CHAPTER 7: ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER
Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
IN THE MOVIE CHARIOTS OF FIRE, Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell (played by Ian Charleson) tells his devout, disappointed sister, Jenny, that he’s going to race in the 1924 Olympics before heading to China as a Christian missionary.
“I believe that God made me for a purpose,” Eric tells Jenny. “For China. But He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”
When I run, I suppose I feel God’s pleasure too: Him laughing at me.
God made me for a purpose too. But He did not make me fast. Or graceful. Or particularly coordinated. He did not give me a love of running, or even an affinity for it.
But He did make me stubborn, and that’s something. Because even though it’s a rare day I want to run, I still do it most days. It’s a rare run that I enjoy, but I almost always enjoy having run.
And while it’s perhaps a stretch to say that running saved my life, it is the single biggest cudgel that has kept my depression at bay for the last several years. I may not be fast, and honestly, I seem to be getting slower all the time. But I am sane, relatively speaking. And that’s something.
My dislike of running came quite early in life. Like most kids, I enjoyed racing around the yard at first, particularly if I had fastened a pillowcase to my shoulders and could make it flap like a cape. But then came gym class, and by the second grade, I hated everything to do with gym on principle.
Our teacher was an ex-Army drill sergeant who had a face like a potato and always wore a stocking cap, making him look like a 1960s movie dockyard tough guy who, if you looked at him wrong, might whip out a crowbar and start thwacking you with it. He clearly knew the world was a hard and dangerous place filled with people who’d try to hurt you, and maybe kill you if they could. So why not teach by example? He wasn’t teaching us second graders how to be healthier: It was like he was training a waist-high army for the inevitable commie invasion, and we had to be ready for anything.
We ran a lot. Boy, did we run. Up and down the gym, up and down the basketball court, up and down the Taos playground. Every time we finished up the latest death sprint, he’d ask us all if we felt like throwing up. If no one actually upchucked the peanut butter sandwich they had for lunch, our teacher would pronounce us “pretty much okay, fit-wise.” I always felt like I was going to heave, but it was best to keep your head down and not make eye contact. If you did, he’d be liable to make you drop and give him twenty.
I avoided running after that. And by the time I got out of high school, I figured my running days were over. I got plenty of exercise through hiking and playing tennis and the occasional crazy game of putt-putt golf. That was enough. No one would ever make me run again.
But one of my best friends—Jeff Lamontagne—did run. He ran a marathon and a couple of half-marathons in college and, every few years, did a few more. He never claimed to be particularly fast either, but he kept preaching how much it helped him, both in body and mind. And remembering how messed up he was in seventh grade, I could see that maybe there’s something to this running thing, after all.
Still, running seemed like the dumbest of all possible sports. No one kept score. In the sort of long-distance races that Jeff was doing, most people didn’t even care about winning. What’s the point of competing if you’re not going to win?
“It’s all about staying healthy and being active!” Jeff would say.
“Yeah, yeah,” I’d say, likely taking another bite of my Quarter Pounder. Whatever.
But then I had my rodeo wipeout, and with it the willingness to change some patterns in my life.
Wendy and I had just helped Jeff and his wife, Suzanne, move. My old, old best friend, Bret,[1] the same guy who rescued me from the pea gravel in fourth grade, was there too. I was just a few weeks removed from my wipeout, I think, and neither my stomach nor my head were functioning just right. I loved everyone in that room, and I’d known Jeff and Bret for, roughly, ever. But the static was really humming that night. I felt pretty horrible about myself—that I was being both boring and foolish—and I wanted nothing more than to open up their apartment door, run down the stairs, and keep running until I either made it home or collapsed and died.
But some social niceties must be preserved, even amongst the best of friends. So instead of making a break for it, I excused myself to go to the bathroom (my tummy had already gotten a running start) to attend to business and see if I could whip my brain into some semblance of functionality. And after a few minutes in there, I heard Jeff ask Wendy, “Is he all right?”
“His stomach’s still bothering him some,” she said. It was my cue to return to the party. In a few more minutes.
