The Breakup

I had three miles left, when I turned around at the twelve mile mark for the final out and back. And these miles were supposed to be my fastest, it would be the hardest part of the run. But I’d already gotten from this run what I needed. 

The night before, I’d mapped out a long looping route that would take me along the Androscoggin to the New Hampshire border and then back down the winding river road to Mt. Tumbledown Road where I’d loop around. The route was the fifteen miles I needed to check off the next run of this marathon training endeavor that is supposed to lift me to a new personal best. 

But when I donned my jacket and gloves and headed out into the driving rain this morning I aborted my elaborate route along the Androscoggin and instead decided to run back and forth on a 1.5 mile stretch of road that follows the banks of a different river, the Wild River. 

And I tricked myself with the math of runners thinking only about mile three and then six and then nine and then twelve and if I got to twelve and wanted to quit that would be OK, I told myself. But I knew I wouldn't because, I knew I’d do it all, even as the rain turned to snow and the temperatures dropped with each gusty snap of cold wind. 

I knew I would finish because that’s what I do. That is who I am. 

It is the leftover part of me, the gritty part, that’s good at suffering. I got that way from being unkind to myself. From decades of loathing the form of my body and acting on every impulse to change it, often in the most extreme ways possible. 

And so this drive to push to the new personal best, to gird myself against the most unfriendly weather, to get fifteen miles in the bank, in the bag, in my body–maybe it is born from a place that is most unkind. 

Or maybe this too was a small kindness to myself to choose to set a goal, to choose to run the fifteen miles, to choose the Wild River Road, because in the back and forth and back and forth I saw the same things once, twice, three times, then a fourth. And it was on this fourth lap when I suddenly realized nothing was the same and everything was different. And that was where the gift was.

It was the sound first, the rush of a waterfall that had not been there before and I stopped mid-stride at the second bend in the winding Wild River Road to stop and find its source. Peering through the bare gray branches I saw it. Water and snow cascading down the hillside. An avalanche of cold sliding to a hidden stream below, covered by the powdery fluff of a foot of snow, wandering towards the river.

And then later, another mile down the road where it straightens out with the river and only a guardrail and a steep slope separated the two, I saw it. I saw it and I stopped. 

The river was transformed before my eyes. The ice was breaking apart, first up just beyond the furthest point my gaze could reach, and then with a sudden rush the river began to move slowly at first. The pillowy surface of snow overtaken by a rushing push of jagged foot-thick ice plates and water the color of beer, tinged with every metal and mineral loosed from the mountains above. 

The ice was going out and I was the sole witness to the change. I watched as the Wild River became increasingly wild. And wondered if this wall of icy sludge would become a tidal wave, big enough to crest over the low parts of the road. I began to run again, watching the river to my right and when I turned around I hugged the guardrail, getting as close as I dared to the unfolding drama. After a while, the road curved away from the river and I ran along where you can only hear it through the stand of trees between the two. 

And my mind wandered and I forgot about the river and wondered instead about the miles left and the rest of the day and the dreams I'd had the night before and if I could do another marathon. All the while the river kept pushing forward, breaking up, coming back to life after its long winter slumber. As if nothing could stop this icy shrug of the mountains. 

This churn of life, breaking up the frozen river was what had happened in me. I’d been the same, struggling, struggling, struggling with my eating disorder until a great dam broke loose and I finally understood love. And the love thawed out the frozen bits of me, creating a warm rush that washed through the landscape of me and changed me. It was a change I believed was possible, but didn’t think would ever happen, until it did. 

When I got to the point where the US Forestry Service had their marker, the river had not yet changed. It was still a pillowy field. A river, but a frozen one with a small trickle beneath it. And as I stared at the unmoving surface, out of the corner of my eye I could see it coming, the slough of wild ice rolling forward ready to overtake the languid spot, ready to make it rage and churn. 

And I watched. I watched it all again and knew when night fell and the temperatures plummeted that the river would re-freeze into a jagged relief, a memory of today’s activity.
Then I made the turn at mile twelve for the final lap, my frozen feet, ice blocks clodding down the road and all I could think was, “I can’t believe I did it.” 

A small kindness of congratulations, because even though I thought I would, believed I would. You never know until you’ve actually done it.