A weekend summary:

On Friday night, I came home from work, had an argument with Kendell about a medical bill (I have no patience or kindness or ability to put up with other people’s issues right now), left home in a huff and spent an hour wandering around Target. (The fact that I only spent $30 is a miracle I think.) Then Jake and I went to pick up food. We had the best conversation while we waited in line at the barbeque place. Nothing really earth-shattering or important, but somehow he helped me feel a little bit better. I’m so grateful he is back home and we are involved in his life again. I’m not complete without him.

This was Nathan’s first drill weekend after joining the National Guard. I got up early to make him protein pancakes both mornings. I can’t express what it felt like when he came home on Saturday night, wearing his uniform. I am proud of him. I am terrified that this experience will damage him in ways I can’t imagine (and ways that I can), that he will be out in the world doing dangerous stuff. But despite that fear, I am also excited for him. I think it will also change him in positive ways.

But I worried about him all weekend. He came home both days exhausted and sore.

I just want to throw this out into the universe: I hope he stays whole and himself. I hope he doesn’t lose his kindness and gentleness. I hope he does acts of service that help people. I hope he makes friends who support him for the rest of his life. I hope this experience makes him an even better person.

Saturday morning was awful for me. I know I sound whiny and miserable and lame, but damn. My depression right now is crippling. I am functioning in the sense of getting up and going to work. But otherwise I am just down here in the dark. Kendell said something that upset me (I don’t even remember now what it was) so we went back and forth for an hour, discussing some things, fighting about other things. He is trying. He doesn’t really know how to help me, but I am glad he is trying. I’m trying too, or at least, sort of. I went back on meds, I started talking to a therapist.

But I also know me. I’ve wrestled with depression since I was 16. It has been better and worse in the past three decades, but never really gone away. I have created coping mechanisms. (Sometimes I wonder…what would my life be like if I didn’t have to fill it with coping mechanisms? What if I could just live and be present and enjoy my experiences?) Right now, I don’t have access to any of those coping mechanisms. But what is affecting me most profoundly is not being able to run. I don’t think I will improve until I can run again.

(And if I can never run again? I don’t even know.)

But, there’s depression but there’s also life, and we needed groceries and we had to go to a funeral. So I took a shower and pretended I was OK and I did what I needed to.

I meant to do some yardwork on Saturday afternoon, but my knees were bothering me so instead, Kendell, Kaleb and I worked on cleaning out the storage room. I finally, after more than 13 years, was able to get rid of all of my books that I’d had in my classroom when I was a teacher. I’d kept boxes of them, with the fear that one day I would have to go back to teaching. But they were taking up so much space, and maybe it was my depression driving me (I’ve also been getting rid of a lot of my clothes, and scrapbook supplies, and running clothes), but I decided: enough. If I DO teach again, I will deal with it then. This felt like shedding some of the weight I have been carrying, which is crazy. I haven’t been in a classroom since Kaleb was born. And despite the fact that I loved many aspects of teaching, the idea of having to go back to teaching is a literal FEAR. It gives me nightmares, and not only because it was difficult, but because teaching was wrapped up in so many other things. My perspective on myself and my place in the world changed drastically during those years, and there were some soul-crushing experiences that happened. So letting go of all of my classroom books was perhaps a thing my psyche needed. Unnecessary weight.

On Sunday, I desperately wanted to go hiking.  But my knees have been bothering me, so I decided not to. Kendell and Jake went, though (I was both miserable about not going and happy they could have some time to themselves), and Kaleb slept in late (Nathan was at his drill). So I just stayed in bed. I had a hot beverage and read my book (I’m reading Fledgling by Octavia Butler) and I didn’t do the laundry or clean the kitchen.

It was my Sunday to teach. My lesson came from Isaiah 50-53, and I focus on learning how to be empathetic from Jesus. I have such complicated feelings about my church and my faith right now. I’m not sure that the Kavanaugh confirmation, and every single Mormon senator supporting him, isn’t the turning point for me. I don’t know how to be in a congregation that is full of men who care more for power and wealth than for doing the right thing. Of course, none of those senators were at my class. I don’t know if I managed to convey this, but what I hope I communicated was this: almost all of the religious stuff we care about is just stuff that doesn’t matter. What matters is loving each other, and mourning for each other, and trying to take care of each other. If Jesus existed, that is what he wants from us, I am convinced. Everything else is dross.

