Getting By and Restarting

We can open ourselves to new possibilities from forced fresh starts

I had an uptick in subscribers the past couple of weeks, so if you’re new here, welcome! I publish every Wednesday but took last week off due to difficult circumstances. I’ll briefly reintroduce myself to new subscribers: I’m a 55-year-old ultrarunner who’s been running for 30+ years. I live at 9000 feet in the mountains near Telluride, Colorado, and I’m an empty-nester with a son and daughter in their mid-20s. Caring for our two horses is my other sport and love. This season I’ll likely write about training for my main goal, July’s Hardrock Hundred, since I finally gained an entry spot after a decade of trying. I’ve been coping with injury since November, when I partially and stupidly tore the IT band’s attachment off the head of the tibia (details in this post). I was a running coach for nearly nine years, wrote this how-to book about trail running, and launched this Substack 3.5 years ago to share personal stories and practical advice about trail running, mountain living, and “midlife grit”—by which I mean, aging with an adventurous mindset and staying athletic and resilient through midlife, cultivating wellness for running and for a greater healthspan. Read more on the About page. Today’s post is about life more than running per se. Thanks for being here.

Me last week in a shirt given by a good runner friend. The small print on the Band-Aid says, “turning setbacks into comebacks.”

I sat down at my daughter’s desk in Los Angeles on Sunday to write this newsletter. Her home office sits at the top of four flights of stairs in a condo on the edge of Venice, south of the big fire, and I’ve been here to help while she recovers from surgery to repair a badly fractured tibia and copes with crutches. I’m also here to visit and care for my elderly in-laws, whose home along with everything around them burned two weeks ago in the Palisades fire.

My in-laws’ home, where my husband grew up, and their burned car in a photo from LA County’s website detailing the fires’ housing destruction. We still have not gained access to their neighborhood to inspect the rubble.

I intended to write about how disconcerting, but mildly exciting, it feels to run like a tentative beginner lacking confidence as I ease back into training while managing injury. But I couldn’t write. I couldn’t stay seated at that desk, as gratifying as it was to sit and look around at my 26-year-old daughter’s design things—a sewing machine on one side, a collection of her handbag creations on shelves on the other side, and a huge oil painting that she painted with impressionistic bluish-mauve images covering one tall wall.

I felt a restless, driving urge to take action and do something for my daughter and in-laws. Sitting and writing about myself and about running felt irrelevant, a privilege I couldn’t indulge next to this place where at least 10,000 homes burned. I wanted to work with my hands and bring order to disorder rather than think and work with words.

So I got a yard broom, an oversized stainless steel dustpan, and a big sponge and took them to the condo’s rooftop patio. Her cheap outdoor furniture had tipped over in the wind storm, her string of party lights had fallen and broken bulbs, and her Astroturf strips that covered the concrete had lifted and folded. Dead leaves mixed with ash covered everything. I couldn’t believe how much ash had traveled and settled on this rooftop some six miles from the southern edge of the Palisades fire.

I lifted up the pieces of turf, shook them out, rolled them up for storage, and then swept and cleaned everything. Then I tackled the leaves and ash on the unit’s balconies. My hands and clothes turned dark with dirt. I took photos of the overgrown dying trees on the building’s side and made a plan to persuade the HOA to get rid of them because they look like giant matchsticks that could burn in an instant.

After the cleanup project, I shopped and cooked for my in-laws and took food to them in the residential hotel near the airport where they’re staying.

Screenshot of fire damage in my in-laws’ neighborhood. They lived at the black dot. Red = destroyed.

Imagine this: You live in a house for more than four decades and raise your two boys there, and you fill it with art you made or thoughtfully bought along with antiques passed down from elders, and you daily walk and drive streets where you’re familiar with every tree, every house, and feel a sense of belonging from a social network that takes root and branches out from that neighborhood—and one day, a Tuesday in early January when it’s not supposed to be fire season, it all disappears, and you find yourself in old age homeless and forced to change and adapt to an entirely new place.

I am heartbroken from witnessing my in-laws (ages 87 and 84) and seeing footage of so many displaced, and haunted by that scenario, one we all could face.

Seven years ago, my husband and I built our dream home on a parcel across the dirt road from the family cabin my dad built when I was a kid and where my brother now lives, and we think of it as our “forever home.” It’s a rustic timber-framed design made of century-old reclaimed wood trucked from old farmhouses in Ottawa, the hand-hewn beams embedded with hatchet marks and rusted hardware from some craftsman in the late 1800s.

