I Need Alex Honnold, Who Can’t Feel Fear, To Give Me Access To All The Feels

2018-11-12 2 Replies

For 90 minutes my body went through a rebellion: hands clutching and releasing anything they could grasp, palms sweating despite the chilly room, tears bursting out of thin air, all punctuated by the occasional gasp of joy. I was not undergoing dental work. I was not on trial. I was not fighting with a loved one.

No, I was watching a movie about a man with no boundaries and a compulsion to seek perfection, even if just for a moment. I watched him create mastery with death on the line. The man is Alex Honnold. The film is Free Solo. It was exhausting, and—oddly enough—life affirming.

I chose the film for a very specific reason: I needed to FEEL. Deeply, engagingly, with my whole body. I wanted—and received—a brutal dose of the feels. Why? I’m odd that way. I need something large to draw out feelings that seem routine to my friends and most other humans. I am slow to rile, slow to react, and am seen as so laid back that nothing much phases me.

Alex tells a similar story when he talks about how most things just don’t get to him one way or the other. His nickname is “No Big Deal”. Everyday annoyances, the daily grind, relationships: he appears a canyon. Vast, deep, immovable. Only when he gets into his comfort zone of flow—complicated, demanding climbing routes—does he start to feel the pleasure that comes from competence. Add to that the all-too-real danger of free soloing, and he can feel alive.

When I walked out of the theater I was in the right mindset to open up with a friend and explore a recent emotional quagmire. Hours earlier, I couldn’t let myself get there. I felt frustrated yet incapable of expression. Letting my mind get lost in the tension onscreen was key. Tension on Alex’s behalf, and on behalf of his friends and filmmakers. The buffeting my mind and body endured were just right. Just what I needed.

Apathetic Amygdala

Alex is odd that way, too. During the film it’s revealed that Alex has some “alternative” brain wiring, starting with his amygdala, the part of the brain that registers fear (in addition to all the other “primal” emotions). When tested in an fMRI machine—the kind that shows your brain lighting up in response to stimuli—Alex does not muster much in the way of, well, anything in the way of reactions in the amygdala. Structurally he’s fine: there’s an amygdala in there. But it’s slower to rouse than a hibernating bear.

This makes him highly unusual—even the control subject, a “thrill-seeking” climber, showed fMRI amygdala responses to shocking imagery. In Alex, this primordial deficit might not have been noticed in a conventional, non rock climbing life. If he’d opted for the civil engineer career path he started and abandoned, he might not have known that he didn’t feel things like other people did. Life just might have seemed . . . fine. Boring, but fine. He wouldn’t have known any better.

But Alex is not a civil engineer (yet; he’s still young). Instead he finds that he is able to touch perfection and truly feel alive when he is using his mastery to stay one smear away from death.

I’m no Alex Honnold.

And yet. I see some interesting parallels in how we process the world. Go big or go home is typically how I take on challenges. Everything else is so “meh” that I am doomed to fail. I don’t just break up with someone: I do that and then get rid of most of my stuff and move across the country. Rather than take a job that’s reasonable in a new company, I find a brand new subject matter in a new company and take over a whole department. Oh, and when I run, I run ultramarathons.

Yep, that’s me. Wanna go run this weekend?

When I step into a big change, I get a lump in my throat. A quiver in my belly. A deep sense of purpose that is damn near addictive. Purpose is fantastic. Purpose helps you open a door, peek through, and realize you—to remain “you”—have to step through. It’s not unlike falling in love: in both we find deep meaning and a dizzying “oh shit here we go this is happening” beginning phase.

But that kind of quivering sensation isn’t repeatable forever. Is it? We grow accustomed to nearly everything. That’s a human strength, allowing us to persevere through some truly awful shit. And it can be our downfall when we seek a meaningful life.

The bridge between those big purposeful feels and just being able to experience emotions without judgement is where I get stuck. And that’s where running comes in. A lot of running.

Endurance + Exhaustion = Feels

After an ultramarathon or an energetically challenging psychological experience (movies can do it, sometimes books, sometimes particular music) I can get to that vulnerable place. It is then that I can open up, have those heart-to-hearts if needed. My normal introvert self can’t be bothered to put up a fight when the rest of me is soooooo tired.

