Rest, Persevere, Rest

when the 500-piece puzzle has 600 pieces

Housekeeping Note: The Blue Room is a free newsletter and always will be, but I now have a few paid options for people who feel moved to support the weekly work. At some point I may add enhanced features for paid subscribers, but for now, the paid tiers are simply a way for superfans to say “thank you and keep going.” (Shoutout to Pat, who became a founding member ten minutes after the option went live last week. Wow!)

As always, your attention and responses are the greatest support of all. Grateful. 

On with the show…

Hoo boy, friends. It’s been quite a couple of weeks… a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle with 600 pieces in the box. A precious yet harrowing time, with a few logistical annoyances thrown in for extra spice. So this week, I’m sharing a bit from the book, which also happens to be a hope-practice that’s been sustaining me. I hope it sustains you as well:

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One of my favorite running workouts is a track workout called rest roulette. The workout involves a series of 400s (one lap, about a quarter mile) at a fast pace. When you’re done with the 400, you push the lap button on your watch, which will record the stats for that interval of running. Whatever the last number is, you multiply it by twenty, and that’s how many seconds of rest you get before the next 400. For example, if the first lap takes 1:38.26, take 6 x 20 = 120 seconds of rest.

It’s a mental exercise as much as a physical one. The higher the digit, the more rest you get. During a recent round of rest roulette, I got pretty lucky with a few sevens and eights, but I also got a few fours, and my last round ended in a one: only a twenty-second rest. (At least it wasn’t a zero.)

Around the second or third round, it stops being about running and starts being a metaphor for life—running hard, resting when possible, then doing it all again, never quite knowing when the next sprint will begin. Life comes at us pretty fast. There’s little time to breathe, let alone process. A colleague described our lives as bodysurfing in the ocean, getting hit by a wave, and having another one strike while we’re still flailing and sputtering. Job stress piles on top of a parent’s declining health, on top of an expired license plate, on top of a busted refrigerator.

Hope requires steadfast effort, but not at predictable, measured intervals. There’s only one thing to do in such times. It’s what gets me through rest roulette: run by feel, paying attention to your body first and foremost. In the age of GPS watches and fitness trackers, runners can become addicted to tracking the stats, comparing present performance to past efforts, and pushing ourselves way too hard for the sake of a number on the watch. But rest roulette helps us listen to our bodies: what we’re feeling and what we’re capable of right now. I’m not going to run as fast after a short break as a long one, and that’s as it should be.

I recently took a day-long drive which involved several hours of torrential rainstorm. My passenger and I would barely escape one band of showers before entering the next. At one point, I was poking along behind a semi truck, hazard lights flashing, my wipers barely keeping up with the onslaught. I fixed my sights on those faint red taillights, my only visible guide. Occasionally, they vanished from view, as if the truck had eerily disappeared into the mist.

For a while, I asked my companion to check the radar to see what was up ahead. OK, just a few more miles, then a break in the weather. I soon realized that knowing how long the rain might persist was distracting me from the act of driving. I needed to adjust my thinking from “how much longer will I need to do this?” to “I’m in this for however long it lasts.” No conversation, no investigation. Just this moment, for as long as necessary.

I have a weekly check-in with my friend and fellow coach LeAnn Hodges in which we take turns coaching each other. She shared that on a recent Monday, she found herself with an abundance of energy and a positive outlook. By Friday she was scraping the bottom of the barrel, completely depleted and pessimistic. So she took the weekend to putter, spend time with family, and have some creative fun. By Monday she was full again. 

It would have been easy, perhaps, for her to feel disappointed for ending the week so much lower than she began it. But in a world as chaotic and broken as ours, hoarding energy is a luxury we can’t afford; there’s too much work to do. Instead, she realized she had exactly the energy she needed, used it well, and used it all—and was present enough to know when it was time to refill the tank. This kind of self-awareness takes a lot of attention and intention—and she’d want me to tell you, she miscalibrates and ends up overdrawn on occasion, as do we all—but it’s a necessary skill amid everything we face right now.

I have a complicated relationship with the phrase “do your best.” It’s meant to convey grace and compassion: “Honey, give yourself a break. You’re doing your best.” But in my head, I can always imagine a best that’s better than my current output. I’ve had to nuance the phrase for maximum self-kindness: “This is today’s best, and that’s OK.”

Today’s best doesn’t need to be pretty. Hope is robust enough to survive it. We get through today, world’s okayest style. And then do the same thing tomorrow.

When I ran the Houston Marathon, a mantra came to me: Keep doing this. Not very poetic, I suppose, but it helped me finish strong that day and many days since. “Keep doing this” means don’t get fancy. You know what it takes because you’re already doing it. Persist—nothing more.

Reflect

“I needed to adjust my thinking from ‘how much longer will I need to do this?’ to ‘I’m in this for however long it lasts.’ No conversation, no investigation. Just this moment, for as long as necessary.” What does this idea evoke in you? Do you find this kind of presence easy or hard, or does it vary? What accounts for the variance?

Practice

The practice for this reflection is simple but not easy: rest. For however long you can manage it.

Photo was taken at a group run a few years ago. “If you want to run far, run together”… Another bit of running wisdom that’s been sustaining me lately.

~

Link Love

Monetary support is lovely, but I wasn’t kidding when I said your encouragement is priceless. It was surely one of you who suggested Hope: A User’s Manual for the Henderson County Public Library in North Carolina. Well grab your library card, Asheville friends, because it’s there along with these other new titles. What a fun thing to pop up in my Google Alerts… and it makes me want to do a study of these lists as a window into what different communities are reading. 

Steady on.