But my in-laws lost their “forever home,” and we could too. Our home’s gnarled thick old wood could catch fire from a wind-whipped grass fire on the mesa. So part of my brain also is preoccupied now with fire resiliency. I bumped up on my to-do list our plans to get a permit to create and fill a pond near the front of the house, which we and the firefighters could use as a water source, and install sprinklers pointed at the house, and rip out the wooden deck that surrounds three sides of the house to replace it with fireproof fake-wood decking that won’t look as authentic or aesthetically pleasing, but shouldn’t burn.

Last week, I also was reminded of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, with a caregiving twist, because I couldn’t care about my own desires having to do with athletic goals and creative projects until my loved ones were OK. Supporting my daughter who’d been broken and my husband’s parents who lost everything, and bringing order to their messed-up spaces, became my workout and focus.

The Hierarchy of Needs. I was stuck on the lower levels the past couple of weeks, for the sake of loved ones.

Good news, bad news? Hard to say.

Three weeks ago on New Year’s Day, which feels like three months ago, I wrote about my determination to “stoke optimism no matter what”: “This year, I am not making resolutions, but I am endeavoring to be optimistic. I will ‘fake it ’til I make it’ if necessary—that is, act optimistically even if inwardly I slide toward pessimism—and I will will myself to believe that my optimistic outlook and actions will become reality.”

I have let go of forcing and faking optimism. The best I can do, I feel now, is be open to possibilities—to possible upsides—and do the best I can with whatever is in front of me.

I’m reminded of the Chinese proverb of the farmer whose horse runs away. When his neighbor remarks, “Oh, that’s bad news,” the farmer answers, “Good news, bad news, hard to say.” The horse returns with a second horse, which the neighbor deems lucky, and the farmer repeats, “Good news, bad news, hard to say.” The second horse throws the farmer’s son while riding and breaks the son’s leg, which seems like bad news, but then the broken leg saves the son from being drafted to war, which seems fortunate. The farmer keeps saying, “Good news, bad news, hard to say.”

Can I look at my in-laws’ lost home, my daughter’s accident and long recovery, my own injury and long recovery—and, on top of it all, this week’s inauguration and the barrage of draconian and environmentally destructive executive orders—and can I be open to thinking, “Good news, bad news, hard to say”? I’ll try.

Here’s the upside to my in-laws’ home loss: Amazingly, thanks to insurance coverage, savings, and my husband’s quick and nimble decision-making and financing, we found and steered them to a new home located in my childhood hometown of Ojai, two hours north of LA. After spending several days scanning listings for furnished rentals, which had to be single-story because of my mother-in-law’s and their old dog’s limited mobility, we realized it would be close to impossible to find one, given the tsunami of demand. So we jumped into the housing market and found a good home in good shape for them to buy. It’s in the neighborhood up the road from my old junior high, and when I was a preteen I wished to spend time in that neighborhood because popular kids and their more well-off parents lived there. After an expedited escrow, we’ll help them move there in a few weeks.

Now I have reason to visit my old hometown more regularly, and now my in-laws seem equal parts energized and exhausted by this unexpected new chapter in their lives. Now my 23-year-old son is motivated to apply for a job opening in Ojai (where he went to high school) in part to be close to his grandparents. The fire aftermath is reconnecting our family in a way we didn’t foresee just three weeks ago. And I’m feeling closer than ever and more full of respect for my in-laws, with whom I’ve had at times a distant and rocky relationship.

Here’s the upside to my daughter’s accident and surgery (which implanted a metal plate and screws in her tibia): I savored the past four weeks of taking care of her and felt that it drew us closer. She let me help her, listened to my advice, and read a book I recommended. We watched movies and shopped together. She was forced to slow down and rethink the timeline for launching her startup company, which opened more creative thinking for how to do that. She moved in with her boyfriend, because his rental doesn’t have stairs, and they seem closer than ever.

A different relationship to running

And is there any good news to my injury and recovery process? I’m feeling pessimistic that my sore spot will ever stop “talking to me” and thinking that having an injury to manage may be my new normal. Instagram posts from other runners crushing their training, or Strava posts about everyone’s double-digit runs, trigger comparison, envy, and anxiety, so I’m looking at social media a lot less—which is mostly good, but also makes me feel isolated and increasingly disconnected from the trail-running community that has played a big role in my adulthood.