By the time I got to the living room, Jeff was talking about running again in that friendly, proselytizing way of his. How wonderful it was. How healthy it was. How fun it was. We didn’t have to run marathons necessarily, he told us. We could run just a teensy-weensy race—like the BOLDERBoulder. It’s just ten kilometers, he said—a little over six miles. You don’t even have to run the whole thing. And it’s fun! People line the streets and cheer you on! Bands play on almost every block! You end in the University of Colorado’s Folsom Field! It’s an experience like no other.
Two things to know about Jeff: He’s as persuasive as a good politician and as dogged as, well, a dog, I guess. He’s talked all of his friends into doing some crazy things on occasion with this lethal blend of charisma and bullheadedness. Years earlier, he talked me into constructing an entire miniature golf course at my grandparents’ cabin. In the dark. In the rain.
But he did make the BOLDERBoulder sound kinda fun. And six miles . . . well, I’d never run six miles before, but I thought it might be possible. I mean, I hiked that far, and farther, with some regularity. But I hate to run, and—
Then Bret turned to me.
“I’ll do it if you do it,” he said.
I don’t know whether, while I was in the bathroom, my friends had conspired against me. But no matter: It worked. If Bret—whose last real exercise was summer-school bowling class—could pull himself away from work to train for a 10K, I could too. And who knows? It might do me good.
Training wasn’t fun, exactly: I’d wake up an hour earlier than I was used to and run up and down the hills in my neighborhood, dodging cars and dogs and the occasional deer. But I admit that I started to enjoy seeing the sun rise, and after a few months, I felt “pretty much okay, fit-wise.” And the race proved to be even better than advertised.
Colorado boasts few cities as picturesque as Boulder. We ran through beautiful neighborhoods filled with brick houses and irises, and cruised through its downtown corridor filled with folks cheering us on. Little kids would hold up signs encouraging mommy or daddy. Residents sometimes gave out free bacon or beer—standard running snacks, I was led to believe. And when I entered the stadium, a roar went up from the thousands in the bleachers. I chose to believe it was for me, not the band of Marines jogging in unison just a few yards in front of me.
Maybe running’s not so bad, I thought.
And even when I found out otherwise, it was too late to stop. I’ve been running ever since. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that since I’ve started running, I’ve not had a true lay-me-out, bury-me-now, flat-on-my-back depressive episode. Like many people, I run to stay healthy . . . but for me, it’s about my mental health as much as anything. While office-bound critics remind me that The Complete Book of Running author James Fixx died at fifty-two and that my knees will surely shoot straight out of my skin one day, I know how I feel mentally if I don’t run for several days. Trust me, it’s not pretty.
You don’t need to run to stave off depression, of course. Lots of forms of exercise will do—almost anything to get the heart pumping and the lungs working a little harder. So what works well to keeps depression at bay? The first and most obvious is . . .
GETTING THE BODY MOVING
I realize that for those dealing with a serious depressive episode, getting up and going for a jog (or a swim or even a walk) sounds about as possible as getting out of bed and joining the Minnesota Vikings. Depression can increase your pain receptors, mess with your eating habits, and completely obliterate healthy sleep patterns—all of which can make exercise all the less appealing. Every step can feel like an impossibility.
I’ve been there. During my rodeo wipeout, Wendy made me go for a walk one day. It was a beautiful day—perfect for walking—and I wanted to make her happy, so I tried. We made it past just three or four houses before I told her I couldn’t walk anymore and went back home.
But if you can get out, research suggests that few things are better for you than a little physical exercise. Indeed, an overwhelming number of studies show that exercise doesn’t just help treat the symptoms of depression pretty effectively, but it stays effective over long periods of time.[2] In fact, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School, exercise has been proven to be just as effective as antidepressants for some people.[3]
“Motion is lotion,” my friend Tim Sanford from the Focus on the Family counseling staff tells me. “Moving, even small shuffles across the room and back, is lotion to the body, the mind, and the soul.”
