Violet Hill

Seven Years of Sisyphus

2017

“Enjoy the downhills.” -Guru Josh 

To run downhill efficiently, you must run as if you’re running on eggshells, with your feet barely touching the ground before pushing back up again, light as a feather. There’s an ultra-runner nicknamed “The Speed Goat” for his perfecting this technique. The instinct is to land with your heels and brace yourself as you fall downhill, fighting back gravity. But if you let go and let gravity take you, touching the ground only lightly, you let the hill do the work and might save yourself from trashing your quads the more you’re able to resist resisting. That’s why the Boston Marathon course is such hell. It’s a net downhill for the entire first half. So you trash your quads over the first half marathon and then the hills begin. Mile 16 is a three-quarter mile climb to the Route 128 overpass, then come The Newton Hills: Firehouse turn into Brae Burn, Johnny Kelley Hill on to Newton City Hall, and then just past Mile 20: Heartbreak Hill.

The thing is, Heartbreak has always been my favorite part of the course. It can be hell, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a party at Heartbreak Hill Running Company. One block later is the Mass General cheering section. And in 2021, Heartbreak became our family’s new meeting spot after McGreevy’s, a Boston institution on Boylston, closed permanently during the pandemic.  Heartbreak is where I stopped to hug my nieces at their first Boston.  Where I took a breath and polished off a beer with my family. And on March 26, 2022, it’s where my brother and I began and ended our first ever 20-mile run together, from Heartbreak to Heartbreak.

2015

“Your ribs aren’t even moving.” -Guru Josh

I still don’t know what this means, but it wasn’t good. I suppose your ribs move when you breathe and it’s true that I had been holding my breath until March 15, 2016 around 11am. He might as well have said, “You aren’t breathing. Are you even alive?” I should have known.  

The thing about Guru Josh, the chiropractor, is that first off, he doesn’t know I refer to him as Guru Josh. But also unbeknownst to him, his one-liner wisdom is always improbably on-point.  Though he knew nothing of my personal life, it’s amazing what the body holds. The stories it tells.

In 2015, as everything unbeknownst to me was falling apart around me, I began quietly helping someone with their memoir to keep my mind sharp and myself eating.  We got together again on the project a few years later in 2018, and I sat on his couch and he hit record and started talking, relaying stories, answering my questions. “I’ve gotten more accomplished with you than I have in years. Everything just started to flow out of me, things I couldn’t access before.” 

“What about you?’ He would ask from time to time. I loved that. “You seem like you have a few novels in you,” he added once.  Especially while working on a project as personal as a memoir — to pause, turn the mirror around, and ask, “So what about you?” is so tragically rare. My mom was that kind of person. We give the most of what we want so badly want ourselves. Maybe that’s why I ask so many questions. Hoping someone, somewhere, will ask them back with as much sincerity. 

We walked through the woods later, crunching over leaves, his Rhodesian Ridgebacks running alongside, and talked about marathon training. He understood that I would have less time to commit to his project going forward.  I was trying to qualify. “Do you think you can?” I think I can. Then the conversation turned to numbers and athletic performance being a way of communicating. A common language. 

My mom and I could communicate with a look.  No words. A glance, a gesture, a thought even.  It dawned on me that I had been trying to communicate in this other common language in the years since she passed. Articulate what had been lying dormant inside me through movement. Faster, consistently, over 26.2 miles. And over time, this incessance gave birth to a curious but sweet habit. Around mile 11 of any given long run I had involuntarily started saying aloud, “C’mon, kid.” Out of nowhere. “Let’s go, kid.”  I don’t know where it came from. There are plenty of times when my internal monologue is cutting and unkind. This is one of its sweeter forms.  Out loud, no less. “C’mon, kid. Let’s go.”

Turns out, all the breathing and writing and actual training in 2017 had me in much better shape, and in 2018 I did qualify.  

Amazing what happens when your ribs start moving again.

2019

“You’re a completely different person now. I think you’re due.” —Guru Josh

I flew out to Chicago alone with a singular focus. Just run a 7:50 mile. Run a 7:50 mile 26.2 times and you end up with a 3:25, that was the goal. Run the mile you’re in.  Mid-race my watch buzzed at Mile 11 and I lifted my left wrist to a text I was not expecting. “Good pace! Keep it up.”  It was my brother.  I didn’t even know he knew I was running that day.

