Back on May 1st the cover story for the issue of my local running club’s newsletter that covered March and April was “The Lost Season,” which in hindsight reflected a way overly optimistic hope that we’d passed the worst of it by then. Now, many exhausting months later, we’re still stuck in the mess, and in too many measurable ways things have actually gotten worse. The lost season became the lost year. Compare the sarcasm of this post you're reading to my optimism of just one exact year ago.
2020 was a year when all social groups and activities essentially had to go “on hold.” Bottom line: this year sucked socially. That said, the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were shipped and administered a few weeks ago. Even though it’s certain that the next few weeks and months will be the worst yet, there’s still very much hope on the near horizon. No one knows for sure, of course, and a lot will depend on how much we collectively are able to adhere to strict social distancing and masking guidelines, but it seems like a safe bet to predict that we will be able to gather in groups again, for races and other events, by sometime in mid-2021 (though that’s still just a guess).
New Year’s Day has rarely felt so legitimately symbolic to me. I’m generally not an observer of anniversaries of things. I find the arbitrariness too off-putting. The Earth keeps circling around its star, and it takes 365 days to get back to the same spot in the orbit, but there’s no real start or finish line. Not to numbered years, especially. That’s just stuff that we invent. But this year it’s hard to ignore the metaphor. For real we are starting fresh, starting anew, starting again. Today we start 2021 with eyes on building back after a brutal 2020, restarting and hopefully coming back even better than before. We’re not quite out of the woods yet, but you can see the light.
And so we beat on, shoes against the pavement (or dirt), borne forward hopefully into the future. Fingers crossed for the promise of better times to come that will be at least as good as past times gone by, and hopefully even better. Miles logged not just for our current health and fitness but also for the lure of all those starting line guns still to come. I’m looking across the bay for that burning green light, in this case indicating that fateful word: “GO!”