Yet I still wonder how sustainable that pattern is. One can’t go through daily life making big life-altering moves AND draining one’s body of energy just to experience an acceptable level of emotions and be able to connect with people.

Can you? I don’t know. It starts with an observation and a theory about normal people and normal emotions. We’re about to go deep. Buckle up.

The Emotion Is Not Strong In This One

I believe that humans are built to experience a large range of emotional intensity. And like all human characteristics the potential range varies immensely from person to person. Let’s say all emotions are on a scale from -10 to +10. A daily chart might show most people existing between -4 and +5 depending on all kinds of things from social interactions to blood sugar. Meaning: in the middle, but fluctuating a bit. This is based on observation and talking with friends and family.

Rare events (tragedy, great news) spike the numbers into the high numbers in either direction. Overall, it seems that the “normal” waves, the -4s and +5s, are good for mental health. When a person is wired to stray too far away from the norm, there will be a price paid. To the conscious mind, or to the spirit.

At one extreme, some people feel BIG feelings more often than average. They’re in those 8s and 9s too frequently. We might call them drama addicts. They probably have issues with cycling between rosy and shitty in their relationships. They could have diagnosed psychological issues. That can’t be fun.

And then there’s the other side of the bell curve: the underfeelers. Here’s where odd me and even odder Alex come in.

I’ve grown to observe my personal daily pattern between -1 and +2. Not much rocks my boat. I am aware that I could be feeling things more deeply, good and bad, but it doesn’t seem to happen organically. The rub? This also leaves folks like me untrained for bigger fluctuations that would be normal to everyone else. So when faced with a -4 or a +4, I freak out a little and go for a run to smooth things out. A bit of self-medication to open up the little release valve.

But that release valve wasn’t serving me or my relationships. After maintaining my emotional ripples at a safe level, my spirit finally made some demands. It WANTS the big ones: those -5s and +6s. It craves them. So I must create them. I do that by watching Free Solo. Or running all day long, which interestingly is the opposite of those short “valve opening” runs. Long bold and exhausting runs contain big ups and downs within, as well as a payout in emotions at the end. Or becoming a freelancer before it’s financially stable. Or moving across the country. In the meantime, I’m going to watch Free Solo, again.

I hope that in learning more about emotions and how to understand and gently let them flourish, I’ll find that joyful spirit. Because feeling the intoxication of possibility is lovely.

With much love and gratitude to Hugh MacLeod and GapingVoid.com

How To Induce Existential Terror Using An Inflatable Kayak

2018-10-13 Leave a reply

I found existential terror over just two days on the Green River outside Moab. Packrafting was going to be my next new skill, but it turned out to be far more complicated than I could have imagined.

We’ve all heard people say, “go with the flow“, intending to calm and get others to mellow out and let things happen naturally. Go with the flow even sounds harmless—you just sit back on the proverbial river and let whatever’s around guide your course. But in March, the opposite happened to me. On a literal river, in a literal blow-up boat, facing the flow transitioned into a crisis of self.

What if going with the flow was not calming but rather like trying to let go and relax during an avalanche? Or a dust storm? What if “the flow”, even as a metaphor, is a tsunami-sized wave you can’t stop, and it’s your own personal version of hell and death all rolled into one? And, jeebus, what is wrong with me? Why can’t I have FUN?

Women packrafters outside Moab Utah on the Green River in drysuits

I found myself pondering this and other obnoxiously huge thoughts when I was out on the Green River trying to have a nice packrafting and paddling skills weekend. Questioning my very purpose and meaning was not what I expected. Instead of quickly getting up to speed on stroke mechanics and how to put on a drysuit, I found myself over-metaphorizing the river itself. Each day I tried to navigate my craft downstream with varying degrees of success. I spent all my energy just trying to keep up with the group until I was exhausted, soaking wet, and freezing.

