Running, to myself

Running, To Myself

They say don’t run from something, run to something. I’ve ran my entire adult life – to get in shape for lacrosse season in high school, to destress during finals in college, to combat cycles of depression, to strength my body, to run through the sickening need to be a certain weight. I am not a competitive runner, except with myself. While running, I am free – all I need is a pair of sneakers, a semblance of a road or path, and in a few steps, my incessant mind begins to quiet and all I hear is my breath. What a beautiful sound.

I slow my exhausted legs and tired feet to a stop. I’ve lost the only sidewalk I’ve managed to stumble upon, offering me a semblance of safety from the otherwise unfinished, increasingly busy, windy roads I’ve been running on in the early morning light the past hour. With the exception of a few barking stray dogs, and a handful of women placing their morning offerings at their temples, I’ve been completely alone running on this very early morning in Bali. I have a sense of where I’m going, yet the reality is, I have no idea.

Sweat runs profusely dripping from my legs, arms, face; down my chest and back at a rate I didn’t know what was possible. Damn, this Bali humidity is really no joke, I say to no one but myself.  The air is thick; every breath is a struggle and takes enormous effort as if I’m trying to swallow the heaviest, driest piece of a French baguette without a beverage to help wash it down.

I wipe away the abundant sweat, as I simultaneously let some of it dribble down my lips; swallowing it, tasting my salt, effort, pain. I imagine my hard-earned sweat beads flowing through my body and my veins offering me the perseverance and grit I need to make it to 16 miles. I look at my iPhone, relieved I decided to pay for the monthly phone service instead of relying on tracking down free WIFI for this month-long trip to Bali. My phone shows me that I am a blue dot somewhere in Uluwatu, Bali, a chic surfing town in the southern tip of Bali. I wish the phone knew where I really was. How did I get here?

It was a not-so-warm, yet not-so-cold mid-April morning in San Francisco when my too-busy manager based in New York joined my mid-year check in with someone from HR. I was informed that my role at the 26,000+ Fortune 500 company where I’d worked the past four years was being eliminated due to business priorities. My mind went blank. I started to scribble in my notebook, desperately trying to capture key action items as I also stared at the faces on the screen telling me I no longer had a job, my livelihood. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, I repeated to ground myself.

I received a severance package. A dear friend picked me up a few hours after the news hit and sat with me reviewing the 20-page legal document, my mind too numb to process the words. “It may not seem like it now, but this is going to be the best god-damn thing that ever happened to you,” she friend said as I sat curled up on my dark-teal West Elm loveseat, one that I ordered for myself after I started this job four years prior, finally making a salary that would offer me the chance to pay off my grad school loans and secure some financial stability as a single woman.

Earlier in the year, as I lived through odd, unexpected health ailments, “Bali” flittered through my mind. I hit me somewhere deep while sitting at my local hipster coffee shop on a random Friday morning, yet I didn’t give it much thought. It was a fleeting thought as if my intuition or a guardian angel or simply, the burnt out early 40s single woman who read “Eat, Pray, Love” many years before it was a hit book, threw it out to the universe to see if I’d be brave enough to go if given the option.

Many months later, that option presented itself. My cousin in North Carolina sent me a link to a workshop to be held in Bali designed for women business owners being organized by a dynamic, red-headed executive coach out of Raleigh, NC. When she and I spoke, she told me “Don’t wait,” so I signed up. Waiting had become a tired anthem of my life. The layoff happened a few months later throwing life up in the air, yet offering me the gift of time.

I keel over, placing my wet palms on my knees; wanting to lay my sweaty backside, camel pack and all on the dirty road with motorbikes whizzing by me. The desire to scream into the abyss that I surrender and give up starts to feel real. Because I could. I could stop right here, stop running, pull out of the marathon, and instead, allow myself have a fun, care-free trip in Bali full of sleeping in, cheap massages, and light yoga classes.

I look at my watch, I’ve run a little over ten miles. I need to hit 16 to keep up with my training schedule. When I made the decision with less than three weeks to come to Bali sooner – and stay longer – during the most difficult part of marathon training, I knew it was going to be near impossible to keep up with the schedule. There were the pure safety precautions as I was a female traveling solo and I’d need to wake up at the crack of dawn to avoid as much as the heat as possible; there was my physical endurance as I was not used to running in such oppressive heat and humidity; and there was laziness, as I could already feel the desire to write and read on a beach start to take over my commitment to keep up training.

I check my phone, giddy to have internet connection and follow my blue dot to a small, open-air gym I’d Googled the night before. My guess was they’d have a treadmill, which would offer me a respite and “break” from running on the roads. And I was right. I pay the young staff attendant the equivalent of $3 for a day pass, asking a couple of times to confirm it wasn’t $30. There were no hand towels, so instead I grab a roll of toilet paper resting on the counter, and do my best to dry my soaked body, leaving teeny specks of paper towels along my arms and legs.

I slowly ring out my black Athleta running shorts, impressed by the amount of water spewing from them as Tom crosses my mind. He’s been with me much of my ten mile run leading to the gym.

Tom, my happily-married, polyamorous-bearded-lover with a family, kids and lifestyle he adored. An uber athlete, Tom was training for his first ultramarathon in November. We’d never run together, though I often imagined his tattooed, muscular body running beside me, particularly during parts of a run when your body wants to slow to a walk so your breathing can catch up, but you don’t. You continue placing one foot in front of the other because that’s what you do when you run – you run.

As I turn on the old treadmill to begin to run again, Tom stays with me. Unsure of how long I need to go, too exhausted to do the conversion from kilometers to miles, I run and then stop when I need to, letting the treadmill continue to move as I’d pat the unrelenting sweat flowing from every pour of my body listening to the Goo Goo Dolls and other 90s pop punk bands. Nausea starts to slowly creep up the back of my throat. My legs are cramping. My sweat is scattered everywhere like a Jackson Pollock painting. I run through college angst, slow burning heartaches, unexpected deaths, asshole bosses, insane jobs, lay-offs. I keep running. Until I stop.

I’m done. It’s not quite at 16 miles, but  I know it doesn’t really matter. I sit outside the open-air gym staring mindlessly at the windy road ahead of me as a fellow Nepalese gym goer sits down at a nearby table. He doesn’t know that I’m training for a marathon, that I’ve recently been laid off, or that my heart is falling in love with a man who will never love me the same way. To him, I’m a runner. As we lock eyes for a split second, slightly smiling and nodding to each other recognizing our respective work outs and strength, I’m running to myself, I say to him through the universe.

I take out my phone and take a selfie. As I look at the image, my sweat-drenched, makeup-less face looks clear, grounded, tired; beautiful and alive.