On October 24th, 2020, I ran one of the best training runs of my life. I spent 16 miles cruising up and down Mt. Tamalpais, a place where I always find refuge and joy. I could have climbed forever, and when it came time to descend, I got as close to flying as I have ever felt on two feet. I was on the cusp of a breakthrough – all the miles were paying off. I was faster, fitter, and stronger than I had ever been.
The next day, I set off for more miles in Marin, this time starting in Tennessee Valley. Fifteen minutes into the run, I reached a set of stairs. The geometry of the stairs caught my eye, so I stopped to take a picture. That picture captured a moment whose significance I wouldn’t understand until five months later.
Little did I know.
After putting my phone away, I started shuffling up the steps. A dozen steps up, my stride caught and an astonishing pain erupted in my hip – a sharp and sudden flash that severed my external senses. For a moment, my entire world shrunk to an interoceptive tunnel drilling down into the agony suffusing my hip.
A breath later, I regained my awareness of the trail and the trees, so I tried to take a few more running steps. The pain engulfed me again, and I knew that I was done running for the day.
The next day wasn’t any better, so I decided to rest for a week. I returned to running cautiously – 4 flat miles at 10-minute pace – but the pain continued to come and go unpredictably. The sensations seemed to wander around my hip – one day in my psoas, the next day in my lower back, the next day deep in my groin. I had a stress fracture in my pubic bone in college, so I decided to get an x-ray. The x-ray showed nothing of concern, so I took more time off from running and switched to cross-training on my bike. But even biking was intermittently painful! My hip did not like being bent. This cycle continued for another couple of months – take time off, try to run, try to bike, try to hang on to sanity. Fail to run, fail to bike, fail to hang on to sanity.
In early January 2021, my doctor referred me for an MRI. I am claustrophobic (justifiably – one of my closest brushes with death involved being buried alive), so the thought of an MRI appointment during a pandemic before vaccines were available was not appealing. But my search for explanation had become so desperate that I removed all my jewelry and crawled into the tube. I needed to know what was wrong because I needed to know how to fix it. If I couldn’t fix it, I was worried I would lose my already-tenuous grip on mental wellbeing.
On Friday, March 6th, 2020, UC Berkeley sent a message to instructors telling us to prepare to teach online. I remember where I was when I got the message: walking past VLSB toward the Tang Center for a sports medicine appointment – my hamstring was bothering me. It felt like a threshold moment, like I was standing on the edge of a crevasse, searching for a bottom too far down to see and seconds from tumbling over the edge. 48 hours later, I received a second message: no in-person classes for the next few weeks. Don’t come to campus, stay home, avoid people, buy two weeks’ worth of groceries at a time, anyone nearby is suspicious, figure out how to teach in this moment of profound disorientation.
As we all know now, it wasn’t just a few weeks away from campus. I didn’t set foot in my office again for another 535 days.
I can’t remember much of the summer 2020 months that followed. Police murdered George Floyd and the streets exploded with people protesting anti-Black racism and state violence. Oakland youth led the way and set a moral example, as they always do. Barack Obama addressed the nation, and while I disagreed with his support for the institution of policing, I cried when he spoke because the inhumanity occupying the White House – the unrelenting and obvious cruelness emanating from DC – broke my heart anew every day. My family managed to get together for a backpacking trip in the Bitterroots, and the trip was a family classic in that what we set out to do was have fun and what we ended up doing was mostly suffering.
When I look back at photos from 2020, I have a few pictures of these events, but my collection is mostly photos of trails – in the East Bay, in Marin, in the Sierra, on the Peninsula. I spent those liminal months running and running and running. The fear, uncertainty, and loneliness of daily life felt cacophonous and incomprehensible, but the trails were quiet, and the accumulation of miles in my training log made simple sense. I didn’t know how to persist through a pandemic, but I did know how to train. Every day spent alone and tied to a screen eroded my mental health, but daily time on trails pulled me back toward a functional equilibrium.
And then the fires came.