At night, I stared into the campfire and thought about death. Instead of talking to the rest of the women in the circle, I assumed a thousand-yard stare and went digging into that feeling of being out of control. I realized you can’t stop time or the creeping specter of our own personal grim reaper. Time flows, just like that river. You have to try to navigate as best you can, paddling downstream with as much skill as you can accumulate, not going too fast and not going too slow lest you get hung up on boulders or dead-spin eddies along the way.

And the river never stops. Never, ever. Until it does and that of course means you’re dead. But you don’t know if your river will end around the next curve or in the middle of the next set of frothy rapids or a bajillion miles downstream. You. Just. Don’t. Know.

Paddling isn’t so much about making speed. It’s about navigating well, avoiding traps, getting through the rough shit without a boat flip, bouncing over rocks without tearing a hole in the boat, bailing water sometimes, and just managing through everything while that water just keeps going. It feels scary to be pulled downward and to only have the chance to pivot this way or that but never to really stop. You could pull up in an eddy and rest, or spin, but the river still continues and you can’t spin forever. Or maybe you can spin forever, and then eventually your boat deflates and you get hungry and you doubt yourself and hate the water and think things like, “why can’t I just get up on the shore and stop moving and just WATCH!? Fuck.”

And that is how I discovered that paddling was no fun. River dynamics combined with my little human self whipping the paddle back and forth generated an existential terror that I could not face.

But I will. I have to. What else is there, after all?

5 Things You Need To Know About Running 100 Miles In A Day

2018-10-05 5 Replies

It was Sunday, 10 in the morning, in the vicinity of the finish line of the Stagecoach 100 mile race. I was not functioning well as a human person.

“Hey, I couldn’t find you!” said Geoff after I’d wandered off for another unplanned nap in the back of the enormous tent. An hour prior I’d been wide awake, ringing a cowbell and cheering in other racers in the morning light. Three hours prior I was sitting in a daze after my own finish wondering if that had actually just happened (yes), if I’d feel some exhilaration any moment now (no), and why my ass hurt so much (TMI).

Okay. Wait. Back up just a tiny bit. Let’s go back a little more than a day and start this sizzle reel from the beginning. It was 6 a.m. on Saturday, I was about to run my first sub-24 hour 100 mile ultra marathon, and I felt pretty damn good. But why was I even here, with this particular goal? It all goes back to a “little” horse event called the Tevis Cup.

100 Miles. One Day.

To run 100 miles and not get “lapped” by the sun. It’s the stuff of ultrarunner dreams. Those four iconic words are etched into each coveted silver buckle from Western States—the oldest 100 miler in the country. Originally, 100 miles under 24 hours was the final cutoff for the Tevis Cup, but after Gordy ran it without his horse it was clear humans could do it, too. Now, a sub-24 at the 100 mile distance is a people’s benchmark, attainable and yet still difficult. In other words, it’s the perfect goal.

For me, it took some planning, some specific training, and a lot of base building. This race was chosen specifically; I had run my 100 mile PR here, a 26:15 five years ago. Everything seemed to be in alignment. I didn’t even get injured (more than a niggle) during training. In the end, my race was a success and yet the achievement felt incredibly numbing at the same time. I was left with so many conflicting emotions, from “of course I did it, I knew I could” to “that hurt a lot but I can do it better” to “I’m already sad and I don’t know why” to “goddamn I’m tired” to “maybe I feel a little . . . yay?”

I have been doing ultras for a very long time, including 100s, yet I wasn’t sure how I would feel. Maybe I imagined it a little like Zach Miller. If you haven’t seen the end of The North Face 50 mile from 2016, give it a look. Watching that kind of redlining . . . it makes me FEEL stuff. THAT is how sport should be! And feel! And wooooooo! But for me, at 6:28 am on Sunday morning, 23 and a half hours after I started, there was not a lot of fist pumping.

Crossing the finish line I definitely felt relief that I didn’t fuck it up. See, the thing is that I knew I could break 24. My training was right, the day was right, even my cycle was exactly at the right spot. (And yes, that’s important if you are a woman trying to race. Dr. Stacy Sims, y’all.)

