On Ambition

For Christmas I gave my husband an entry for a trail race on our local mountain. When he opened it, he didn’t say anything, and I realized that maybe it wasn’t the best gift to give him. He agreed. He said he was mad about it because it made him commit to something he hadn’t chosen himself. But after thinking about it for a few days, he thought it might just be the impetus he needed to get back in shape.

I picked this race from a series held up and down the Island because it’s local. I thought it would be fun to run on our ‘own’ mountain, where we would be able to practice the race course beforehand. What I missed in my excitement was that the race was labelled ‘hard,’ and there’s a section called the ‘chin-scraper’ that’s so steep you have to go up on your hands and knees. Yeah, I wasn’t really thinking about that.

I did the same thing when I signed up for the Lake-to-Lake marathon/half-marathon a few years ago. I imagined a nice walk on a graded rail trail from Shawnigan Lake to Lake Cowichan, conveniently forgetting the effort involved. It wasn’t until I’d signed up and considered the distance that I realized I had to put in some serious training. I wish they were hosting it again this year, but it folded last year due to a lack of volunteers. I feel like this year I have the right shoes to do the full marathon—at the 2021 half-marathon finish, my legs were great and I could have kept walking, but my feet were killing me and I couldn’t take another step.

I’m an ambitious person. I know that’s not a popular thing to admit, but there it is. The trouble is, I’m hampered in my ambition by my illness.

I want to do this trail run but I worry that I’ll get too tired and not be able to either do my training (I’m already having to sleep more), or do anything other than training, like gardening, or promoting my book, or writing companion pieces for that book, or starting on my next book. I am stymied not just by being exhausted, but by cognitive issues (problems finding words, short term memory loss, difficulty forming sentences) that stem from one of the medications I’m taking.

This is also part of the trap of energy spoons. I have a limited number of them in a day, and if I expend them on training that automatically means that something else has to give. Usually that’s things around the house. This is when my ambition starts to seem selfish, when I’m using up all my limited energy on something for me, instead of contributing to the communal “we” of my marriage.

My husband describes it as “60%-Sarah” vs. “100%-Sarah.” The latter was me 13 years ago. I could train for a trail run, garden, talk in public, write articles, start a new book, and still have time and energy on the side to walk dogs and do housework. But now I’m the former. If even. Some days it feels like I’m at 40%. So all those things I used to do have to be cut down by 40-60%. At least. I have to cut down my ambition, like cutting a tree that’s gotten too spindly and might blow over in a storm.

I don’t want to cut down my ambition: I feel like I’m giving in. But I have no choice. That’s the way life is now. As you can see, I’m still having trouble accepting that. Even though I’ve had this illness for so long, I still feel cheated by its limitations.

One thing that helps is that I’m back in the pool after a long, long absence. I love it, which is interesting because my body—which I dislike—is fully exposed, but I don’t care. I just love cutting through the water, windmilling my arms and kicking my legs as I roll from side to side. Swimming reminds me of my university days, when I would be the only person still in the pool at 8 am, finishing up a 4,000 m workout that left me feeling energized and hungry. It’s a comfort to go back to that, to feel capable again. I’m not swimming the same distance (!!), but I’m doing what I can. Even though I should be focusing on running instead of swimming, I think the latter will give me the upper body and core strength I’ll need on the trail.

Swimming is bringing me back to myself. Trail running is forging a new me. Together they exhaust me but I keep on doing them, because of my ambition.