Off the grid: The many ways to thaw

This year, spring has taken its time making its way to the Northwest. While the calendar had it scheduled over a month ago, there has been snow on vehicles, little bloom and other signs of seasonal defiance.

The masses have responded by merely pretending spring is here, as if sandals and shorts might encourage temperatures to rise.

But I am not fooled.

Because the climate cannot be trusted, and Easter is a fickle holiday on the calendar, I use running events to mark the change of the season. Last week, it was the Spokane River Run.

That event (a fundraiser to boot) is, regardless of the distance, my favorite event of the year.

First of all, it’s a blatant reminder of what an incredible place we live in, with seemingly endless pristine trails, the rushing river, cliffs, bizarre moonscape formations and fields of flowers.

Also, if it’s been a rough winter, and my pie-to-miles ratio is in favor of pastries, I can crawl out of my hibernation hole and slog out the 5,000 meters with all the families and their incredibly fast toddlers.

If it’s been a year when, say, I’m saving my marriage by running a ridiculous amount of winter miles to cope with the stress of building a new house, I’m ready for 50K through the arrowleaf balsamroot flowers.

It was a long winter, there was pie, and we’re getting better at collaborating, so I ran the 25K. I even trained for it.

But my pacer did not. At least not the same way.

You have friends, and then you have friends who are like, “Hey, what are you doing this weekend? Oh, running for three hours? That sounds fun.”

They are the kind of friends you hate/love because you know they will make everything look easy while encouraging you to push your limits.

“If you get off your couch, pace me through a race I’ve trained four months for, and wallow in post-breakup agony the whole time, I’m going to unfriend you,” I said with the kind of compassion you have for a recently dumped friend.

I fully expected her to show up with potato chip crumbs on her sweatpants and the disheveled look of a dish towel that is long past rag status.

Apparently, some people do breakups more gracefully than others.

She was bright-eyed and present, the way a certain type of person gets when running is their medicine and trails are their cure. In this, we are kindred spirits. Running has saved us from ourselves many times.

We determined to battle the blues by dedicating each mile to something for which we were grateful.

Gratitude is a balm for most sorts of misery, from winter to heartache to privilege to hard miles. Also, because we wanted to let spring know it could arrive any time now, we wore shorts.

As we clicked away the miles, clucking like hens about things that warm our hearts (our children, dogs, other people’s dogs, people who like dogs, soft trails, purple flowers, race volunteers, sun, the bodies we inhabit, resilience), the forest around us warmed, too.

We shed layers as we shed burdens of the heart until we were purged and purified, until grimaces became grins.

By the time we were rounding those last corners, I was pretty sure spring had indeed arrived.

And it wasn’t just the landscape that had thawed.

Something in the bitterness of winter had left me, and some glimmer of hope and remembrance shone in my friend. Or at least it seemed to, based on the bouncy steps she trotted well ahead of me, as if she knew that underneath all that loss, she’d find herself again.

I saw her glance at her watch, then look over her shoulder.

“Better pick it up. You’ve got 2 minutes to reach that finish line,” she said. I was so glad I could be there to support her in this difficult time.

We often think we’re in control of things merely by having an expectation of ourselves, others, or the rotation of the planetary axis.

We assume we can plan wardrobes and emotional development and finish times.

We cajole and bludgeon ourselves with the rigmarole why things ought to be a certain way only to be reminded we can’t force growth, just like we can’t force spring or the Starbucks line to move faster. But we might be able to encourage them.

If that’s seemingly ineffective, we can be grateful for precisely where we are. And anyway, I’ve never known a spring that did not eventually arrive.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammimarie@gmail.com