Stress and Release

Roughly 48 hours from when I post this, I will be in terrible pain. People dodge describing it that way when they recount cross country races, but really, the most important part of competitive running is pain management. Even when you don’t have a side stitch or IT band injury or the urgent need to vomit*, there’s always a persistent pain that is less a hurt localized in a part of your body and more a message in your brain saying “This is intolerable” on infinite repeat. Every race is harder, and every race hurts more, and conference, looming just two days away, promises to be the fever pitch of the entire aching season. 

I’m still not entirely sure why I even like running. Sure, there are a lot of little good things that come out of races. One is the glory of doing well, another is experiencing little moments of adrenaline-fueled fiasco that seem a lot like war stories without the possibility of dying or killing.**. But even all added up, none of these explain why I really like racing. The only thing that comes close is that sense of relief I get from stumbling across the finish line, knowing that the pain is over and I can sleep for the rest of the day if I want to. No matter how I do in a race, that second when all the stress and hurt and fear streams off me is nothing short of magical.

But that doesn’t work as an explanation either. The relief only lasts for a few minutes at best, and then I’ll be looking forward to six hours of doing homework on the bus while my legs cramp and ache the whole way back. Compared to the weeks I spent worrying about conference and the months I spent training for it, a couple minutes of euphoria seems like a raw deal.

This cycle of stress and release seems like a trap I’ve been falling into so often that I don’t even need to look more than a week back to find another example. Last week I had mid-semester exams, the time of the year Grinnell College students rightly term “hell week.” Over the course of the week I had three papers that ran a combined total of 20 pages to write and a test to study for which I had to know over 500 individual, hyper-specific facts. Even though I’m not much of a procrastinator, plowing through those last few days left me dizzy with the pure volume of work. But the promise of perfect release from responsibilities in the form of fall break pulled me through. But that release only lasted up until the the afternoon of the first day. After that I had to admit to myself that I really getting bored.

My mom’s favorite line in literature comes from the end of Ernest Hemmingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises: “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” There it’s used to describe an impossible longing, but I think it works perfectly well to describe things we actually do achieve. Isn’t it pretty to think that spending a week doing nothing would be fulfilling? Isn’t it pretty to think that finishing conference, or even winning conference, would sustain me for the rest of my life? No matter what I tell myself, that’s inevitably what I expect going into these things, and ultimately what comes up lacking.

But sometimes it gets sort of on my nerves when mom quotes that to me. Yeah, sure, I get that nothing’s perfect, but there must be something truly satisfying out there, right? Otherwise, what’s the point? But as much as I long for it, I can’t help but doubt, having been let down so many times. I think that this is where so much of my worry and doubt from religion comes from. What would heaven even look like? Dante described it as being like a fly trapped in amber, stuck forever eternal pleasure. That’s probably a lovely idea when you’re poor and starving and striving for something to live for, but as an overprivileged young person, I can say that eternity without moving still seems like its own kind of hell. No matter how happy I was, I’d want to stretch my legs after a few thousand years.

Which I think means that I have to loop back to the suffering that started this whole quandary off. Maybe what gives running meaning isn’t the pain in the moment or the relief in the end, but simply the progress through the race, knowing I'm getting closer to the end. That edges dangerously close to the old cliché, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” But I think it goes further than that, because you have to believe in the destination, and really enjoy it at the end, for the journey to mean anything in the first place. It’s the same with my schoolwork. As much stress as it generated, I really did enjoy writing those 20 pages and learning those 500 facts. But I never would have started them if I thought the paper would never reach a conclusion or the flashcards would just keep on coming forever. This cycle of work, completion, and rest seems scary when you think about it in the big picture, everything does when it’s followed by, “And that’s how it goes for the rest of your life.” But I really wouldn’t have it any other way, especially when I’m caught up in the cycle of thrill and relief, my gaze no higher than the next project. So this is one of the rare times when the permanent answer to a serious problem might just be “Don’t think about it, it’ll be fine.”

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* Fun fact: I’ve once gone through a race with all three.

** For example, at a race two weeks ago there were these mud pits so deep and sticky that they regularly claimed racer’s shoes. One guy a couple paces ahead of me got one foot stuck in the mud and the other foot tangled up in a loose string of flags lying by the edge of the course, so when he tried to move forward, neither of his feet would budge. All his forward momentum sent him tumbling head-first into the mud and, since I was right behind him, I had to leap straight over him just to keep moving.