The process begins with simple chemistry and biology that might help override some of the biochemical problems that cause or are exacerbated by depression. Certainly, lots of intense training can release endorphins that can make you feel good, leading to the famous “runner’s high.” You feel stronger, happier—euphoric, even—and you’re more resistant to pain. German researchers, extrapolating from studies on mice, suggest that exercise might even tap into the brain’s “endocannabinoid system,” which is the same effect on your brain that people experience when using marijuana.[4] (Thus, presumably, the similarities between the words endocannabinoid and cannabis, I’d assume.) The runner’s high, these German scientists suggest, is no exaggeration: Running can make you feel like you’ve smoked weed without the nasty smell, failed drug tests, and the desire to eat whole bags of Doritos.
But while I’ve felt the runner’s high, I think, it’s not that common or that pronounced. Also, I tend to be running when it hits, eliminating some of the charm. And, like marijuana, its effects tend to give you a false sense of reality. Hey, if the runner’s high hits around mile eight, I may feel like I’m ready to run across the state, no problem—possibly singing all the way. By mile thirteen, I know better.
But there’s another way that running helps, according to Harvard, and you don’t need to run eight miles to find it.
Exercise—again, not just running, but swimming or walking or playing tennis or whatnot—fosters the release of proteins that make your nerve cells grow and connect with other nerve cells (according to Harvard).[5] That growth and interconnectivity apparently makes you just feel better and more balanced. Other studies have found that it smooths out our brains’ responses to stress, tamps down on “excessive inflammation” (though the blisters I sometimes get might beg to differ) and helps other physiological friction points.[6]
And if you’re exercising outside—especially in nature—the benefits become even more pronounced. One study found that participants who spent a couple of nights in the forest had lower levels of cortisol, a prominent stress-marker.[7] Several studies have found that time in nature can help combat depression, even major depression.[8] Stanford University reported another study that found folks who took a ninety-minute walk in the woods “showed decreased activity in a region of the brain associated with a key factor in depression.”[9]
Then there’s the obvious: When you’re exercising, you likely just feel better about yourself. You feel healthier and more in control. You may feel like you look better. You likely have more energy, which allows you to do the things that you enjoy doing for longer.
Running is not a great tool to lose weight, oddly. But I know when I’m training for a marathon, I tend to lose anywhere from ten to fifteen pounds. Vain as this may sound, I feel different about myself when I weigh 165 pounds than when I weigh 180. When my clothes fit better, I feel better. And that’s one less trigger for me that might send me down the worthless trajectory that seems so common in my depression.
CONNECTION
I was drawn to running, in part, because it was as solitary a sport as you can get. Being the introvert that I am, I try to avoid other people whenever possible. And honestly, I do enjoy running by myself. I don’t need someone else to keep me entertained. Running by myself, the process of pounding the pavement, helps me work through the stress and challenges of the day, keeping me from falling into mental traps that are difficult to crawl out of. And that’s great.
But I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency in me: The less I’m with people, the less I want to be with people. And the more isolated I am, the more my mind turns inward, fixating on stressors and problems and my own failures. And that’s obviously not a particularly healthy place to be.
So I’ve discovered the pleasures, even the joys, of running with other people too. When I run with someone else, it forces my mind outward. I’m not just focused on moving forward—a good thing in itself—but moving forward with someone. The running becomes a relationship. It sounds cheesy, but there’s something innately healthy about pushing away from the me and running toward the us.
Years after Jeff talked me into running the BOLDERBoulder, he talked me into running a marathon with him. (He just doesn’t quit, that Jeff.) No longer was six miles enough: Now it was twenty-six. And when you’re as slow as I am, training runs can last for two, three, even four hours. That’s a long time to listen to your own feet strike dirt. Thankfully, Jeff made it easy on me: We did our long runs together—alternating between Denver and my home base in Colorado Springs.
