Feeling Alive

While I was studying abroad, I spent one weekend holed up in a cabin in the middle-of-nowhere, Wales for an adventure sports weekend with a bunch of other students. The activity we were all most excited about was coasteering: getting fully suited up in a multi-layered wetsuit, water shoes, and life vest, and swimming out into the freezing cold choppy waters off the rocky coast of Wales. We swam into underwater caves, jumped and dived off cliffs, climbed rocky outcroppings, and swam against rebellious waves that pushed our life vests up to our chins and made it hard to breathe.

The final part of the coasteering adventure was supposed to see us linking into a chain and swimming across a fifty yard open expanse of water to a 30 feet high cliff to jump into the water. But by that time, the light breeze that’d been there when we started had picked up into gusty winds, and the waves were pushing us astray so strongly that our guides quickly realized there was no way we’d make it across the open water. Just as we’d decided to call it and swim back to shore, the sky opened up and buckets of water fell down.

We found ourselves at the furthest point out from shore planned for the event, straining against the current, barely able to see through the water coming at us from every direction, with the rocks that sometimes came up beside us as dangerous to walk on as the water was to swim in given how treacherously slippery they’d become. Many people looked angry or upset, and one of my friends was having a full on panic attack; when we got back to shore and she got wrapped in a towel, she couldn’t stop sobbing for half an hour.

Through it all, I couldn’t shake a giddy smile and the thought that I’d never felt so alive.

There’s something about being forced into being so physically present in a moment that it’s impossible to think about anything else that makes me feel inescapably human. I don’t think it’s a “near-death experience” thing – though the storm was scary, we were still life-jacketed and accompanied by experienced guides, and I don’t think any of us would have ever come to real harm. It wasn’t a sense of living on the edge that made me feel alive, but the sheer adrenaline from the assault on all my physical senses in every direction.

I spend a lot of time working towards intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual development – these are things that come up a lot in my personal life and in my work. But since I haven’t been a performer for some years now, I don’t often think of “physical development” in the same plane of importance. I actually often think of running (my primary and currently only form of physical activity) more as a means to the other ends – an opportunity to think things through uninterrupted; to relieve stress, anxiety and other negative emotions; and even to get some reading time in, since I listen to audiobooks when I run.

But if I try to think of a moment when I felt as alive as I did coasteering in Wales, it’s running marathons. When I train, even on my longest runs I’m doing it for the aforementioned reasons. But you’re not “supposed” to run more than 20-22 miles before a marathon, and there’s something about the final added distance and the monumental nature of the event that makes the marathon itself completely different. I’ve run two so far, and though I was far more mentally empowered and happy throughout the first than the second, I hit a point in both of them where the physical act was all that mattered. I realized around mile 20 of the Vermont City Marathon that I hadn’t processed a word of my audiobook over the last half hour, because all I was focused on was a constant evaluation of the soreness of my muscles, my parched throat no matter how much water I grabbed from aid stations, and the physical weightiness of pounding the pavement with every step. I couldn’t use my book as a distraction, because I was so present in the physical moment of how my body felt. In other words, I was paying attention to it in a way I never normally allow myself time to.

Maybe that’s why I keep signing up for marathons, when I could just as easily run shorter distances and reap the same health benefits, or run long distances for the emotional and mental relief it gives without spending the money on a big event. But in addition to my general life need to always have a goal, I think subconsciously I’m also addicted to marathons for that added element of feeling so alive that I untap at that distance, which I so rarely feel elsewhere.

Because I can tell you one thing: running isn't about weight loss/management or even "maintaining a healthy lifestyle." If I knew I was going to die in a month, I wouldn't stop running. And that's how I know that for me, it's an essential part of living.