On September 5th, 2020, a close friend and I drove to Tuolumne, where we planned to backpack before working remotely from Mammoth Lakes for a week. While we were on the Tioga Pass road, ash started drifting onto the windshield. Rangers urged us forward toward Lee Vining – they were trying to get cars out of Yosemite. We dropped quickly down to Mono Lake and stopped to take stock where 120 and 395 meet. As I got out of the car to stretch my legs, I glanced back upslope toward the park. The sky was roiling and black. Over the course of 30 minutes, my world had ruptured again.
For the next 48 hours, my friend and I fled fire. We camped a night in Bristlecone Pine and woke to smoke so choking that I wondered if, unbeknownst to us, a new fire was racing up the hill toward our tents. We dropped into the valley to work our way home, and the ash was so thick that the road before us disappeared only 50 meters in front of the car. Another fire had started, this time in the mountains just outside of Mammoth.
We couldn’t return through Yosemite, so we took the next road north – Highway 108. 108 proved to be a gauntlet of fire. Brush on either side of the asphalt was smoldering, and the eerie emptiness of the road lent an alien pall to the trip. A panic rose in my throat as we wound our way up to the Sonora pass; my thoughts got frenetic, and an animal instinct to survive took over.
When I got back to Oakland, every part of me collapsed. I cried myself ragged during an emergency therapy session the next day. And then the dark day arrived when the sun didn’t rise in the Bay Area, and the last fibers of resolve holding me together snapped. I booked a plane flight to Chicago to spend time with my parents in breathable, runnable air. The choice was either COVID risk from travel or depression risk from staying home. I chose COVID.
My time in Chicago was lifesaving. But I could only stay there three weeks because the city’s concrete ocean started to feel like it was closing in. I missed my Bay Area trails, so I flew home and returned to the single tracks that had been keeping me afloat. I kept running and running and running, as I had been for months. I ran my way through so many pairs of shoes, just holding on.
And then, my hip exploded – another tear in the fabric of my reality.
The MRI report came back clear. Apparently there was nothing wrong with my hip that could be observed in imaging. So I tried running again, for what felt like the millionth time. The fitful pain continued, sometimes so severe that I couldn’t get comfortable in any position or movement pattern – sitting, biking, walking, and running could all be excruciating. Occasionally, inexplicably, I would get a run that felt okay enough to provide temporary respite and keep me trying. But even so, I felt like I was going crazy. I was in pain, but the source of the pain was unidentifiable. The pieces of the puzzle didn’t make sense, so with my MRI images in hand, I sought a second opinion.
Five minutes into an appointment with a second doctor, the pieces fell into place. My MRI had been read incorrectly. I had an obvious tear in the labrum in my hip (the tissue that maintains the integrity of the hip socket) caused by a misshapen femoral head (femoroacetabular impingement). I faced three options: stop competitive running forever, commit to extensive physical therapy and a break from running, or get surgery. Stopping running for the long-term was a non-starter. Physical therapy seemed like a reasonable, conservative choice.
As I write this in February 2022, I have been seeing my physical therapist at least once a week for 13 months. Chance at Active Care is incredible. But physical therapy wasn’t working. The pain continued, even though my glute muscles had become ironclad and I hadn’t run a step in two months. I got a cortisone shot in my hip to enable even more physical therapy, and the shot provided welcome relief, but the pain and dysfunction returned a few weeks later.
After four months of conservative treatment, and months of confusion and pain before that, the surgery option loomed large. But the rehabilitation process was significant – all told, I wouldn’t run a step for more than six months – and the results weren’t guaranteed. But what else was there to do?
I went under the knife.
The months between correct diagnosis and surgery was one of the most difficult periods of my life. The only outdoor movement accessible to me was hiking, and I couldn’t sustain a hike for more than an hour due to the pain that would accumulate. But those months were also clarifying. I learned so much about myself.