Now, Jeff and I have been friends since seventh grade. We shared a lot of our childhoods together and became as close as two heterosexual guys can be. But when even the best of childhood friends become adults, there’s a natural tendency to separate a bit. We each got married, had kids, worked demanding jobs. Those long weekend runs gave us a chance to reminisce about the old days and commiserate about the new ones—unpack family dramas and workplace frustrations and not just remember who we were, but also become more familiar with who we are. It allowed us to foster an entirely new aspect of our friendship. And that’s pretty cool.
Running has also given me the chance to connect with my own kids—especially my daughter, Emily—in a really nifty way.
As I kept running, my kids started engaging in the sport too. We ran the BOLDERBoulder together for several years, sometimes bringing other friends or family members along for the run. In high school, both Colin and Emily started competing in cross-country. Sometimes, when I’d be training for a marathon, they’d be training for a half. And when Colin was out of the house and Emily was still in it, Em and I began to train for our respective races together. On long-run days, we’d start out and run, say, six or seven miles together—perfect for Emily’s half-marathon training. Then Wendy would pick up Emily at a designated spot and I’d run another six or seven miles to prepare for my marathon.
And then, she decided to start running marathons with me. We weren’t just running six miles together. We’d go for ten, fourteen, sometimes twenty-two miles. That’s a lot of time to talk.
Those runs were, for me as a dad, remarkable. Both Emily and I are pretty private people. It’s uncomfortable for either of us to open up too much in person.[10] But if I keep my soul in the psychic equivalent of a safe-deposit box, Em banks hers in a moated castle guarded by dragons. She doesn’t talk much about her hopes or fears with Wendy and me. She doesn’t like showing a lot of emotion. When she got married and I saw her in her wedding dress for the first time, I felt like I’d lost and gained the whole world at the same time. I teared up as if someone had literally stuffed onions in my eyes, and every sliver of onion was somehow playing Old Yeller. Emily treated the moment like she was opening a checking account.
She is, come to think of it, just as taciturn as I was for so many years with my parents. Curse heredity.
But during that first spat of training runs—and in all the many, many that followed—we talked. Not about big important issues, necessarily. We’d talk about books and movies, about vacations and gardening and relatives and, oddly, skin care products. One morning, we spent an entire two-and-a-half-hour training run discussing breakfast food.
That’s the funny thing about real connection: You don’t need to pour out your soul. You just need to share stuff—stuff you enjoy, stuff you hate, the stuff that makes your everyday life neat or irritating. While some would argue that meaningful connection means always talking about “meaningful” things, I think “meaningful” can be pretty relative.
You don’t have to talk about your fear of death. You can talk about your fear of clowns. You don’t have to talk about politics or philosophy or the important essences in life (though you can if you want to). You can talk about the merits (or lack thereof) of turkey bacon. It’s still connection. And in some ways, those more superficial connection points can feel just as profound as—maybe even more than—those showy bits of soul you might regurgitate only to your priest or counselor.
And as we talked, we shared experiences that most dads never get to share with their daughters: Watching a coyote dart across the path. Listening to the ice sing on a frozen lake. Grossing out together over a really filthy portable toilet. We ran in twenty-degree weather and in eighty-degree weather, through forests and homeless encampments and, once, an unexpected turn-of-the-century-themed arts-and-crafts festival.
One morning, we ran eight miles in a bitter, driving wind that we weren’t prepared for. We stopped in a grove of ponderosa pines, and I doled out our halfway-point snack (yep, we still had another eight to go)—fruit rolls that were stiff with cold. I still remember Em peeling off her mittens to stuff the roll into her mouth—a tiny, crystalized strip at a time—her nose blue, her feet shaking in her running shoes. We were both pretty miserable. But turns out, misery really does love company. Sometimes our most uncomfortable moments become the fodder for shared stories later. They stop being moments you’d rather forget and become moments you love to remember. They become, in short, adventures. As an introvert, I sometimes forget that. Running with someone—with Emily, mostly—helps me remember.
