Mental Health and Mountains

Lately I have been fretting a lot about how to make everything happen in the compressed amount of time that it needs to happen in. On Friday during a really stressful moment, I was driving to campus to a meeting that had suddenly popped up as a result of an issue with an event that I'm directing in a couple of weeks, and suddenly I felt a pain in my left arm. Lest I worry you, I will go ahead and tell you that it was actually my tricep being sore from yoga, but in that moment of stress I had this brief but intense fear that the pain was shooting and that I was having a cardiac event. My father died from a sudden and massive heart attack behind the wheel of his truck during an incredibly stressful time for our family in 1999. I pulled over into a parking lot and spent a couple of minutes breathing deeply and making sure that my other arm felt the same way (it did). Although there were other stressful moments in the day, I kept thinking back to that moment when I thought stress from my job might actually be killing me and reminding myself to slow down and breathe and let go of some of the worry.

I know that I am privileged to work in a field that I love. But institutions often bank on their faculty working far more than 40 hours a week. On Friday when I was driving back to campus, I had already worked close to 70 hours that week. On Sunday I had worked from 7am to 10pm with a two hour break for brunch and shopping. The rest of the week was not much better. That moment in the parking lot made me realize that I need to recommit to drawing some boundaries and to stopping letting molehills at work become mountains for me that I spend all my time trying to scale. I need to be better about saying no, asking for help, and recharging my batteries. It's hard for me because I strive to be good at my job, to give my students and my research attention, to be a good community citizen of my university. But I cannot do any of these things if I work myself sick.

Plus, I have some actual mountains to tackle. After a much-needed evening out with Mark and some dear friends for dinner and vino (at a cool bar where you can buy a card and get wine out of dispensing machines), I hit the sack in preparation for Saturday's beast of a run. My Team in Training group was running up Arctic Valley Road. Because I knew that there was a very good chance that I would try to avoid running up this cursed mountain and bail if left to my own devices, I had committed to carpooling with one of our coaches. We went a little early and set up a water stop.

I dedicated this run to my dear friend Geoffrey who has been my sponsor twice for TNT, my mentor, my co-author, and my friend.

It was a 60 minute out and about 40 minute back run. The elevation gain was approximately 2,700 feet. It was painfully slow going on the way up, and my lungs and calves were on fire almost the whole time. The last 10 or 15 minutes I had to alternate a minute of running with a minute of walking in order to keep moving forward. The way down was much better and felt like a great reward for making it up so far. Due to the ice and snow on much of the road, I wasn't making up tons of time in terms of pace, though. We'll return to this route in a few weeks, and it will be interesting to gauge our hopefully increased levels of fitness next time we go up, up, up. Hopefully, the next time I run up this mountain I'll log more than 7.8 miles.

Running friends, how do you feel about hills? What are your strategies for minimizing work-related stress?