cramping?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t like the sound of that. Let’s do an MRI scan of your skull.”
A few weeks later, I am back in her office, the headaches and tongue cramps still bothering me.
“The MRI came back clean and normal. You can breathe easy now,” my doctor says.
“That’s a huge relief. So what is causing the headaches?” I ask.
“How long do you sit in front of a computer each day?” Dr. Pedersen asks.
“At least four hours.”
“I’d start there.”
I go home and talk to Kurt.
“The doctor says I should get up and move around every twenty minutes,” I tell him.
“You were never the sitting down type anyway. I’ll build you a standing desk,” he offers.
“Could you add a treadmill?”
“Slow down, Seabiscuit. Let’s see how the standing part goes first.” Then Kurt stays up all night to build me a standing desk. I stay up, too, to keep him company. It’s the first time in a while that we do something together, just the two of us. It feels good.
I am grateful for my new desk, but the headaches persist. I see doctors, chiropractors, massage therapists, and physical therapists. Each specialist is convinced that the problem is my pillow. I buy hard pillows, soft pillows, buckwheat pillows, lima-bean-shaped pillows, foam neck pillows, body pillows. There are so many pillows covering our bed that Kurt wonders, “Are the pillows having babies?”
I make an appointment with a highly-recommended massage therapist who works with triathletes and Olympians. After I try massaging my neck and head for a few weeks, my tongue cramping goes away. The headaches persist but are manageable with ibuprofen and the bodywork she gives me. I am convinced it is just stress.
#
In November 2015, the headaches are manageable enough that I run the New York City marathon to celebrate my friend Sarah’s birthday. I am intimidated by Sarah and my other running partners; they are all female champions at this distance, with several of them having run marathons under three hours. Fear now says, “They’re real runners. You’re an imposter.” They run and talk and I do my best to keep up, breathing heavily. “You’re holding them back.” I listen to Fear and back off. I don’t tell them how I feel. Instead, I join them on the short, easy days, and usually skip the intense speed workouts.
We wake up at three thirty in the morning in New York City on a cold, dark, race day. At the start, there are thousands and thousands of people. I lose my friends almost immediately. I am used to running on trails, with almost no one around. They must be ahead. Don’t let them down. Keep up. I feel frantic and lost. How will I find them again? I listen to the rhythm of my own feet. My pace is too fast; it is unsustainable. But I have to go faster to catch up. For a few miles, I attach myself to a group of Dutch men in orange shirts who are running strong. I try to stay with them, but I am straining to keep up. I have a headache. Where are my friends? There’s no use. I am way behind.
At mile twenty, I want to quit. I slow down to a shuffle. My friends will finish way ahead of me. An African-American woman on a crowded sidewalk in the Bronx shouts, “I see you, Susie. You CAN do this!” She must be reading my shirt. I had written my name on the front in black Sharpie pen.
“You GO, girl! Do ya hear me, Susie?” Here was a woman who didn’t know me at all. I was just a random white lady. My guess was we didn’t have much in common, but she saw me struggling and rooted for me. That big-hearted gesture motivated me to finish strong.
I cross the finish line in a decent time with the Bronx woman’s strong voice and words of encouragement still ringing in my ears. I want to tell my friends about how much her words meant to me, but they are not at our meeting spot. Maybe they are already having lunch somewhere? It turns out they were behind me the whole time. While I ran frantically, convinced that they were faster than me, I missed the fun. They ran a relaxed, easy race and finished together. Running easy was an option?
5
Back home in Colorado, the headaches are a part of life. I wake every morning with a heavy pain at the back of my skull, take a couple of ibuprofen, and do yoga to improve my posture before putting in hours in front of the computer. I get a massage as often as I can.
When I ask my massage therapist what she thinks is wrong with me, she says, “I don’t tell this to just anyone, but I am often in touch with my clients’ spirit guardians and they say things.”
“Oh,” I say nervously. “What do my spirit guardians say about me?”
“That you were an eagle in your past life. That’s why you can run so fast.”
“Cool,” I manage to