That text carried me through the next 15 miles. 

The goal was 3:25. I ran a 3:25.

I collapsed onto the grass, immediately attended to by a man with latex gloves whose job, I believe, was to pick people up. I gauged as much as I sat there covered in sweat and tears and other liquids that’d be cause for a glove or two. 

“Are you ok?”  

“Yes,” I nodded. 

“Are you just gonna sit there and smile?”  

“Yes,” I smiled. 

“Ok.”  

“Thanks, just give me a minute,” I conveyed in some form. 

And he did. He stood right by me, keeping watch, but giving space. And then after a minute, he reached down with his gloved hand. 

“Alright. You know what happens if you sit too long.” 

I did. And I let him help me up. 

I just needed a minute. 

Sometimes it’s a minute. Sometimes it’s seven years. 

The sun had warmed to about 70 degrees and it glistened off the Fox River and danced between the overhanging trees and I thought of her and smiled through tears. Just sitting there, alone, but for a gloved stranger, having done exactly what I set out to do. To date, it’s probably the most consistent thing I’ve ever done. I could hear Jeff: “Now go and run a beautiful marathon.” 

I could hear my mom, whispering through trees: “Go.” 

From the race, I drove straight to Chicago that afternoon to visit my friend, Erin, whom I’ve known since first grade. We walked to dinner and then to her favorite local honky tonk where we downed beers and danced until 1am. I woke up at 4am, flew back to Atlanta, hopped MARTA, and then walked two miles home. It was still early enough that people were out for their morning runs along the park, and as I walked by dragging my suitcase, groggy, grinning, running on fumes, I found myself enjoying the long way home, the detour, the absolute no rush to get anywhere. 

I think 2017 was the first time I crested this imaginary hill I’ve been rolling boulders up since 2013. But on this particular walk home in 2019, I felt in my bones what it meant to enjoy the downhills.

2022

Sometime in October 2021, I sat on Rice Beach and blasted out the first part of this story. The part about the downhill. There was a clam shell next to my beach chair, which was so large and so perfectly intact it reminded me of a conch or the kind of thing you’d pass around a talking circle where the person holding the shell is the only person who may speak. When that person is finished speaking, they pass the shell on and the circle is complete when the shell is passed fully around without anyone speaking out of turn. I remember looking at it and thinking, alright, I’m just going to write whatever comes to me while I’m sitting here next to this clam shell. Then I took it with me. It sits on the antique-painted-over bright green cedar dresser in my bedroom to this day, which is probably sort of gross, but I also don’t really care about that sort of thing. I think it’s beautiful. Funny enough, next to the clam shell is a green Red Sox hat that spent ten years lost at sea before circling back around to the same spot where it was lost. That’s a story for another day. But I have also kept this hat perfectly preserved in its sea-worn, sand-filled, un-sanitized state. It’s a wonder I’m single.

I told my brother a few months ago that after nine years I still sit down to this EP and burst into tears. “Well,” he said, with equanimity and grace, “Just take a deep breath and try again.”

What I think people get wrong — about this EP, about all the marathoning, about me, frankly— is that my commitment to these Sisyphean efforts are a commitment to remain mired in grief. To not move on.  

But I can read back through the EP from 2013 when I started and thought I would finish and I’m so grateful I wrote it all down as it was happening.  And I have so much empathy for the version of me who was writing this then. The girl who started before she was ready.  It was never about staying mired in grief, just as it was never just about marathoning. It’s about the other side of grief, which is love. 

They say if you want to write a good book, write what you don’t want other people to know about you. If you want to write a great book, write what you don’t want to know about yourself. The truth is, I think I’m most afraid of what might not be waiting for me on the other side.

“The promise of happiness is felt in the act of creation, but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture she is painting. Until then, she had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life… It is this great insufficiency that drives her on. Thus the process of creation becomes necessary to the painter, perhaps more than… the picture.”  —Lucian Freud

I didn’t have the words for what I thought the end of this EP would bring.  I didn’t even have the words for what to call it — I hated the word blog, that felt like it was cheapening the endeavor. What I wanted was to write my mom back to life. 