After church, one of the best parts of the weekend: we had dinner with our friends. They live in South Carolina but they were here for Saturday’s funeral. We had some great conversations, our kids reconnected, and we laughed. I laughed. I am not laughing much these days so just that buoyed me. But one conversation in particular, which has too much back story for me to even start to explain it, left me…wow, it left me feeling peaceful, and like I had a little of my light back. It made me feel like I was heard even when I didn’t know anyone was listening. I need that, too.

How was your weekend?

The story of how I messed up my knees in Colorado begins in the redwood forests near San Francisco.

I prefer every trip I take to include a hike of some sort, if possible. (I haven’t managed this yet when we’ve got to New York, but I think if we go again I will make it happen.) So when we went to San Francisco for my marathon, I found a trail for us to hike. I made sure that we hiked a couple of days before the race, to give my body a little time to rest between hiking all day and then running all morning. The trail I chose was Berry Falls in Big Basin State Park. I chose this ten-mile loop hike instead of going to Muir Woods because I wanted a little bit of solitude, and we found it there. We saw only about six or seven other people during our hike, and it was beautiful: not too steep, the perfect distance, three waterfalls, and glades of redwood trees lit by filtered sunlight.

It was perfect.

Except, once we got back to our hotel in San Francisco, I got out of the car and discovered that something was weird with my knees. They didn’t hurt, really. They just felt…strange. Wobbly and irritated, as if the spaces inside the joint were full of the wrong level of tension. I iced them that night and the next morning, and did some extra quad, hamstring, and popliteus stretches throughout the next day. I also slathered them in Deep Blue. And tried not to be frightened: could I run my race if my knees were weird?

When I woke up the morning of the marathon, they seemed fine. A little stiff, but the strangeness was gone. I ran my race and only thought about my knees a couple of times; it probably didn’t hurt that there were several aid stations with Biofreeze, and I had the volunteers spray both the front and back of my knees.

I didn’t really think about the knee weirdness again. Over the next month, I gave myself some good rest days, and then I started running again. I planned a little weekend get-away for Kendell and me, to dovetail with a trip he had to take to Denver for his job. I walked with friends and I did a few hikes and I started eyeing the possibilities for a late-fall half marathon.

For our trip to Denver, I decided to have some mountain adventures. I went running the first morning we were there, a beautiful little run around Broomfield. Then we hit the road. There was quite a bit of driving on the first two days—we went on the Mount Evans scenic byway (my first 14er!) and drove the whole length of Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, stopping here and there for the small hikes that are near the road (the Tundra Communities trail was my favorite). And every time I got out of the car to take pictures or to hike, I discovered that my knees had that same feeling I’d had in California: wobbly but stiff, not really painful but just…wrong, somehow.

Our last full day in Colorado was our long hike day. I choose the trail to Sky Pond for several reasons, but mostly because it was the one that the most people recommended. I was especially intrigued after reading this blog post by Kate, one of my fellow Skirt Sports ambassadors. I took a bunch of Advil the morning before we hiked, and had Kendell rub my legs, and then we took the shuttle bus to the trail head.

I love hiking on trails in national parks. They are always beautifully maintained, with steps and bridges and cairns. This trail follows that idea and is absolutely beautiful. It includes a waterfall, the stunning Alberta Falls. One thing I noticed hiking this trail is just how different these mountains feel from mine in Utah. Even though technically the Wasatch Front is a part of the Rocky Mountains (the very furthest western part, in fact), there is a different spirit in each mountain range. I don’t exactly have a word for how it is different; the light, and the air, and the smells. More it is just that each mountain has its own personality, and I confess: I fell pretty hard for those mountains, too. A creek runs beside part of the trail, and there are mansion-sized stones scattered around. Despite the knee worries, we were doing just fine; in fact, if it doesn’t sound too strange, I felt like the mountains were glad I was there and lending me some of their strength.

The trail is consistently steep but not excruciatingly so. It leads first to Loch Lake, and, wow. If we’d just hiked that far, I would’ve been OK. It was so beautiful. The mountains I usually hike don’t have lakes and ponds like this, and it makes the experience feel entirely different. I wanted to find a spot to dip my feet in (as I did when we hiked Half Dome) but I we wanted to get to our destination first, and then be a little bit more leisurely on the way back.

Past Lock Lake, the trail gets much steeper. There is a long stretch of steps carved into the mountain, and then you get to the spot I had been both dreading and anticipating. To get to the next lake, there is a scramble, a spot where you have to climb rocks. Climb rocks next to a waterfall—not exactly ON the waterfall itself, but close enough that there is still some water coming down the stones.

