Finding Our Touch Trees
Trees get a good deal of attention at this time of year. People plan entire vacations around the changing leaves, calculating just the right time to travel east or travel west based on the anticipated peak of their color. While they may be their most beautiful at this time of year, they also create a bit of extra work for us as their leaves, ripe with the colors of fall, float down to the ground in crunchy piles that require us to rake them, an homage to the tree as it prepares for the cold and darkness of winter. Trees are not worried about the cold, and they don’t lose heart in the dark. They know that the days will get longer, and they will come back to life come spring. They can also help us come back to life with that same kind of knowing.
PRFS athlete Kisha Arnold’s story is a reminder of the real and metaphorical ways that a tree, a “touch tree” is not just beautiful but orienting. It can help us find our way when we step off the path of living a healthy, flourishing life. Nearly everyone hiking the forest of wellbeing loses sight of the trail at some point in time. The trailhead is clear, wide, well-marked and easy to follow. Things are pretty good. There is a zest in our step, the air is crisp and clean, and even though we may struggle with the climb, we are making progress toward the kind of health and wellbeing we want to claim for ourselves. As in Kisha’s story, sometimes however, that clear path disappears, often when we least expect it. We aren’t sure which direction to go, and what once seemed an easy route suddenly becomes narrow and filled with rocks that make it difficult to find our way. We get lost in a million ways. Life gets incredibly stressful. Work, mortgages, kids, schedules and no time to breathe. No time, period. Or something jolts us out of our routine, illness or injury, and we find it hard to get back to what we know we need. Sometimes we get sad or heartbroken or lonely and we forget why we craved flourishing in the first place. What did well-being even mean?
No one told me when I was seventeen that it probably wasn’t a good idea to go from swimming 10,000 yards a day, 6 days a week, to barely being mobile after my final swim season ended. My senior year was incredibly stressful, like senior years are for many students. I had high expectations for myself and a goal to be my class’s Valedictorian. All that studying and all that sitting was good for my GPA, but not for maintaining some semblance of an exercise program. With high academic success as a goal, you might have thought I would have been smarter, but the fifty pounds I gained during my final semester in high school would most definitely indicate otherwise. I clearly wasn’t smart enough to do the math. It was with mathematical certainty that subtracting 3 hours of exercise every day done for years without subtracting any of the calories that could be consumed with that level of training would equal progressively larger numbers on the scale. It would be a gross understatement to say I “strayed from the trail.”
Like Kisha, I felt like I deserved every single sugar, salt and fat filled calorie. After all, I was working very hard at being a good student, albeit a very sedentary one, and food was my reward of choice. Those fifty pounds, however, became like the darkness of a cave I had somehow wandered into while trying to find the trail. Those extra pounds were a shadow over everything, coloring my choices (or at least my perception of my choices) and my decisions, shrinking the options I believed were available to me. At a time in life when the world should have been wide open for me, I felt limited. There was no body positivity movement in the 70’s and more people were thin than were not. Being overweight brought requisite shame.
I did get to give that Valedictorian address, but I also spent the next fifteen years trying to find my way, trying to get back to a lifestyle I knew made my life better. And, like Kisha, small wins over time helped me reorient toward the positive. I got better at doing the math.
Running was part of the calculus. It became a touch tree for me. Grounding and orienting. Racing helped me return to a level of physical activity I truly need. I need to move, full stop. We all do. I have been privileged to see others throughout the life of the Platte River Fitness Series use running, walking, cycling and triathlon, in the guise of racing, as touch trees to help them find their way to whole human health. The “series of races” are little wins we can all embrace as we venture into a life where we thrive. In August of 2017, I stood on top of the 14,115-foot summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado, a place that had been my nemesis, at age 58, and received a finisher’s medal in the Pike’s Peak Ascent Half-Marathon. I made the cut-off time with twenty minutes to spare. Other than the days my kids were born, it was the best day of my life and that remains true to this day. You see, I tried to climb Pikes Peak at seventeen, when it should have been easy, but couldn’t make it beyond halfway, a sad reminder of what happens when you abandon the things that make you happy and healthy. It was a brutally painful lesson. That finisher’s medal means more than any other. It sits on my desk while the others sit in a drawer. It reminds me that I am my own touch tree. Understanding my own wellbeing, knowing that we are almost duty-bound to make the most we can out of the gift of our body and the gift of our life is the truest way I’ve found to reach the metaphorical summit in life.
The PRFS taught me the essentialness of having a touch tree built on community too. We really do need two trees, both/and, not either/or. We need our own self-knowledge, agency and values to guide us along, and in order for the PRFS to serve its purpose of fostering whole human health, there must be a community. Perennial PRFS athlete Cheryl Uhrmacher shared, “I don’t go to races for the medals. I don’t go for the t-shirt.” (Although, there is nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of your effort!) “I go to races to be with friends, to spend time with people who matter to me.” The PRFS family and the PRFS races are touch trees. They are our home base. Athletes come and go. Some race only locally. Some race locally and venture out to find new experiences. Some race a lot, some race just a little. I like to think we help athletes feel just brave enough to try new ways of training and new places to race because they know they have a place to return to. Races come and go. There is a lifespan right for each of them. Eventually, at some point, the PRFS will no longer be needed as a touch tree. For now, however, how blessed we are to know that fifteen to twenty times a year, we can venture out and race, pulled along by goals and challenge and effort with the knowledge that with this community by our side, we will know the way home.