Ammi Midstokke: Misery on mile 3

I don’t know where undaunted optimism comes from, but I know I got the gene. Many people confuse it with the naïvety gene, when they are in fact quite different. The naïvety gene is sort of like having problem-blinders, whereas the optimism gene leads one to believe that obstacles ahead are smaller than they appear and that one possess the necessary skills or gumption to overcome them.

Even in my failings, I tend to brush off my knees and exclaim, “Whoa, that could have been way worse!” It’s basically my brand at this point in my life.

At least that’s how I’ve viewed myself until last weekend, when three miles into a 32-mile day I realized I was already miserable. Not just the usual, “Why am I even a runner?” kind of misery either. That’s just a badge we wear when we lie to nonrunners about how much we love running.

It was the kind of misery that made me wonder if I would actually … public cry.

There is a rumor that I once did in fact public cry, but barring concrete evidence we’ll have to assume I had something in my eye.

I was schlogging up a mountainside (and now we see Midstokke in her natural habitat), shoving a banana bread granola bar into my face (watch as she captures her prey with ravenous intent), doing the thing I was born to do (notice how she plods clumsily along). Despite everything being seemingly in order, I was not. I was experiencing some emotion I could not name. I thought it was pessimism, but apparently that in itself is not an emotion.

If you’ve ever been to the Methow Valley, you’ll know of its legendary beauty and charming towns. What you may not know is that the mountains in May are covered, carpeted, exploding with sprays of spring flowers. The arrowleaf is thigh-high in golden glow. The lupine with its delicate purple fills in every open space. The red of Indian paintbrush peppers the slopes with flame. Some other pink flower looked like the fairies had just tossed it between the rocks. It is breathtaking, magical, unreal even.

For miles we ran – and ran and ran and ran – through these floral fields on narrow single track trail, through towering alpine forests and regenerating burns, along expansive ridges, past much-appreciated aid stations. The weather was perfectly cool and perfectly warm. The rain waited to unleash itself until late in the day. The world smelled of fresh soil and larch boughs and was honeyed from the blossoming flora.

Still, I could not shake the misery. I wondered what that’s like for people who are confused about their lack of joy in the world. We have all reasons to be happy, just as we all have reasons to be sad. I’d like to think we have some agency in which we choose to spend most of our energy.

I set about to wondering what was wrong when nothing was really wrong at all. I’d come into the day injured and in pain and I’d taken most of the pharmaceuticals in my first aid kit in the first hour. Pain was surely a factor, but I was raised on Hamburger Helper, hard labor and hatchet wounds. Surely, a limp and a minor hobbling was not my problem.

I spent nearly eight hours wondering what my problem was, which only further compounded the confusion and distracted me from the surrounding beauty. My unflappable running buddy skipped (literally) past the 20-mile mark then made airplane zoom noises with her arms outstretched around corners. The trails were that fun. The views that inspiring. The flowers that playful.

Still, I fretted about my left ankle and my right hamstring and how much Tylenol it takes to cause irreversible liver damage and if I’d eaten too much or too little or had too many hard kombuchas. I wondered if I was too old for this nonsense, past my prime, if perimenopause was to blame for everything as is en vogue these days. I worried about one knee and then the other and I’d probably have made up a third knee to fuss about if I hadn’t settled on a hip or a glute to obsess over instead.

When I crossed the finish line, 10 minutes faster than even my most ambitious goal, I was still disappointed. I wasn’t even celebrating my joy at it all being over. I was rattled by the mind-battering of the unfamiliar experience of an utterly pessimistic day. It was a great reminder of the emotionally debilitating power of pain.

I read once that pain makes us selfish, turns us inward toward ourselves, and that the only useful response to pain is compassion. I had none. In typical fashion, I rationalized my way through and past it all. I shouldn’t hurt. I should be stronger. It was a day-long intensive exposure to invalidation.

When I crawled out of the pain cave and looked at the world around me, I saw all the ways in which I think around the suffering of others, try to solve the cause rather than pause to acknowledge the discomfort. I’m not saying we should be paralyzed by the suffering, but I suspect that accepting it is part of the easing of it.

And if one is going to make some space for the pain, doing it in a field of flowers seems a good place to start. Perhaps one must not even sacrifice their optimism.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com