I’m running again, sort of, tentatively. I was supposed to refrain from any high-impact movement for four weeks following a December 27 PRP shot on my tendon repair area, but I cut that short by about a week because I was fast-hiking and upset and frustrated, and then my stride shifted to catching air with each baby-jog step, and I ran little intervals. My injury spot expressed stiffness and dull ache at about a 2, maybe 3, on the “pain scale,” but then faded rather than worsened.

A selfie from January 14, my first run of the new year—one solid steady mile bookended by two other miles mostly hiking.

I have progressed in the past week to three steady miles, and I’m doing this little bit of running on non-consecutive days. Sometimes the injury area hurts going up and down stairs, or when I am simply walking around, but other times it feels normal.

It’s daunting to think of how much training I need to get in Hardrock shape, and whether I’ll be able to handle it without re-injury, so I try not to think of that; I think instead about what I can do this week, and I recall a line my runner friend said (the one who gave me that T-shirt pictured above and who’s recovering from knee surgery), “I can do more this week than last week.”

So what’s the “good news”? Hard to tell. I guess that I’m stronger now from more time devoted to strength training, and more appreciative now of whatever running I can do. I’m more conscious of trying to run with good posture, quicker cadence, lighter foot strike, engaged core and glutes, and parallel rather than turned-out feet, all of which theoretically will help my injury—but also, all of which keeps me from letting my mind wander to fully enjoy the run. I hope this injury episode will prompt me to approach running more like a beginner in terms of excitement and a sense of wonder, rather than always comparing myself to performances and training volume from my prime years.

Overall, these past couple of weeks made me care about running less, which may be temporary but for now is a good thing. If I can do it, great. If I can’t, I’ll cope and do something else. Good news, bad news? Whatever, it’s fine and manageable.

And on the macro level, is there any upside to the sea change in our country? I don’t get political here much, but as a moderate who cares deeply about public lands and the climate, and who’s doing what I can in our community to make immigrants—who are central to the town’s workforce and culture—feel safe and supported, and who felt doom and deep sadness when the U.S. Capitol was ransacked four years ago, you can guess how I feel about the new administration’s executive orders.

Maybe the new tech-bro oligarchy will go all in on carbon dioxide removal and other types of geoengineering in ways that actually lead to some relatively safe methods to cool the planet. Maybe people will get so fed up with the meanness and falsehoods on Meta and X that social media will become uncool and we’ll trend toward making phone calls and organizing meetups. Maybe random acts of kindness and neighborliness will become a thing again, aided by run clubs and dinner parties (I’ll do my part). Maybe, surely, many will make great art.

The last lines from this Inauguration Day poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer loop through my mind. She described drinking from a broken mug that had been glued together and mused:

All day I thought of broken things.
All day I thought of repair. All day
I thought of ways to make beauty
out of what looks, for a time, like despair.

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How about you, can you recall a time in life when bad news turned out to be good news, or vice versa? Feel free to share that or anything else in the comments below.

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Reading & film pick-you-ups

When I spent Monday night in Flagstaff to break up the drive home from LA, I approached the hotel gym’s spin bike for some cardio exercise with a sense of duty. That feeling changed to desire, however, thanks to this newsletter post from

Sam Robinson

. He put together a collection of training montages from retro movies, and the YouTube clips got me pumped—and laughing! I started cycling and laughing so hard during 1985’s Rocky IV “training montage of training montages” that I had to pause the bike to catch my breath.

Top 10 Movie Training Montages

I wrote above about how I’m thinking about running form as I ease back into running. Learning about basic running form do’s and don’ts is worthwhile—but don’t overthink it. Running is pretty natural, and we each run how we run, and it’s hard to change your form significantly.

Christine Yu

wrote a thoughtful post on running form (and I added my two cents to it in her comment thread):

Why are we so obsessed with running form?

I watched two good movies last week and highly recommend them. One, A Real Pain starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, is super thoughtful, original, and at times funny (I love Kieran Culkin), and it should earn Oscars for acting and writing.

The other is a documentary called Join or Die, which is a followup to the book Bowling Alone and spotlights its author. It’s about social capital and the epidemic of loneliness, and its tagline summarizes it: “A film about why you should join a club, and why the fate of America depends on it.” You can stream it on Netflix, and I encourage you to watch it with others—organize a watch party! Since I’m president of our local Rotary club, I felt proud to see Rotary spotlighted in the film, and I got the chance to talk to the gathering about it and explain how “it’s not my dad’s Rotary club”—we’ve evolved, but we still get together with a motto of “service above self.”

Are you in a club—be it book, run, service, religious, other? How does it enhance your life and community? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.