I’m not afraid of heights. I can stand on the edge of a cliff and feel nothing but exhilaration. But I was a little bit nervous to tackle that scramble. It’s not something I’ve done very often, and I feel like all of this year’s illness has negatively affected my body’s strength. But I wanted to get to Sky Pond, so I put on my Big Girl Pants and started scrambling.

Going up was actually really fun. There was one little spot where I felt like my legs weren’t long enough to manage, but Kendell was behind me and he helped heave me up. When we were about halfway up the scramble, though, the weather changed abruptly. It had been a little bit cool but sunny, but then all of a sudden some clouds rushed in and it started to hail. (Look how blue the sky is in that picture...and just after Kendell took it, the clouds came out of nowhere.) I just kept going, though, and finally made it to the top.

To Sky Pond! (Actually, this isn’t even Sky Pond. Because I was overwhelmed with adrenaline or just because I’m an idiot, I didn’t realize that this is Glass Pond. I didn’t realize until we finished hiking and I could look at the map on Strava that we didn’t even go all the way to the pond we set out to see. %#&*(&@^^@*[email protected]! This makes me annoyed at myself! But it also is a reason to go back to RMNP.)

OK, Glass Pond! It was SO COLD. The clouds kept moving across the sun and then pulling back, but the hail didn't stop. We sat on a rock that sheltered us a little bit from the pelting hail, but eventually decided to go back down. When I stood up to go, my knee wobbled…and then I FELL. I fell face-first into the piney bushes I had been sitting by. I caught myself and didn’t bang anything, just scratched my hands and my face, but somehow, somehow…that fall made me freak out. Maybe because I was thinking about that spot on the scramble where my legs had been too short. How would I get down that spot? And the wind kept blowing and the hail was biting my skin and I just said “OK! LET’S GO NOW!” so we headed back toward the cliffs.

I was really in full-blown panic when I started scrambling down. My breaths were raspy and my heart was pounding, my hands shaking. There were probably 15 people also going down, so I waited in the line (and this, of course, is the drawback of hiking in a national park: it’s beautiful, but don’t expect any solitude as everyone else wants to see the beauty too) until it was my turn. Kendell went first, just in case, and then I started down.

I scrambled down backwards, with my chest and arms towards the rocks, and despite the hail and the panic, the wind and the slick rocks (they were considerably more wet than when we had scrambled up), I was doing OK—until I got to that spot, the one made for people with lovely long legs. Kendell made it down just fine, and he was standing on the cliffs below me, his hand trying to guide my foot to the next spot. My right leg was bent literally as far as it could bend, and then my left leg was reaching down, and my legs were just not long enough.

Kendell wanted me to just drop, but I couldn’t. The panic rose up in me again and I said “I can’t, I can’t!” in a really panicked voice. Then the guy who was above me said, in a very calm, deep, manly voice, “Excuse me, ma’am, can you use a hand?”

He reached his hand out for me and I totally trusted that this stranger, who I could only identify by his boots and his red jacket, would be strong enough to haul my fat self back up. But: he was! I thanked him and hugged him (which I’m sure embarrassed him), and the woman hiking with him said “it’s OK, sweetie, you just take your time” like I wasn’t old enough to be her mother.

I still had to get down that cliff though.

So this time, I attempted it going forward, with my back towards the rocks, and that was easier. I could sort of see where to put my feet, and I could see Kendell right there to catch me if I fell, and I made it.

I made it off the cliff.

The crowd above me and the one below me started cheering and I totally burst into tears, those post-panic tears that are cathartic and get rid of all the rush of chemicals your panic caused.

Then I had a snack and we started back down.

We still had one other lake we wanted to hike to, Mill Pond, and despite the rain (the hail had blessedly stopped), wind, and panic, I was feeling happy. I took about three steps down the trail, and then—something crackled.

It didn’t really hurt.

It was just utterly wrong. Something deep in my right knee, something horribly crackly. I froze mid-step. Carefully shifted my weight. Thought about that impossible way I’d just bent my knee on the cliff. Was afraid to take the next step.

But it was fine.

Nothing else crackled, so I just kept going. I mean…what choice do you have other than helicopter extraction?

We finished the hike. We stopped at Lock Lake for a while, and then took the spur trail to Mill Pond, and they were beautiful. I’m not even sure I could say which one I loved more. On the way back to the parking lot, we saw a female elk, right next to the trail, and I stood and watched her for a good five minutes before she very peacefully walked across the trail right in front of me, so close I could’ve touched her (I didn’t try to touch her).