Weeks ahead of time, I told everyone I was going to do sub-24. It made the goal more real and more visible. And scary: what if I totally failed? If the result was that I struggled all day and finished in 25 hours, I’d feel surprised and a bit humbled and a lot embarrassed. So I needed some perspective.

Detach From Results

In order to let my legs do what they were ready to do, I put my trust in them. My heart was ready. It was the head that needed some coaching, honestly. The head controls pretty much everything, including legs and heart. It was my head that would tell my legs to slow down if it decided I was a crap runner. It was my head that would allow my legs to reclaim their spunk in the last hours to put the frosting on my race cake.

Days before the race I was in a yoga class and almost lost it when the instructor said to the room, “Your body is ready. You are ready.” She wasn’t talking to me. She was referring to all of us being warmed up and ready to do a deep stretch. But it didn’t matter. My heart heard those words and melted like butter in a skillet. Yes. I was ready.

5 Things Toward Making Sub-24 A Reality

In the end, several things helped me get to my goal. They are what you must remember. They are what I needed to relearn.

1. Running to a timetable is damn stressful.

Nearly every other ultra I have ever ran was “to feel”. Meaning, I ran what felt appropriate for the day, for my training, for the race. Not too hard. Sometimes I was fighting cutoffs. Sometimes I pushed myself harder than usual to finish strong. But almost always, I was running what felt reasonable for that day. And that made me feel unfulfilled as an athlete/animal. WHAT COULD MY BODY REALLY DO? This was a question I’d started to answer 10 years ago when running marathons, but I am just poking into it with ultras.

My 24 hour target splits were absolutely perfect for ME. They were based on two people who’d run this race the year before, finished just under 24, and raced like I do: worryingly slow in the first half, then a barely perceptible slowdown in the later miles. Based on previous races I knew this was my kind of plan. But it left little room for error. I wasn’t putting in quick miles early to have some wiggle room later. That ends up disastrously for many people, and besides, I love that feeling of “orange-lining” the whole 2nd half. Not redlining and blowing up. Bad idea. But just below that is the orange line and that is where I twiddle the dials of my Central Governor and go into the pain cave for awhile. Sustainable discomfort. Which leads to . . .

2. Everything is temporary. EVERYTHING.

Feeling bad. Feeling awesome. Being too hot. Needing to “find a tree”. Feeling hungry. Getting talkative. Wanting silence. Being lost. Getting lonely. Those fresh batteries in the super-bright headlamp.

Pretty sure I fertilized a tree somewhere around here. About mile 30.

Nothing lasts. Soon, you feel better. Or worse. Or your batteries die. Deal with it, and wait for the next change.

3. Self-talk can make or break you.

Get ready for this one; it’s not as hippie as you think. Hours and hours of “you got this” and “you are ready” and “what a great day” will tend to produce a different mindset than “oh boy I feel slow” and “this hurts my feet” and “ow ow ow my butt”. And your mindset can turn into differing performance results. It’s true that some folks can rally when faced with criticism or difficulty, but those birds are rare. Many of us do far better with encouragement, from the world around us AND our inner narrative. Even though I wasn’t able to draw my Sharpie mantras all over myself, I still thought about them as if I had.

Corollary concept: positive talk directed to other people is a double shot of goodness. Telling other racers they’re doing well, thanking volunteers, all of it feeds into this big loop of sparkles and unicorns and love. And it works.

4. The finish is what you make of it.

Didn’t have any friends to be there and go WOOOOOOOO and take photos of your grimy face and thousand-yard stare? Suck it up, buttercup. You STILL did the thing and the tiny cactus still believes in you. Pat yourself on the back as much as you damn well want. Mope. Take a micro-nap without really planning on it. EAT something, unless you will literally throw up as a result. And, most importantly, get OUT of your head. You’ve been in it for more than a day. Stand up, walk around, and do the WOOOOOOO for everyone else who is coming in to the finish. Maybe they don’t have their friends around, either. BE their friend. You both did this thing.

