Caring for the vessel

Running to acquire the void, running alone and in the dark for the obliteration of the mind, treat yourself like your own dog, just exercise, it's not that deep

A few months ago, I had a horrible day at work. I was sitting at my desk, rapidly losing my mind. I went down my usual Youtube rabbit holes—woman in the pacific northwest harvesting backyard tomatoes, anonymous Japanese housewife making shrimp tempura for her husband, twenty-something-lookalike Asian American woman in a major metropolitan area drinking a beautiful matcha latte and living a life essentially identical to my own¹—but they all failed to alleviate my suffering. Then, noticing the sun was going down, I changed into my running clothes, stretched half-heartedly, and set off for the park.

The run was the first I’d done alone in a long time. Last year I got into the habit of running with other people². It was a shift from how I thought about running for the first two years: solitary and at night, a plunge into a deep, thoughtless pit.

When I run with other people, the sun’s still out and we’re talking—about work, about life, recent things they’ve made for dinner, whether they believe in redemption, how they make friends as adults, how they deal with the passage of time³. When I run alone, I’m freed from the sensation of being trapped in my own head. I am just muscle, tendon, bone, ligament, everything working in concert to alchemize sugar into motion. Sometimes at the end of a run, it feels like I’m waking up from a long dream.

“I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

It was an out-and-back, four miles one way, four miles back. After the first mile I was still upset. After the third, the bad feelings felt smaller, something I could wrap my hands around. After the sixth, I was finding it hard to remember why I had felt so terrible. After the eighth, I just felt glad to be alive.

I came to a stop and felt the night breeze on my arms, saw the moon hanging in the sky, brilliant and enormous, tenderly unaware of my existence.

“I’ll be happy if running and I can grow old together.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about burnout. Work stress is a unique challenge for our brains that have evolved to fear lions—when someone disagrees harshly with you in a meeting, it feels like you’re being chased by a creature that wants to eat you, but you’re boxed in by etiquette and professional standards. You can’t reach across the table and slap your coworker. You smile and move on, even though your body is still in a state of fight-or-flight. Pent up, the stress has nowhere to go.

“…the strategies that deal with stressors have almost no relationship to the strategies that deal with the physiological reactions our bodies have to those stressors…stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle⁴

One way to get unstuck is through exercise. This isn’t some novel, radical thing. Most basic health advice comes down to a few things: sleep enough, eat a vegetable, move, have good relationships, do meaningful things. I guess I’d just spent most of my life thinking I was smarter than my emotions. I thought if I did all the other things, I could skip the exercise.

Part of this is motivated by how I saw myself for the first twenty-seven years of my life. For most of that time, exercise was something I actively despised. I was a scrunched-up little nerd, the kid nobody wanted to pick for their dodgeball team. For years I joked that my high school sport was speech and debate⁵. In college, my parents used to call me and insist I shouldn’t go to sleep without having done at least five sit-ups⁶.

I was a person who lived mostly in my mind. I was used to analyzing my emotions in long, expository paragraphs. I believed I could think my way out of any problem. This got particularly bad in the years following the pandemic when I found it hard to go outside, once spending so many days indoors that I forgot what shoes felt like.

During this time, my therapist said to me, you know, you tend to intellectualize your emotions. You seem to have a lot of pent up energy. Have you thought about doing something somatic, releasing it in some way? Taking a warm bath, dancing wildly for a few minutes, lifting weights, just something? My something is swimming. Maybe you could find your something too.

…

A few years ago, I developed an interest in the idea of structurally automating good decision-making. This can be an environmental thing (e.g. lay out your gym clothes the night before) or a logistical thing (e.g. sign up for a recurring exercise class that charges a no-show fee).

I thought about this in the context of happiness. In many ways, this feels impossible—how can happiness, this strange, inchoate thing, be engineered to occur with some degree of regularity?

Some people think the easiest way is getting a dog. It makes sense; dogs love unconditionally and visibly express their devotion at every opportunity provided, but more than that, they need to go outside, get exercise, socialize. In serving those needs, you’re forced into the broader world outside the small space of your apartment. Strangers smile at your dog and then at you. They strike up conversations. They reach out and pet your dog and in that small way, the seemingly impenetrable barrier between you and the other person is broken. There is some sense of shared humanity in your mutual appreciation for the fluffy animal.

In a lot of ways, running has helped automate some degree of happiness by having me treat myself as my own dog⁷. I take myself outside, on long runs in the park, across bridges, from borough to borough to borough, ending at bakeries, at friend’s houses, to my office where I sit on the rooftop and stare at trucks that occasionally get stuck on Brooklyn Bridge. I run in the sun and rain and snow and there’s a childlike joy in feeling the fresh air on my face and remembering what weather patterns are like. I start conversations with strangers and feel buoyed by the mysterious love of thousands of people I haven’t even gotten a chance to know properly yet. Maybe I should write to my old therapist.

…

Over time, the doormen in our building have gotten used to seeing me head out for my runs. The other day one of them said to me, “It’s so incredible that you run basically every day.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling sheepish. Then, without thinking, I said, “You know. I think that I need it. Without it, I’d just go crazy.” It was what I told a friend a few weeks later when he asked me, “How can you find the time to do so many hours of running every week?”

I said, “I think this is what I need to do at this phase in my life to be a good friend, to be a good partner, to be a good daughter, so it’s not a matter of how, it’s a matter of, what do I need to do to make it happen.”

And it’s strange and beautiful and remarkable and the most obvious thing in the world that no matter how much I over-intellectualize and overthink, there is a certain amount of living in the body I need to do. The act of bounding towards something feels like an act of faith, the flinging forward, the rising, the falling, the picking up of the feet to do the same thing over and over again.

1. I will write a whole separate post on the strange voyeurism of lifestyle content where you’re just basically watching someone live a life that is identical to your own. Part of this might have emerged from several years of remote work during COVID where I couldn’t have in-person friendships with coworkers—it’s my mom’s working theory, at least.

2. One thing about entering your 30s is that your friends split into two camps, (1) the people who become obsessed with exercise (specifically endurance sports for some reason) and (2) the people who despise exercise with a burning passion. As the average age in your friend group goes up, group (1) tends to steal people from group (2). I have a friend who’s gotten into triathlons and all of our hangouts for the past year have been during runs.

3. I have a theory that trail / ultra runners are particularly fun to talk to because there’s something about running 50 miles + that forces a degree of introspection and self-reckoning that makes it impossible to not be interesting as a person.

4. I have a lot of issues with this book but I found its description of the stress cycle interesting so eh, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater I guess?

5. Vocal cords are muscles!

6. I disliked exercise so much that I once drafted a short story about a tech company that does “consciousness swapping” for your during a workout so your consciousness can be replaced by an athlete’s while the exercise is happening so you don’t have to be there for it :’)

7. I’d really like to get this on a hat