But even when I’m not running with someone, I still feel that connection—that link to a broader world. You’re in that world. You feel, on some level, an intimate part of it, even if you’re just running by. The trees and grasses that line the trail, or the houses and businesses you pound past on the sidewalk, feel more a part of you than when you’re just driving by them. In a car, you feel inherently an interloper in the life buzzing all around you—an isolated missile zipping past. When you walk or run, you’re a participant in that life. You’re a piece of all around you, an intricate part of God’s creation.
I believe that separation—the divorce we sometimes feel from each other, from the world around us, even from God—can be a critical element of depression. Sometimes, exercise can help, if not completely heal, the divisions we feel. To patch them and knit them closer together.
CONSTANCY
I was never one for order. In high school, my bedroom floor had a nice mulch of old homework papers. My locker looked like the lair of a Dark Age monster. I was kinda proud of how chaotic my world looked to the outside, because order was antithetical to who I was and who I wanted to be. I imagined myself a poet, after all. I would let the art and spirit take me where it would. I thought that, like so many of the great artists and writers and dreamers I admired, I’d experience the world like a leaf on the wind, going where it blew and landing where it wished. I might isolate myself like van Gogh, or travel the world like Hemingway, or live a life of uncompromising chaos like, oh, the Rolling Stones. Whatever it looked like, my life would serve the art I felt inside me, the stories I longed to tell. I would feel every emotion deeply—the happiness, the sadness, the hope, the despair. Because that’s what poets do, right?
Of course, van Gogh cut off his ear, Hemingway wound up shooting himself, and clearly, Keith Richards has made some pact with the devil, because nothing else really explains how the dude could still be alive in 2019.
Turns out, there’s something to this whole “order” thing after all.
Disorder gets me down. I think it always did. Now, I’m no neat freak: I let papers pile up in my office more than I should, and Wendy wonders why I never rinse off my plates. But if things get too bad, I find the need to restore order to my little self-created environment: I feel better when there’s structure I can lean on. And if I have a solid sense of structure and organization underneath the mess, it allows me to deal with the disorder overlaying it all a bit more productively.
In my life, running serves as that underlying structure. Like the baseline of a piece of jazz music or the two-by-fours lurking under the drywall, running undergirds and, in some ways, supports everything else I do.
It works like this: Say I’m training for a marathon. I know that, to run the marathon’s 26.2 miles, I’ll need to put in about seven to nine months worth of serious, structured running: five runs every week, if I can manage—four “short” runs and one long run every weekend. Sometimes I think I should do more, and admittedly I sometimes do a little less on a given week. But that’s the baseline for me. If I do much less, I’ll likely fail in my ultimate goal of finishing the marathon. You can fake a lot of things, but if you fake your marathon training, the marathon will know.
And thus every other aspect of my life—even though those other aspects are, technically, more important than a little marathon—revolves around those training runs. They become the underlying framework for my life, the shelves for my life’s books, the Christmas tree for my life’s ornaments. Everything else needs to fit itself around those runs, and even my inherent laziness takes a back seat to them. Want to take the night off and watch a terrible movie on Netflix? Nope, sorry, gotta get my mileage in. Want to mope around and eat Cheetos? Sure, but after my run. How about sleeping in on Saturday? Can’t. I’m meeting Emily at 7:30 for an eight-miler.
Training requires a certain level of accountability, which I think can be in itself a strong guard against some forms of depression. (More on that in the next chapter.) But it’s all about being accountable to yourself. And honestly, that sense of personal accountability is something I both desperately need and am really poor at giving myself absent a reason for it. Absent my running.
I’m an example of that even now. Even as I extol the praises of running, I’ve not run for a week now. I have nothing to train for, and so those other areas of my life start to encroach. I’ve got movies to see. Deadlines to meet. A stupid book on depression to write. I’m so busy, I tell myself. Too busy to run today. Maybe tomorrow. But tomorrow comes and the busyness isn’t any better. It grows harder and harder to make myself go out and run. I can feel my tummy push harder against my jeans. My brain feels a little more disjointed, a little more filled with the static of my depression. My whole being feels like your mouth does when you wake up in the morning, in need of a good brush and gargle.