December 20, 2012, the day she passed, was the first time Brian and I had ever run together. We all woke up together in hospice that morning, and Brian suggested he and I go running.  Later that morning, Dad suggested we put on her iPod, and ever since, running and music have been a portal to her.  Her playlist, the inspiration for this EP, April 2013. Marathoning the replacement April 2014.  And nine years later, April 18, 2022, I ran my tenth Boston Marathon and first Boston with my brother.

A couple nights later we stayed up until one in the morning, just he and I, sitting on the couch together having drinks and doing a proper post-race analysis, giving everything its due. “Someday after you’ve left,” he said, “I’m sure I’ll process what just happened. I haven’t fully yet.” 

Before the 2016 marathon, knowing what a shit year it had already been, one of my dad’s closest friends sent me a message saying, “This year, I hope at least some of those miles are for you.” I think it took me that long to realize that I was doing this as much for me as for anybody else, and that that was ok.  In the lead up to this year’s marathon, Brian shared with me, almost as an admission: “By the way… you know why I’m doing this, but if I’m being honest, I’m also doing this for myself,” as though it were selfish to acknowledge, hey, this run’s for me too. 

There are 12 songs left on her playlist, but I’m going to do them with a B-Side this time.  The B-Side is for me.  An homage to the other side.  An ode to cresting this Violet Hill, which I have tried to do as many times as I have run the Boston Marathon. Again and again and again and again and again and again.

“What does it mean every year?” Brian asked in November 2021.  “I know, aside from the obvious. But I mean, you’ve done this how many times now? How is it different every time?”

First to mind was that classic final scene. 

“We are gonna do this one—more—time.” William leans over the bed, pulls out his tape recorder, and hits record.

“So Russell, what is it you love about music?"

“To begin with…” Russell answers. 

“Everything.”

I don’t know what’s on the other side, but I know I can’t get there from here, sitting on this EP paused any longer.  I needed a breather, and fortunately I can now say I know the grace of being given the space you ask for, which for women is all too often tragically rare.  I know the power of rest, if even for a minute.  And I know what happens when you sit too long.  So this is me standing up.  Listening to that still small voice that softly whispers: “Go.”

Cheers to the B-Side.

“I don’t know where I’m going from here. But I promise you it won’t be boring.”

—Bowie

Update: I told my brother most of this story two days after finishing the marathon together. He said two things: “First, you just told a 25-minute story… Second, I’ve read the Stoics, I’ve read the Myth of Sisyphus, and I’ve never pronounced it that way in my head. All these years I’ve been reading it as the Myth of Syphilis.” 

Sisyphus, Andrew Bird

Sisyphus peered into the mist 

A stone's throw from the precipice, paused

Did he jump or did he fall as he gazed into the maw of the morning mist?

Did he raise both fists and say, "To hell with this, " and just let the rock roll?

Let it roll, let it crash down low

There's a house down there but I lost it long ago

Let it roll, let it crash down low

See my house down there but I lost it long ago

Well, I let the rock roll on down to the town below

We had a house down there but I lost it long ago

Lost it long ago

Na-na-na-na-na-na-na

Na-na-na-na-na-na

I'm letting it roll away

It's got nothing to do with fate

And everything to do with you

I'd rather fail like a mortal than flail like a god on a lightning rod

History forgets the moderates

For those who sit

Recalcitrant and taciturn

You know I'd rather turn and burn than scale this edifice, yeah

Where's my accomplice?

So take my hand, we'll do more than stand

Take my hand, we'll claim this land

Take my hand, and we'll let the rock roll

Let it roll, let it crash down low

There's a house down there but I lost it long ago

Let it roll, let it crash down low

See my house down there but I lost it long ago

Lost it long ago

Na-na-na-na-na-na-na

Na-na-na-na-na-na

I'm letting it roll away

It's got nothing to do with fate

And everything to do with

Sisyphus peered into the mist

A stone's throw from the precipice, paused