Leapfrog
Eighteen miles of leapfrog on the trails of Northern Utah.
In last weekend’s trail running race (a 30K on some of my home trails), I did the dance of different paces with my fellow runners. It’s so awkward: first, I pass you, then comes a hill that I want to walk but you don’t, then you pass me. Then there’s a downhill and we do it again, then there’s an aid station and we switch positions again.
I can’t pass up the opportunity to make anything a complex social calculation, so I do. When coming up on someone: Am I faster than you? If so, for how long can I keep it up? When I might need to walk in half a mile, then you’ll pass me and what do we say to each other?
This wasn’t a very big race and I was at the back of the pack so I was alone most of the time. Often, I couldn’t see anyone in front of me nor could I hear anyone coming behind. Still, I leapfrogged with the same six or seven folks that morning. We were all pretty jovial about it, sometimes stayed within hearing distance enough to chat a bit. It helps that we didn’t have to look at each other. There’s a honesty that comes when you don’t have to look into someone’s eyes, a slight lessening of the worry of performing human being-ness wrong.
Being slow was my biggest fear for so long. That I would be I would be exposed as weak and unworthy by my pace. It’s taken me so, so many miles to work out that equation is broken. Slow doesn’t mean weak and it has no bearing on worthiness. The erasure of that equivalence is what allowed me to be out there on the trail last weekend, and for so many days in the past few years.
In fact, maybe that was the reason to be there: to live the worst fear, to be slow, to be in the back, to be passed, to be below average, to feel like maybe I don’t belong, and to still move my body forward. I existed in that mental mess for four hours and eighteen miles and could not be anywhere else. There were even a few moments where I did feel like I belonged, chatting with a few folks, giving people a cheery “looking strong” and hearing them say it back to me.
For a few microseconds I even believed them.
I leapfrogged my own doubts. Coming back to them, passing them, hearing them breathing heavily behind me. Sometimes they got out ahead and took over. Sometimes I was the one ahead, leaving them behind for just a little bit. It happened before the race, it happened out there on the trail, and I know it will keep happening afterwards too. Our game is not over, doubt and I, but maybe we understand each other a little better this week than we did last.