It’s time to sign up for another race. Because having a goal to literally run toward is the best way I know to force myself to run. Because even though I spend so many extra hours running—hours I really can’t afford to spend—I know that if I don’t, my depressive tendencies have another avenue to claim more control over my life. The whispers of worthlessness might grow louder. My sleep will get worse. The clutter of my life will go from inconveniently messy to inexcusably dirty, requiring that much more labor-intensive scrubbing later on.
Ironically, running itself can become an analogy for depression.
It was a beautiful day, except for the pain.
You could smell the sea air, hear the waves lap against the boats we were running beside. But I barely noticed. Emily and I were just a quarter mile into the Newport Marathon in Newport, Oregon, when I felt the first real twinge in my back.
I was not surprised. I figured it would come, but I hoped it’d be later.
Marathons are hard: hard to run them and hard to train for them. I’ve been pretty lucky in my running career to stay clear of injuries. And sometimes, even when Emily and I had some injurious setbacks, we were able to—perhaps miraculously—pull through. When Emily ran her first marathon, she forgot her shoes at home. She ran the whole thing in a borrowed pair of running shoes and earned a trophy for her age group. In her third marathon, she’d struggled with knee problems during our entire training regimen. Next time we went into training, she developed some persistent soreness in her knee. It was hurting so bad toward the end of our training that she sometimes looked like an especially skinny and fleet Quasimodo—limp-galloping toward the parking lot. When it came time for our race at Disney World, she brought a knee brace and scads of ibuprofen. But even though Em hadn’t had a pain-free, limp-free run in months, she ran the marathon just fine. It was, in fact, her fastest time ever. It was a little racing miracle.
But during this marathon, when I could’ve used a miracle myself, I wasn’t so blessed. Six weeks before the Newport Marathon, during a long training run, I’d pulled something in my back. It’s the sort of injury I probably should’ve anticipated. When you reach a certain age, your muscles and bones get a little sick of being with you all these years, and they eventually take it out on you. And honestly, it didn’t feel that bad at first. And with our marathon so near, I figured I’d just keep training and gut it out.
That hadn’t worked.
So I figured I’d rest it for a week and hope not to lose too much muscle.
That hadn’t worked, either.
Part of me (a small part) thought about skipping the marathon. But Emily and I had trained so long and so hard, and I felt like I would be letting her down. Plus, Newport’s medals are really cool—not metal medals, but glass ones, each one a unique creation from one of the local glass shops. I really wanted that medal if I could figure out a way to make it to the finish line.
A quarter mile in, I started to hurt. After two miles, I was pretty sure I’d have to drop out somewhere along the way.
But the medal. I thought. But Emily.
The pain didn’t stop. But remarkably, it stopped getting worse for a while. I found that if I turned my right foot just so and worked my left leg a little harder, I could limp along at a pretty healthy pace. I hurt, but some level of discomfort is sometimes part of the territory even on good long runs. If I could just keep pushing forward, maybe my aching back would loosen up.
But when you try to protect one set of muscles by overtaxing another, it opens your body to all sorts of chaos.
Same thing is true in depression, too, by the way. You can try to ignore your pain, or minimize it by concentrating on other things, or push yourself more and more, hoping that the pain will go away. And sometimes, that’ll work for a bit. But to ignore or avoid or minimize what’s really going on will eventually catch up with you. Your depression will rise up like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and wrap you in its arms. And then, there’s no pretending that everything’s all right. There’s no chance to cowboy up. You acknowledge that something’s going on and accept that you’re going to need to deal with it—no matter what plans you had for the day or week or year.
Halfway through, my plans for this marathon had been utterly obliterated. My back was feeling better, but only because so many other areas of my body were hurting so much worse. Even as the clouds slowly burned away into blue, even with birds and flowers and water at every turn, the course had long lost its beauty. Every step hurt in a dozen places. Every effort I made to talk felt false and strained.
I can’t keep going, I thought. There’s no way I can keep this up for another thirteen miles. No. Possible. Way.
But if I’ve learned anything from marathons, it’s this: When you feel you can’t go on, you can.
