Seventy-five percent

My office at Newman is a time capsule for March 2020. The computer, when you turn it on, opens five tabs of webpages that I last had opened when I left, whatever day had been my last day. I have left some notes for myself for events that never ended up running. Someone has been in to clean a few times, you can tell, and there are letters for me piled up and a book sent by a publisher, but everything else is the way it was. I sat in my chair for a moment and then gathered up the books I needed and left. I got halfway home, walking through the field on the backside of campus when I realised that I had forgotten to get my linen sport coat, the whole reason I had gone in the first place, but it didn't matter now, I thought. It's too hot even for linen. 

I'm editing a book where one author has written extensively in their chapter about Covid and I've wondered, reading it, how dated it will be in a few years. If people will remember the specifics of this time when everything stopped, of lockdown, of two metres distance between people. There is no one image to rally around, no single moment when it happened, like the way you remember where you were on 9/11 and you saw the plane hit the building, the second one because all of the cameras were trained the towers by then. Maybe it will be when you realised it personally when you knew something was wrong. I remember for me, it was that Sunday before the lockdown and the kids went to church even though I didn't really think they should and I went to pick them up and everyone was having coffee together like normal. This is madness, I thought, what are they doing, but even five days before I hadn't thought anything — we had all gone to breakfast to show our support for the neighbourhood pub. I stood in the church, staying away from everyone. One of the women who I normally hugged wanted to hug me then as well, but I was standing too far away and it was clear I was uncomfortable, visibly upset. She rubbed my arm instead, the way you treat someone who is particularly concerned about a political issue that you don't really care about. And then, a week later, it was here. 

My rescheduled marathon was cancelled after it's become more and more clear that this pandemic is not going away before September, despite how much anyone wants to pretend. I felt as though I received the news on a long run, like something you think you hear, but when you pull off your headphones, there was actually nothing. You keep running anyway, what does it matter why you're running. You're not going to stop running now, are you. Of course not, you're ticking off boxes in a plan, tracking changes in your body with metrics like body weight and fat, and heart rate and everything else. The heart rate monitor tells me I am running too many junk miles. The scale tells me I am 61% of the way to 75.9 kgs, that magic arbitrary number I've been chasing for years and years. Some time ago I was convinced I would never have to diet again and then here I am, doing the same thing I have written about for years — stripping naked in the morning to weigh myself. The same scale. The same feeling of my naked feet on the tile. The same looking up at myself in the mirror and thinking, it's okay, you're okay.

Junk miles are the miles you run at 70-75% of your max heart rate. They aren't your best, and they aren't easy. They make you miserable and tired. They open you up to injury, but they are the miles particular kinds of people run naturally. The kind of people that always want to do a little better than whatever they've set out to do. Seventy-five percent is as hard as you can go for a while, for a long time, but when you run like this, you're miserable, you're always on the edge of pain. You can keep going but you don't want to. I'm been running at 75% for years now; it makes sense that I've also been miserable for years. I heard a story of runners who retired and then ran their personal bests when the training schedules were eliminated. I've been thinking about this as I slow to a walk at the end of a run and pull off the chest heart rate monitor. Do I need this at all. Did I ever need it. The sun is well up and I feel it in the grateful way you feel the British sun. You can't put a number against that feeling of a slow easy pace, just the feeling of your body pushing blood through your veins and a road ahead that you could run for years and years.

So that grace might increase

The lockdown goes on — I am counting the days in the bullet journal I started at the beginning of February and every day passes and it's now somewhere in the eighties I guess. Now though, it all feels normal and the little graces, like the opening of Cafe Nero today, feels like a small gift. There are placards up about how often everyone is washing their hands and how we can all feel safe. The economy has shrunk so much the numbers almost seem meaningless — what does any of that mean to anyone until you don't have a job or can't eat or can't get the things you need. I have a new computer that I got because I can't travel and the money in the budget needs to be spent. It's unequal like everything else. Someone, somewhere out there is dying, but the Pihlajas of Harborne, with all our other problems, have been untouched so far. 

I gained weight for the first two weeks of the lockdown, as I finished my solo marathon and stopped running and was just eating and eating further into a stress spiral. Then like that, I took a different tack and decided to instead drop weight, to make that my obsession and have been filling the bullet journal with charts and notes, to take all the mystery out of it, to analyse it so closely and carefully that when I am losing weight in the future — because I will be losing weight in the future — I will have a plan, it will be clearly laid out for me so that I don't waste my time wondering about how much I need to eat. I have been going for long walks. I've been drinking protein shakes. I've stopped being hungry. The Galaxy watch tells me how many kilocalories I've used and praising me in a way that I find more comforting than the other apps and devices I've used in the past. It understands me. It tells me it's not good to have too many restrictions. It says some weight loss plans are harder than others.

I've been trying to write about my dreams in my journal as well — I'd heard this was something that Bobby Byrd does, writes poetry in the morning based on his dreams. Mei has gone back to school, two days a week, and last night I dreamt she was young again, two or three and her body was covered in growths. I didn't know the name of the disease when I saw it in my dream, and googled all day trying to find it, find its description and a photo of it and finally did: Neurofibromatosis. Of course, Mei is fine, and the dream was just my own insecurities playing out from this active memory of when I was paralysed at the end of the PhD and we were moving and Mei had the most awful eczema and Yoko was washing her in the shower and Mei was crying and Yoko was saying in Japanese, We will not lose to this, again and again. I don't remember having any agency, I remember just listening and feeling a pit in my stomach — I was gaining weight then too, wasn't I. 

The other things, all the work, the books, the three books I'm writing or have written or have edited, the funding bid, the student meetings, have been filling the bullet journal as well and I have been dutifully ticking things off as they come up. At the end of the year, there is an imperceptible moment where the tide has turned and the requests and meetings start to thin out more and more until there are almost none and you have to begin thinking about next year and whatever it will be that you have to do next. What will the Pihlajas of Harborne do when there is some freedom. Now, with none, we do what we can, we go for long walks up towards Hagley Road, and stop to buy iced coffee, which we can buy, a small grace. I fall asleep on the sofa, watching TikTok videos, and shopping for things I don't need online. Before money stops having meaning, I should get a thing. Jeans or a new computer monitor. It is all ending, it's just a matter of how long we can hang on.