My motivation for PhD work dwindled when I hadn’t previously suffered from academic malaise. Certainly, the grind of remote work and disembodied Zoom meetings wasn’t helping, but more acutely, I wasn’t able to roam the places that brought me such joy. I realized that I was pursuing a PhD in environmental sciences to be able to take care of the places where I had scattered pieces of my soul – Montara Mountain, Mt. Tamalpais, Redwood Regional, Sibley, the Headlands, Las Trampas, and so many other open spaces that I know intimately. As a hydrology and climate change researcher, I am deeply aware of what is in store for my sacred places in the decades to come. In this line of work, anticipatory grief sometimes overwhelms me; at other times, I can rest in the present and appreciate the access that I have to these landscapes that renew me over and over. In spring 2021, when I couldn’t spend time on the trails, I lost the will to work on the subjects that had fascinated me for a decade. The diminishment of my spirit and disconnection from nature added to the physical pain I was enduring. It was as though I was suffering from amnesia – I had forgotten my “why,” or perhaps more precisely lost the embodied and emotional memories of it.
I also struggled with self-concept during those months of immobility. I couldn’t run, so I didn’t feel like a runner, and I had always been “a runner.” I also couldn’t hold on to my fledgling self-acceptance and self-understanding as a queer woman. That self-acceptance and self-understanding has been one of the central projects of my 20s. I spent my high school years in white, moneyed, suburban Minnesota. While my community wasn’t majority-conservative, constricting Christian religious convictions were common, and it felt like no one was queer. In my high school of 3,200 students, no one – students or adults – was out, to my knowledge. There were no gay people present in my day-to-day life in Minnesota. Classic, casual teenage homophobia was common. As I grew up over the course of high school, I felt different, but that difference felt too dangerous to explore and fermented into a tangled ball of shame and anxiety. I couldn’t shake that shame and anxiety in college, even though the college that I attended celebrated queerness and queerness has always been completely accepted in my immediate family. After college, I moved to San Francisco, motivated in part by a hope that maybe in San Francisco I could figure out how to be me.
I found myself an apartment in North Beach. The Headlands hills across the Bay intrigued me every time I looked over the water. But I didn’t have a car, so they were logistically far away. The only way I knew how to get there was running, so I started building up mileage. Eventually, a 20-mile day running out my door to an adventure in the Headlands became possible. My love for ultrarunning was born out of necessity.
Just a run away.
There is something magical about the Headlands. The way the light and fog play with the coastline, the folded marine rocks that hint at millions of mysterious years, the spring flowers that pop up amongst the scrub, the trails that deliver undulating runner’s bliss – the beauty of the landscape is impossible to put into words. I can only say that it has been healing for my soul. Getting lost in the valleys and ridges felt like coming home – to the Pacific Ocean of my childhood in New Zealand, to the parts of me I had been hiding from, to spiritual rest, to undercurrents of joy. I could be whole in the Headlands; somehow, when I was running the ridgelines, I felt like I was enough. And from this grounding in enoughness, I started to know that I’m gay. I didn’t have any revelatory moments; I suppose that the wholeness that I ran with in the Headlands dissipated my fear and brought me the stillness I needed to stop fighting myself. Is it a stretch to say that the Headlands taught me my queerness? I don’t think so. I haven’t fully shed the literal disorientation of my teenage years and early adulthood, but now I’m honest about who am I. And I feel free.
But unexpectedly, that freedom became harder to access when I couldn’t spend time on the trails because of my hip. The only choice left to rescue not only my running but also my self was surgery.
My surgery happened on June 7th, 2021. My labral tear had progressed over the months to the point where the tissue was now practically in two pieces. Dr. Alan Zhang at UCSF cut a pair of small incisions in my outer hip, arthroscopically shaved down the head of my femur, stitched together the labral tissue, and sewed me back up. I left the hospital with a pair of crutches and a 24-week rehabilitation program. As my opioid medication wore off later that evening, the throbbing in my hip crescendoed. Using the toilet was monstrously hard and sleeping was equally difficult. I wasn’t allowed to bend my hip past 90 degrees, extend my hip behind my body, rotate my femur in my hip socket, walk without crutches, or sleep in any position except on my back – and I couldn’t have done any of these things even if I had tried. I often got stuck in chairs or laying on my stomach, since I couldn’t easily roll myself over or stand up. My dad had to help me put on my underwear, a return to our parent-child relationship from more than 25 years ago.
Four days post-op. It was hard to get myself into and out of bed, so I sat on Zoom meetings… in bed.
