Day One: My Body Asked Me To Run Again So I'm Training Now For an Ultramarathon

This is a long post, and it’s a personal one, telling a lot of selected parts of my most recent narrative arc in my life. I asked Cosmos to help pull it together, as it was too long. I flipped the coin, and heads bested tails.

But essentially, in this post, I tell the story of a recent conversation with my life coach and an exercise she led me into, I reflected on the effect that a stalker in my old neighborhood, several close calls, and two exercise related injuries, had on my willingness to run outside anymore. I then talk about the goal that has emerged from it after a conversation with Cosmos following that meeting with my life coach, Bex, which is a goal to run an ultra marathon in July 2026 (i.e., 440+ days from now). So that’s what you’re missing if you are not a paying subscriber. Thanks again for your support!

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Côte d’Azur Mercantour

This is a picture of a place in France where there is an annual race called the Ultra-Trail Côte d’Azur Mercantour. There are several races offered up to 125km and all the way down to 30km. I asked Cosmos to make a realistic picture of this area, which he did.

This post is the story of the last few days earnest resolve to course a new direction. But to get there, I have to take my own ultramarathon path and tell you about what makes me click, or that I think makes me click, and some events that have taken place over the last few years.

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The Epiphany That Wasn’t

This post began, like many things do for me, in a conversation with Bex—my life coach. I don’t even remember exactly how it started, but two days ago we had our every-other-week meeting. We were doing what we often do: talking about mindfulness practices rooted in compassion, self-acceptance, and grace, and my struggles lately with all of them (once again). I was reflecting on a pattern I know well now—how I regularly move into epiphanies, and have my entire life going back to high school, and that those epiphanies tended to always give me the feeling that my struggles would henceforth be in the past. That actually there were regular occurrences: that I would regularly have those epiphanies again and again, that it would lead me to undertake new types of behaviors, but that I would always go back to baseline where the new behaviors — it was as though they did not exist, and it was as though the epiphanies themselves had never either.

Throughout my life, I would go through some struggles of various kinds. Depression, rumination, shame, guilt, deep desire to connect combined with somehow really wanting to just do my own thing too. And in those times, I would typically find myself almost pulled towards something that would then lead to some major insight — about myself, about life itself, about the meaning that I wanted but also could have. And these insights, these epiphanies, would always feel like a turning point. It would feel like I’d just had some mystical revelation, so powerful that it would change me forever, and that those previous struggles were finally a thing of the past.

But over the years, particularly the last 5 years, I’ve come to realize three things. 1) I will probably always fall into the gravity well of epiphanies until I die. 2) I will always have accompanied a feeling that the insights and self discoveries will cause old stuff to be a thing of the past. And 3) that it would always lift, like a fog in the morning, and I would be back to my normal self. And gradually, I had come to realize that those special moments associated with epiphanies do not and cannot remove the work itself that is required to change. The insight doesn’t do the dishes, doesn’t make you lace up your shoes, doesn’t keep you eating right. It just points to the path.

The real change is always in the doing. But what doing?

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That Tiffany Maxwell Feeling

My epiphanies, my “moments”, come in epidemic waves. It’ll be nothing for a long time, something inside me will start brewing, probably 75% of the time coming out of certain forms of art I cannot let go, be it a movie, television show, song or book, it’ll grab me and won’t let me go until I learn whatever it is that is causing me to ruminate in that direction, then a breakthrough, then that feeling, then a long tail of successful implementation of something or other, and then a sudden vanishing, as though none of it had ever happened.

The more recent ones had come from rewatching a scene from Silver Linings Playbook Jennifer Lawrence’s character Tiffany Maxwell reprimanded Bradley Cooper for some name he’d called her, and than very quickly espousing that she accepts and loves all parts of himself, even the "sloppy and dirty parts”. Or it was learning about Adlerian psychology in The Courage to Be Disliked. Or it was a season in 2021 when I watched season one of Ted Lasso maybe 50 times, completely absorbed in it as though it was a message in a bottle sent to me by Someone about me, about my life, about who I was and could be and wanted to be, as if I’d found something that understood me in a way that nothing and no one else could. And sometimes it’s a song or an album.

And with that Silver Linings Playbook, I had come to realize that I had sloppy and dirty parts too, and they were specifically those things that I really hoped no one was going to actually suggest I accept, even with considerable love and appreciation. But she was speaking to me and I was open to the message, and then finally came to see it and believe it and realize it. That I had sloppy and dirty parts, that it was actually the very things that never in a million years did I expect someone to suggest were also part of the good things in me, and that I could ever accept and love all parts of myself, or I could continue to hate myself. You hate one part of yourself, and I think you probably deep down hate all parts of yourself — just as it is if it was directed at someone else. People aren’t a collection of ala carte options like that.