Assumed audience: Talks about endurance sports and virtues, but in a way that I trust and hope will be friendly to people who have never run a mile in their lives and think “huh?” if I say “virtue ethics”.
Two quotes from Sabrina B. Little’s The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners that caught my attention on my run today — because they spoke so directly to my own experience of recovery and learning resilience as I have slowly rebuilt my body after a horrible disc herniation last October:
In my year of return from injury, I learned a lot about resilience — the virtue of recovery. I learned that small exercises make a big difference, and that bouncing back is a considered choice. I learned that recovery, like all forms of training, is a hopeful act.… Substantial hopes provide us with mental resolve, help us not to lose heart, and enable us to “maintain effective agency in the face of fluctuations in evidence” [quoting Nancy Snow]. Maintaining agency is important. It means we continue to choose and to act in light of the possibility of renewal, even if we lack visible evidence of progress.
In my injury recovery, I also learned that patients wear sneakers, not slippers. If I could just stay patient — actively patient, the kind of patient that would diligently perform the exercises I was prescribed by my doctor — I might become the athlete I was before the injury. I might become an even better athlete. The resilience I gained in my process of renewal would make me a stronger, more adaptable athlete, and this would pay off — both in the process of training and within competitions.
I should confess that resilience is a virtue you never really want the occasion to develop. This is because having the opportunity to develop resilience means that something has gone wrong, or you are broken in some way and in need of repair. It means you enter an uneasy space, having to figure out if you are indeed fixable. Not all broken things are. Ask Humpty Dumpty.
Resilience is the virtue of recovery.
I admit, she’s right: I really would have preferred not to have to develop this particular virtue. But standing here today, I am (strangely enough?) grateful for so severe an injury in October that it sent me to the hospital, because it forced me to take much more seriously the kinds of changes to my habits that would make me healthy in the long term. I have been saying — humorously, but truthfully — that I am going to do Pilates every day for the rest of my life. Getting around to more of that kind of work had been sort of vaguely aspirational before this injury. Now it is just my baseline.
But the idea that recovery specifically and training in general is hopeful: now that one I am going to be chewing on for a good, long time. I had never really put it in those terms, but it’s exactly right. You set out training for your first 5K, or for your first marathon, hoping that your work will yield certain results: the ability to finish at all, a shot at a PR, or if you’re Sabrina Little possibly a World Champion title. But even if you’re Sabrina Little, and certainly if you’re someone like me, there is no guarantee. You can plateau in your training when you hoped to improve. You can twist-and-lift just so and throw out your back and blow up your training season. You can get so sick the morning of the race that you cannot get out of bed. You can have life circumstances that intervene such that you have to give up racing for a few years. (All of those have happened to me!)
Training is an act therefore not of absolute confidence, but of hope.
You keep at it — or get back at it after setbacks — because, in spite of them, you keep hoping. The hopes change over the years, but hope itself does not.