You can.
The human body can run 26.2 miles. But it doesn’t particularly like to.
Sure, we’re built for distance. Deer and cheetahs can embarrass us in sprints, but pile on the mileage and we begin to catch up. Some experts say that, on a hot enough day, a man—a fast man, admittedly—can beat a horse in a full marathon. But covering that sort of ground comes with a cost. No matter how diligently we train, no matter how many carbohydrates we load up on the night before, and no matter how many snacks we bring to eat along the way, most of us run out of fuel. Around mile twenty or so, all the carbs in our system are gone.[11] Our bodies can’t process the simple sugars we’re consuming during the run quickly enough. So our system starts poking around for something else to eat: fat and muscle, primarily. And while burning fat is one of the reasons we runners run, burning muscle is something else entirely. It’s a little like if your car ran out of gas and started gobbling up your carburetor.
They call this “hitting the wall.” The dizziness hits. The nausea. Some people get headaches. For me, it’s as if my body just announced, “Yep, we’re done. Sorry ’bout that.” The run turns into a shuffle, if we’re able to run at all. We cruise through the first twenty miles, no problem. And then, suddenly, we’re coldcocked by our own mortality.
I’ve heard some runners call the last six miles of a marathon the race’s “second half,” and that feels about right. The race switches from a physical challenge to a mental one. The body’s done: It’s up to the mind to push you through to the end.
I’ve read strategies to avoid the wall, but I’ve rarely managed it. By mile twenty-two, most every part of my body hurts, even my teeth.
But that’s not the worst of it: Pain’s just part of what you sign up for when you’re marathoning. What you don’t expect—and it surprises me every time—is that sense of quit in the body. You know there’s a finish line up there somewhere. But some terrible part of your brain tells you that the race will never end. We’ve been taught that we can meet any challenge if we just put our mind to it—that we can do amazing things if we just believe we can. The wall is when our body tells us, “Wanna bet?” Every physical synapse reaching your brain says, “Enough. Stop already.”
And sometimes, for our own health, we must listen. Your heart isn’t pumping right. Your knee stops bending as it should. Most marathoners have quit a race at some point. And if I keep doing marathons, I probably will someday too.
But I haven’t yet.
When I feel like I can’t go on, I do anyway. When almost everything inside of me says stop, a small voice keeps telling me to go. Slowly, maybe. But go. I can take another step, it says. I can make it to the next tree. The race is no longer twenty-six miles, but a series of tiny, painful, reachable goals. Covering another four miles feels impossible when you hit the wall. But getting to the top of the hill? Yeah, I can do that.
And so the miles wear away, yard by yard. I feel a little like a kid whose parents are forcing him to eat his peas: one more bite, one less pea. Each step is a step I’m done with, a step I don’t have to take anymore.
Anne Lamott took the title of her book Bird by Bird from a nearly failed research project. Her ten-year-old brother had procrastinated writing a huge school report involving scads of birds. Suddenly, it was the day before the report was due, and as he sat surrounded by research books, he was close to tears, paralyzed by the immensity of the task. Lamott writes: “Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”[12]
That’s the secret to marathoning. That’s, I think, the secret to life—especially a life riven by anxiety and depression. Take it bird by bird.
Bird by bird. Breath by breath. Step by step. So goes the end of every marathon. And then, somehow—nearly miraculously—I find myself on the other side of the wall, as if through sheer force of will I dematerialized it and shuffled right through to the other end. I’m still tired. I’m still in pain. But I know—know—that I can make it. Sometimes it’s with a mile and a half yet to go. Sometimes, it’s almost within sight of the finish line. But I’m sure I will get there.
And that is like no other feeling I’ve ever felt. It’s not glee or exultation or happiness or even simple relief, but a hard-earned sense of joy.
And so it is with depression.