5. Aftercare is real and underappreciated.

No, I didn’t just deliver a baby but boy did I put my body through the wringer. For days the muscles are confused and angry, the lower legs inflamed and swollen with impressive cankles. Sleep is challenging, and then sound, and then challenging. Hunger is fickle, rising and falling with no seeming logic. I am given a free pass to eat anything I want as a “reward” for my race, but when I go to the store the day after the race I buy salad and liver and eat them with gusto. More than a week after the race I find myself having a chocolate-bar-and-bag-of-chips dinner. Really. But with more than a solid week of nutritious food already down the hatch, I’m recovering like a boss.

Oh, yeah. Emotional wackness. I get this one, real bad. Half a day of “yay, I did that” followed by a day of random staring into space and thinking, “boy is my life empty and dumb”. Repeat for a week. Or two. Throw in some sudden emotional meltdowns, such as panicking at the grocery store or bursting into tears during a run, and you have a pretty interesting post-race period. It’s sometimes called post-race depression and it can magnify any other clinical depressive symptoms already present. Pay attention and call someone if you’re freaked. Call me. There’s lots of us in this together, and we’re stepping up to be seen.

Salt encrusted shirts are THE BEST.

Ultimately, the biggest secret to aftercare is just tuning in. Need a nap? Take one if you can! Hungry? Eat something, dammit: whatever sounds good. Legs all freaky and tight? Lay on the floor and put your feet on the wall. It’s a lovely feeling. Want to go running? Go, but slow. Don’t want to go running? Don’t! But do walk around and be mobile as much as humanly possible. You might get a cold a week or two later. That’s fine. Sleep more.

And take it all in. Smile, even if you still have the thousand yard stare.

The Little “D”: Depression After An Ultramarathon

2018-02-27 3 Replies

Two days after my most recent ultramarathon and I was walking down the street wondering whether or not I care if people can tell I’m on the brink of crying. Always the worrier, I think about the outside world’s perceptions rather than how I’m actually feeling. Should I stuff it in? Should I just let it come and forget what people think after all?

Depression after something big in a person’s life is oh-so-common (searches for postpartum depression on Google have been depressingly stable for 14 years), and the post-event kind even has a name: Post Project Depression. Mental health professionals, from what I’ve seen, tend to call it the “blues” rather than use the formal D word, likely to help destigmatize the condition but also perhaps because they’d rather not say anyone is an actual Depressive unless they are diagnosed by—you guessed it—a mental health professional.

Post-project depression is seen sometimes as “subclinical” in nature. It’s something that gets noticed by those suffering but you still don’t check all the psychological boxes needed for a formal diagnosis.

Super weird cover of book on melancholy from the 1500s, from Wikimedia Commons

Post-Ultra Depression and Clinical Depression: Related?

True to my nerd roots, I have wondered if this post-event “blues” has some connection to a propensity for what I’ll call capital-R Real depression, also known as Major Depressive Disorder. Meaning, clinically diagnosed and fitting all the patterns of the American Psychiatric Association’s list of qualities. Those that have clinical depression are often helped, sometimes immensely, by regular exercise like running. (I imagine that has a lot to do with body motion and hormones but also being out in the daylight.) However, what about those that might have mild undiagnosed depression—or no depression at all—and find the post-ultra blues slightly contradictory to getting out and doing yet more exercise?

As is true with many things in the body, the mechanisms are complicated and intertwined. After a long bout with huge spikes in excitable hormones like adrenaline and norepinephrine as you might experience in the 10, 12, 18, 30 hours of an ultra, there has got to be some physiological payback. It’s like taking your favorite t-shirt that you wear gently every day, and sending it through an industrial car wash over and over again. That t-shirt is going to display some obvious signs of wear and stress and fatigue, both visibly in color as well as below the surface in the strength of the fibers and the resilience of the cloth. Your body, after an ultra, has a massive spike in all kinds of “bad” things like cortisol, cytokines, other stress hormones. Those, coupled with a change in training load (like maybe down to zero for many days in a row), are going to have an effect on your general state of wellbeing.