It was a challenging, beautiful, magical hike and I’m so glad we decided to do it (even if we’ll have to go back again to get to Sky Pond).

We had to wait for about twenty minutes before the shuttle bus came, and it was another twenty minutes before we got back to our car. When I stood up at the parking lot, I realized: that crackle? Well, I’m not sure why I wasn’t hobbling the whole way down, because now, after sitting for so long, my knees were useless. The left one was stiff and swollen, and the right one—the one that crackled—wouldn’t bend at all.

And that, dear reader, is how I injured my knee. No dramatic fall or twist, just a gradual building-up of tension and stiffness and then the mysterious crackle. I’m not yet sure where my story goes from here…only time will tell.

“Don’t talk to me,” I told my husband as we waited for the elevator on the fourth floor. “Don’t talk to me because if you do I will cry, and I don’t want to cry where people can see me.”

So we rode down the elevator, walked through the doctor’s office and the hospital, up the stairs of the parking garage tower, in silence.

We sat in our car, overlooking the beautiful red Mt. Olympus, in silence.

Until I thought I could talk around the lump in my throat. I could barely get enough air through to make a sound, just enough to say what was pounding in my heart and brain and psyche. “I don’t want to live a life that doesn’t include running. I don’t want to be alive if I can’t run.”

Perhaps that is overly dramatic. If I think about all of the surgeries my husband has had, yes. If I think about people who are blind, deaf, or physically altered, who have lost limbs or control of their bodies, yes. Who have cancer or diabetes or failing kidneys or asthma or a stroke—where does my frayed patellar cartilage rank in those comparisons?

Fairly low, I know. I know there are millions of people who have had worse things happen to them, and who don’t fall into despair. Knowing that makes me feel worse, actually.

But please: Allow me to wallow for a bit. Let me be selfish for a minute. Let me tell you how this conversation with an orthopedist pushed me so far back into the dark that I could say, out loud to my husband who has almost died more than once, that I didn’t want to be alive anymore.

A little over a month ago, I hurt my knee while I was doing a scramble on a trail at Rocky Mountain National Park. (I thought I would’ve written about this experience before now. Somehow, I haven’t. Somehow I don’t want to look at it too closely.) There was a crackle somewhere deep in the joint, but no pain until I stopped moving, and then my knee just wouldn’t work at all. While driving to the Denver airport, I called the orthopedic doctor recommended by the surgeons who operated on Kendell’s knee and hips. I started physical therapy, I had an appointment with the ortho doc, I got (after much back-and-forth with the insurance company) an MRI. I continued with PT, I went back to the ortho to discuss the results of my MRI. He explained that I have a tear on my femoral condyle, which is the cartilage at the end of the femur, but he thought it wasn’t a new injury. Instead, he thought the stiffness and general my-knee-feels-wrong feeling was being caused by some thinning of the cartilage under my kneecap.

He suggested I do a month of physical therapy and come back to talk to him.

So yesterday I did. This was the essence of our conversation: He thinks I should stop running.

This time, he said that the thinning was “severe” and the cartilage almost entirely worn away in one spot.

When I protested and said that I don’t want to stop running, he said “well, that’s like someone with diabetes saying they don’t want to have to take insulin. You can want or not want, but that doesn’t change the reality that your knee cartilage is starting to wear out.”

He went on to explain how women who continue running into their 50s, 60s, and beyond are “freaks of nature.” And that I should feel pretty grateful I got to run until I was 46. And to tell me a story about how all of his friends who were serious runners left the sport in their 40s.

“But I literally can’t imagine my life without running,” I said. “And if you have friends who are runners, you have to understand the runner’s psyche.”

“Oh yeah, ‘no pain, no gain’ right? Take up swimming. Or biking. You can get your endorphins somewhere else.”

And I just stopped talking. Because I could tell he’d already decided for me, and that he wouldn’t actually listen, or offer any suggestions other than “stop running.”

Clearly he doesn’t understand the runner’s psyche in the least.

That was likely not the best drive home from a doctor’s appointment my husband has ever had. Because he got to listen to me rage and wail, spew despair and ugly, ugly thoughts that haunt me:

How I’ve failed at basically everything in life. How I failed my children in the worst ways, with my own blindness. How our marriage is difficult and full of strife. How damaged my relationship with my mother is. And with God, not to mention religion.

But it’s not like I have something else to compensate for all of those relationship failures. I don’t have success in the world, either. Sure: I have a job I love and that is the perfect fit for me. But I can only work at the library because of Kendell’s job. I could never support a household on my salary. (Even if I worked full time.) So instead of doing a job I don’t love but that pays more, I selfishly work a job that brings me happiness but doesn’t help my family much.