When you’re in the throes of depression, life itself can feel like an agony. It seems to sap everything you need to keep going: your desires, your interests, your relationships. Like mile twenty-three, everything looks curiously flat, everything feels dull. The pain never leaves. And here’s the thing: Sometimes, you can feel like it’ll never end. That you’ll be on this horrific slog forever. And sometimes the pain, or the weariness, or the seeming endlessness of it all makes us want to quit. We despair and stop moving. Some stop moving forever.
So what must we do? Just. Keep. Moving. Maybe we can’t imagine facing another day. But let’s crawl through the next hour, and then the next. Maybe we can’t fathom stepping outside the house. But getting out of bed? Taking a shower? Maybe we can do that, and we’ll worry about the next small goal after that.
Because here’s the truth: We’ve got a medal waiting for us. As hard as things may be, as hopeless as we might feel, there is hope. Depression can be quelled (if not always completely conquered). Depressive episodes eventually lose their grip with effort and treatment. Those who struggle with more chronic depression can find tools to keep it in check and ward off the worst of it. Exercise is just one of them. Life can do more than go on and on. It can be filled with beauty and joy and achievement and love.
But to reach that point, you gotta break through the wall. And to break through, you have to keep moving.
I pressed on in Newport, but with some adjustments—and a little encouragement from my running partner.
“My back . . .” I started to say. “Em, I—”
“Need to walk?” Emily said. “Thank goodness! I’m exhausted!”
And so we walked for a while. Then we ran as far as I could, and then walked some more. I don’t know if Emily really was grateful to take it as slowly as I needed to, but no matter: She stuck with me anyway. We watched runners seemingly sprint past us as we talked. We pointed out the flowers we saw, strange to our Colorado eyes. We watched the seagulls float over the Yaquina River, the wide waterway we ran beside. I kept telling Em she could run ahead if she wanted: She could finish the thing an hour before me, if she wanted. But instead, she told me that this was one of the most enjoyable marathons we’d ever done together. And whether it was a lie or not, I was glad to have her with me.
We didn’t set any personal records in Newport. By mile twenty-four, we weren’t even running at all. If I tried, my legs would cramp something awful. So we walked along Yaquina Bay as other marathoners shuffled by us, their footfalls adding a backdrop to our conversation.
Then, with twenty-six miles in the books and just the point-two to go, I tried to run again. And improbably, everything worked. Emily thought that running the last two-tenths of a mile after walking the last three was just plain crazy, given how nice a time we were having. But I started the marathon running, and I wanted to finish it running. So we ran down the hill, past a worried Wendy (who expected to see us forty minutes earlier) and her iPhone camera. We even mustered a smile. In the picture it doesn’t look like we’re moving at all, but we are. We’re just slow, that’s all. When your knees don’t bend and your back doesn’t twist and you don’t have enough strength to lift your feet higher than a couple of inches, that’s the way you look.
We crossed the finish line, collected our medals, and staggered off for a free bagel or two. And then we sat down, put our swelling feet up and rested: Not by the side of the road, as I so much wanted to do miles—ages—ago. Not in defeat, not in submission to the pain. We rested in victory. No matter that hundreds of runners finished before we did. We finished. And in so doing, we won.
Around AD 54, in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote about running the race so that you will win the prize.
It took him another ten to twelve years to write about running again, this time to his friend Timothy. He was in a Roman prison cell then, waiting for his own execution. By then, he’d been abandoned by many. He’d suffered deeply. “I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come.”
And then he added this famous phrase: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:6-7).
You don’t need to win to win. You do, however, need to finish. It’s not easy. It’s not easy for any of us whether we suffer from depression or not. Life is hard. Life can wring you out like a washcloth, and sometimes the pain and grief and hardships we experience along the way can feel like too much to bear. It’s so easy to check out in one way or another. To give up.
But to finish the race—to stare down our setbacks and suffering, to push through the wall and push away our despair—this is the stuff of victory. To persevere despite our despair and find our place in God’s plan—this is the stuff of heroism. God knows who we are and where we are, and He asks us to move forward anyway. We must fight the fight. We must run the race. We must find the finish and claim our medals and then—only then—we rest. And we shall feel God’s pleasure.