I haven’t decided whether or not I’m going to do the Chicago Marathon again next year, in 2024, but I’m still mining my 2023 experience for lessons and thought I’d share. As I’ve said, I came away from the race feeling hopeful and connected to community in a new way, but I wonder if there was another connection I’d experienced without realizing its effects until the race was over. That was, of course, the connection I felt within myself.

Maybe it’s just the podcasts I’m listening to lately, but I feel like there’s lots of talk about embodiment, or feeling connected to one’s own body, or the mind/body connection – seemingly all ways of saying the same thing. As an athlete, out of necessity, I learned to separate my mind from my body so that my body was, in various moments, a vessel or a tool, or in some testing scenarios, a machine. In order to push myself through uncomfortable (read: painful) situations, I would disconnect. I got in the habit of repeating “I am a robot” like a mantra during erg pieces.

Let me backtrack and say I really THOUGHT this was necessary to be successful. I did not want to feel the pain I was putting myself through, so I just didn’t feel it. The sensations stopped at my neck and didn’t reach my brain. Granted, rowing is a different kind of sport than running, and the erg specifically is a mentally challenging machine because you’re pulling a chain without going anywhere. It’s different in the boat because you can feel the connection to the water and your boat mates. The connection makes the work bearable. Disconnection from self isn’t as helpful or necessary in the boat. I think some runners feel similarly about the treadmill, but the erg is an unavoidable evil in rowing. If you want to be any good, you have to put in a ton of time on the erg.

Anyway, right or wrong, I separated mind from body and thought of my body as a tool not just in the context of rowing, but all the time, as an object to bend to my will, sometimes a tool that misbehaved, sometimes a tool that I hated, especially as I got older. During marathon training, for the first time during an athletic endeavor, I was kind to my body, myself.

It started when I felt like garbage the day after a long run because I hadn’t eaten enough food and properly refueled. After the next long run, I ate MORE food and chose food that was going to help me recover, not just food that was going to fill me up in the short term. It sounds really simple, but that was a big first step. I learned that proper refueling and eating good food that makes me feel good is good for every part of me. Both body and mind needed to lie down on the couch for the majority of the day following the garbage-recovery long run. The reconnection started there.

Now that the marathon is over, I’m trying to exercise to take care of myself and stay in shape. Part of me always viewed post-exercise time (not training – those are different things) as an opportunity to eat junk food, the real cravey stuff. The idea of earning one’s breakfast or earning big meals via exercise is pervasive. It’s all over the place on Instagram, and the existence of Turkey Trots – pre-Thanksgiving Day feast races – hint pretty strongly at the idea as well. But I’m trying to learn to take care of myself and retrain myself to want food that will feel good for all of me, rather than the sugary dopamine hit that feels good in my brain but not in my body, which eventually makes my brain feel bad later anyway. Being connected breaks the cycle. I recognize that this sounds like the simplest stuff, but until I felt the change for myself, I kept repeating the same pattern.

I don’t think it’s like a light switch. This idea of embodiment is taking some work – thinking of the fingers typing these words being as much me as the mind thinking of them first, as well as the fact that I can eat food because I’m hungry and want to – but given that I’m new to this, I’m feeling pretty good about it. We’ll see if I can enjoy moving for the sake of moving, rather than only toward a goal, next.