I didn’t accomplish my goals. I’m not a university English professor like I wanted to be. I’m not a famous writer. I wasn’t a good enough mother or wife or daughter.

But running gave me something.

It gave me an identity. And, I confess: It gave me something to be proud about. Even though I’m not fast and will never win a race, I still felt proud of my running accomplishments. Running gives me a goal, a way to accomplish something measurable. A way to feel like I succeeded at something.

And no: it isn’t about “no pain, no gain.” Or the endorphins, really.

It’s about moving my body outside in the world. Moving to somewhere, not just in endless strides on an elliptical in the stinky rec center.

It’s that when I am sad, angry, frustrated, I can put on my running shoes and let the miles give me time and oxygen to work through it.

When I start to get stuck in an anxiety loop, when I worry about something and then my cortisol starts spiking through my body and then that makes me worry more, I can take a deep breath. I can get dressed in running clothes and then just run, and the cortisol dissipates, filters through my skin and evaporates as sweat and I am peaceful again.

Running is the only thing I have in my life where the eternal loop of negative self-talk finally stops. It is the space that demands I be kind, encouraging, and gentle with myself, where I find something good about myself.

It’s that where ever I go, I find myself thinking “I wish I could stop the car and run here.”

It’s that every vision of my future includes running. I want my grandkids, if I have any, to think of me as their grandma who runs. When I travel, I don’t just want to see a place. I want to run in the place. Or, say I did accomplish my writing goals—you know what I’d do when I was out on book promo trips, right? I’d go running, where ever I found myself.

Long ago, more than a decade ago, I set myself the goal to be the old woman at races, the slow but determined one who is, I now know, a freak of nature.

I don’t know how to imagine a future or live a life that doesn’t include running.

I found myself thinking about the time, five or six months after I left gymnastics, when I was spiraling and lost in darkness and my mom put me in therapy. The first thing the therapist asked me was “who are you?” and I said “I’m a gymnast.” And then I paused and ate my words. “No, I’m not.” And that was terrifying to realize that my identity was gone. But I was sixteen and I still had my whole life to figure things out. I still had plenty of time to make a new identity.

So I did that. I found the things that helped me cope with my depression. I worked through the loneliness of being a mother while not feeling supported by my own mother, and I turned that into an appreciation for solitude. I made peace with not having tons of friends, or fitting in when I tried to join running groups.

It was not just OK to run alone, it was glorious. It gave me joy and goodness; it took away some of the relentless shame and the disappointment in myself that I feel at almost all other times.

And now the universe wants to take away running, too?

(In the same damn week that politicians took away my belief in the democracy of our nation, the integrity of men, and any faith in the future?)

Today, I went back to my physical therapist. I told her what the doctor said, I said the F word, I had to apologize for getting upset and saying the F word. (I love my physical therapist but she is very, very Mormon.) I said the F word because the only way to not start crying again is to be a harsh and say the F word. She forgave me and tried to talk me down. She was kind and gentle and she said “doctors say ‘don’t run’ all the time. It doesn’t usually prove true. Yes: you’re probably not going to be the runner who runs five or six marathons a year. Yes: you need to cross train. Yes: we need to get everything calmed down and working as smoothly as possible. But you can run again.”

And I felt a little glimmer of hope.

But I don’t know how to get that doctor’s voice out of my head. I don’t know how to reclaim running from his negativity.

I know not everyone understands this. I know I sound overly dramatic and possibly hysterical and definitely pathetic. But that appointment with that doctor? Not just what he said but how he said it, with a sense of incredulity that I wouldn’t just accept what he said. It was just like the crackle in my knee. It was an injury, except an invisible. A tear in my psyche, just like the one on my condyle.

So for the next while—maybe even six months, I don’t know—I think there will be no running. I will hike, of course. Walk. Maybe trying a spin class or two.

But I think if I try to run and I can’t, if it’s still painful or it makes things swell and stiffen and ache again, then I will be overcome with discouragement, and I’m not sure I can climb out again.

So I will let my knees heal and I will let my psyche heal, and hopefully over the winter I won’t gain 50 pounds, and in the spring. In the spring when the world is green and hopeful again—maybe by then I’ll have forgotten the derision in his voice, and the surety of his pronouncement. Maybe the glimmer of hope will grow to an actual light source, and I will run again.

In the absence of running I will only be able to hold on to the hope of running.