Things you think about when you watch the Olympics and then go for a run.

Oh, bodies.

(you’ll notice i started writing this a bit ago by the opening line…. Also, just a reminder of how meaningful it is to know you’re out there reading- a comment or heart can have a profound impact on the loneliness of this weird endeavor.)

Last night was the opening ceremonies for the 2024 Olympic Games. 

This morning I went for a run.

These days, I sit in the dark and tie my running shoes while quietly suppressing an increasingly familiar sense of dread. I run the tap and swallow the micro-dose of ego death that accompanies me on my neighborhood loop. I stretch, and find a dozen distractions that keep me from getting out the door and taking the first sluggish steps of the death march that once was the most treasured ritual of my day.

This morning I really didn’t want to run. I am, however, a dutiful slave to my routines- the more punishing, the more likely I am to adhere to them with the zealotry of a nascent convert. So out the door I trotted. 

For some entirely unknown reason, today’s run felt… dare I say pretty okay? Mostly good? Definitely not awful. There were stretches on the trail where I slipped into that rare vein of unconsciousness, the trail-runner’s shape shifter portal- where the frustratingly mortal meatsuit of an estrogen-starved middle age woman disappears and there is just a whoosh of blissful cellular detritus blowing down the trail, communing wordlessly with flora and fauna alike.  

This happy surprise had me thinking of all the athletes at the Olympics. And any athlete, really, whose life and livelihood depends on their bodies ability to show up at the starting line on race day and pull off peak performance on-demand. 

We fetishize the meritocracy of sport, the spreadsheets and training plans- the idea that those who work hardest, win. The confounding factors of reality are too mind-bogglingly complex to acknowledge.

Our bodies are an absurdly random symphony of virus, bacteria, fungus- each a cocoughany of autonomous entities themselves competing for a place on the podium. The idea that we can out-train this infinite variability, while intoxicating, attempts to steal fire from the Gods- our promethean punishment to be forever bound to an impossible pursuit of control. 

I ran, or whooshed, and grieved for the athletes who’s mitochondrial chorus would indecipherably wobble and cost them a medal, a sponsorship, a belief. 

I grieved for my own sacred and futile pursuits; the daily ritual of corporal lock-picking, the prayers and the busy-bodiness. I think about this a lot these days- I’m 52, and I have ovaries. The scales fell with my estrogen levels. Parenting, small business ownership and perimenopause, (what I’ve come to refer to as the Trifecta of Profound Humbling) have wrested from my clenched fist any remaining delusions of grandeur or control. The emotional and physical motherboard that constitutes one measly person exceeds human comprehension.

Whooshing and grieving, it dawned on me suddenly that I have extended a certain amount of grace to our complex biological systems- the somewhat quantifiable and measurable metrics of humanhood and the fever dream of optimization. I cathartically gripe with my midlife sisterhood and share the shock and awe of our mortality- gratefully, we have a shared language for this.

What I feel less able to express is the impact of all these interconnecting pieces, physical, emotional, cosmological- on our ability to conjure and midwife the birth of anything creative. There is no amino acid profile that can assist the absorption of inspiration nor any workout routine that assures artistic gains. 

Julia Cameron invites us to do our morning pages in order to clear our channels, and I do. We meditate, we sketch, we devotionally return to our work. We do this without much thought regarding the physicality of our creative practice, normally. But our sense of presence, our access to ideation, both engines of creation- they’re entangled with our brain’s ability to neurally process and our nervous system’s ability to downregulate. 

I guess what I’m wondering is this- if my body is an incalculable equation of confounding variables, and my body and soul are a symbiotic network, then how do we measure- or at the very least acknowledge- the psychic and spiritual impact of physical changes and challenges? 

We talk about how certain diagnosis (*coughperimenopause*) impact cognition, but what about the sideways implications they have on our creativity? I can feel the seismic wobble in my own work, and the ramifications for my life as a working artist are still unfolding. I lock eyes with my elders and mine their life stories for signals that as my bone density deminishes, the enigmatic minerals that constitute insight or inspiration are able to find purchase and knit.

For now, I mine and I slog-in case a whoosh should arise, and I cheer for all of us who continue to toe the proverbial starting line, wobbling our way along.