I used crutches for two weeks inside and three weeks outside. When I took my first steps without crutches, I nearly fell over. My legs had forgotten how to walk! To get to the fridge (an important place), I had to hold on to the counter and take one… focused… step… per… second. I moved so haltingly. I went to physical therapy three or four times a week, and still it took me six weeks to re-learn how to walk and normalize my gait.
I went for my first walk three and a half weeks after surgery. I shuffled a quarter mile to a bench in a nearby park – that was as far as I could go. I sat and read a book in the sun for an hour before shuffling a quarter mile back to the car. Every step was effortful. I might as well have run twenty miles. It was one of the best half miles of my life.
The next activity I got back was stationary biking. My first session was 5 minutes without resistance – the bike practically pedaled itself. I slowly increased the time I could sit on a bike, using pain as my guide. Initially, producing more than 70 watts was nearly impossible. But six weeks after surgery, I started to build in resistance through modest interval sessions.
That same week, I was allowed to walk over uneven ground, which meant gentle hiking. I cried tears of joy while meandering two miles in Joaquin Miller redwoods, using hiking poles for balance. Two weeks later, eight weeks post-op, I could walk far enough to spend time in the Mt. Tamalpais watershed. I felt my soul stirring from the discouraged hibernation it had entered six months before.
Yolanda trail, one of the most beautiful stretches of single track out there.
In early August, two months after surgery, I was finally permitted to go on a gentle bike ride outside. I hadn’t ridden a bike outside since February. And on September 1st, 2021, twelve weeks post-op, more than six months after the last time I had run, and a lifetime since that fateful day in Tennessee Valley, I got to run. I ran a minute and then walked a minute, ten times, and accumulated two miles around a nearby high school track. My stride was funky, my fitness was nonexistent, and I experienced mild surgical-site discomfort, but joy emanated from my very bones. The relief was almost too big to feel.
Over the next three weeks, I adjusted the ratio of running and walking until I could run fifteen minutes continuously, which felt like an eternity at the time. I have been slowly building since then, and now, eight months after surgery and nearly a year and a half after this whole saga began, I finally feel like myself again. I can run sixty-five miles a week, over any terrain, at whatever intensity I want. I have been ecstatic to get to know my places again. My motivation to keep chipping away at graduate school is returning. And I feel more at ease being me, somehow, perhaps because I can spend time in landscapes that make me feel whole, that allow me to move in the most natural way that I know and feel unobserved and uninterpreted for a time. Maybe it’s that when I’m out there, I catch glimpses of the emptiness of separate self. I am made by these places I love, and when I’m in them, my ideas about myself don’t matter so much.
I’m writing this two days before I race up and down Montara Mountain. I call it my home course because I have family nearby and I know the contours, geology, and ecology of the mountain as well as I know the back of my hand. I am now fast and strong, and I am excited to race to feel those twin sensations of fortitude and flight that I felt on Mt. Tamalpais way back in October 2020. This will be my second race back after hip surgery, after the crisis phases of this pandemic, after the fires, after seasons of listlessness, after so much not-knowing.
A month ago, I ran my first race back. I was nervous stepping to the line. I knew my body was ready – I have worked so hard (and with David Roche’s guidance and unwavering support, so wisely) on physical therapy, aerobic base building, and the early phases of race-ready fitness. But I wasn’t sure about my mind. The past two years have been so, so, so hard. The weight of it all isn’t gone from my mind yet, and I don’t know when it will be. I felt that psychic burden on the initial climb of the race – 1800 feet up over four miles. The emotions came hard and fast – self-doubt, discouragement, anxiety, even despair. But wisps of gratitude bubbled up as I persevered, and I held on to memories of having it all, losing it all, and clawing it all back. What a life it is to be able to do this. I noticed the redwoods around me. What a life it is to know and steward these sacred places. Nothing is promised; the miles are a gift.
I finished the race strongly – if there is anything I do well, it’s run downhill. As I crossed the finish line, I felt a little bit of that pain and heaviness lift. I smiled to myself. No one there knew me, knew the tribulations that had preceded my race, knew the significance of that finish line, but that didn’t matter because I knew. I knew and I was proud.
I grabbed a swig of water, changed my shirt, and shuffled off for a cool down. Onward to whatever adventures, hardships, and joys have yet to come.