I’m curious about this potential overlap between the symptoms of the “blues” vs. clinical depression in different kinds of people. Little by little, endurance athletes—ultrarunners, too—have come out publicly with their personal major depression stories and how it has affected or been influenced by their athletic careers. But having clinical depression of the Rob Krar or Nikki Kimball variety could be utterly separate, or somewhat related to, the post-event blues that many of us feel. Personally, I’ve felt all my life that I tend towards the melancholy but have not been diagnosed by a psychiatrist. On the other hand, I’ve always been an athlete. Might the lifelong endurance activities be keeping my theoretical clinical depression at bay? Or am I just utterly normal: feeling emotionally destroyed after long races (albeit at a higher intensity that I see in friends) but then eventually getting some mojo back and signing up for the next thing on the calendar?

Melencolia illustration by Durero, from Wikimedia Commons

Clearly I think about this, time and time again. After all, I wrote about this almost exactly three years ago, after the exact same race: https://andreaworks.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/post-ultramarathon-funk-and-how-it-sucks-balls/ And it does not really go away; if anything, this experience seems to become stronger and more obvious after each long event. I take that as a sign that I can learn more and manage it in the future, or at the very least be prepared to go lightly on myself during those days.

What Post-Ultra Depression Actually Feels Like

The best description as I’ve experienced it is that of Mild Despair and Melancholy. The thoughts during those hours and days lean towards the pessimistic, like “what was it that I just did? why, exactly, did I do that? I spent *how* much money on that? does anyone care? do I care?”. Things don’t progress to the point where I can’t get out of bed in the morning (though noon-hour pajamas are not uncommon). And they don’t progress to the point that I cancel upcoming plans or quit running altogether for days or weeks. Even I know that that will make me feel even worse. Not to mention completely mess up my “digestion” (having a post-coffee morning poo is about the best thing ever).

In reality, those sidewalk episodes like mentioned earlier last minutes to hours, and that’s manageable. But they do still come during ebbs and dips in mood that are almost like clockwork in the days and weeks after hard endurance efforts. I felt this way during and after the Colorado Trail, an “event” 26 days long and therefore having plenty of time for ups and downs. I feel this way, sometimes, during training. And I expect that the little black puppy will start stepping on my toes just a few short days after any ultra race, or after any hormonal swing. It’s only natural, after all.

Someone shared with me a video that gets to the heart of the fabled ‘black dog’ of major/clinical depression. It’s a great overview for those who don’t suffer, told from the perspective of someone who is not only affected by depression but they are ashamed of it and fearful of being found out.

With all of the newish and thoughtful writing being done on depression and mental health in general, I think we as a culture are progressing. Even network TV shows are taking on lead characters with psychiatric disorders and treating them like genuine and interesting humans rather than quirky sidekicks just there for a joke. Bravo, Maria Bamford!

I hope that with my post, with earlier writings, and with the help of open and wonderful folks like Rob Krar and Nikki Kimball, I hope the shame aspect is going to fade. These days it seems like the idea of going to a therapist is totally normal, where just a decade or two ago it was an eyebrow-raiser. Same thing with tattoos: used to be “acceptable but a little out-there”, now are completely normal and sometimes in your face. Let’s make depression and mood issues of all kinds be IN. YOUR. FACE. There’s no shame in feeling sad, or feeling nothing, and not knowing why or how to change it. Change toward getting better almost always has to start with open acceptance.

But What Should I Do After My Event?

Other than the usual advice to rest, sleep well, and take a lot of walks, there’s more you can do for your brain. A mental re-framing of the whole situation is valuable here: those “bad” stress hormones that pile up after an event? It’s probably better to think of them as recovery hormones. They are what your body is doing to repair what you just endured. Don’t hate the cast on your broken arm for its weight and inconvenience: treat it gently and respect it for what it is doing for your bone.

Photo By Cameron Parkins, via Wikimedia Commons

[P.S. This post was at least somewhat bolstered by reading Brad Feld’s take on his only ultramarathon and the emotional fallout afterwards. Feld writes often about depression and, in addition to being a good writer with interesting things to say about technology, he is an open advocate for more discourse and less shame about mental illness, particularly depression. Thank you, Brad.]

IFS with Andrea