Little Leveret

Balancing many thoughts, many things, and being grounded by nature.

I’m more robust than I once was. I managed to give blood on Monday, something that my 20-year old self - a slip of a thing - could only get halfway through before feeling faint and needing to stop. I was more concerned then with being skinny than feeling alright, which is a tiresome way to exist, if you actually want to get anything done. I eat properly now, and I ate iron-rich foods in the weeks leading up to giving blood, and I drank plenty of water. I felt light afterwards, but not necessarily light-headed. I was offered to hold my own bag of blood, which I did, and then I dashed through an impromptu storm to get home.

I’m heavier than I’ve ever been at the moment. I can’t even pretend it’s muscle mass, given that my muscles have atrophied: my normal levels of activity were severely disrupted by being hit by a speeding car in March. I’m not very comfortable with being bigger as a result, but I am comfortable with being alive and well. On balance, it’s fine. Being strong and healthy enough to be able to give blood - something that will save a few lives - is a fair trade, too. I hope I’ve given a life back to the universe after mine was so luckily, miraculously spared.

Relatively recently, elite Canadian ultra runner Marianne Hogan put a post on Instagram about receiving comments about her body shape and size. This wasn’t even a “body positivity” thing, it’s just wrong and shocking. Someone had accidentally replied to one of her Instagram Stories saying that she’d put on weight over the winter (“which is actually good news for me because it tends to keep injuries at bay,” said Hogan), and at a track session, someone told her she runs fast “for someone my size”. Hogan went on to say, “for someone who wears XS? Gee, thank you so much.” If you’re familiar with Marianne Hogan - her extraordinary strength, speed and resilience - the whole thing is deeply saddening and worrying.

I’m not going to talk about her body here, that defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to say, I will only say that she should not be receiving these comments. No one should. She has lined up at the Western States Endurance Run this weekend as one of the favourites to finish in at least a podium position. She came 3rd last year. She came 2nd at Canyons 100k that year too. 3rd at UTMB the year before, 2nd the year before that, after coming 3rd at Western States again. In fact, has she ever not-podiumed at either of the most competitive ultra marathons in the world? Has she ever not been a completely dominant force to be reckoned with? And people want to comment on her body?

I suppose it all just resonated with me because I feel self-conscious at the moment. In a world where people don’t look at a normal body and think it should be slimmer, I could simply be glad that my body is doing all the amazing things that it needs to do. I’m building up my running distance every week and recovering fine. It’s doing all that, while still healing a massive scar on my leg, and dealing with a really stressful week of too much work in too much heat, and too many tasks outside of my comfort zone. It’s hard to sleep, it’s hard to breathe, and my body is like, “Oh, and you want to go for a run? You want to cycle home in the 34-degree heat? Alright, lets do that too.”

I saw a young hare on my run on Thursday morning. I was doing mile reps, not having a very nice time, and saw a little puff of brown in the grass. I thought it was a rabbit - I thought I wouldn’t be so lucky as to see a hare - but then I noticed the tail was hare-like. I was walking on a 3-minute recovery, but as it bounded away, I broke into a jog. I chased the hare - yes I could see now, a leveret - and we stopped together further up the road. The leveret bounded around my feet, running up and down the road, puppy-like in its curiosity, seemingly unbothered by me. It seemed to be seeking the best way through the grass, the hedge and into the fields, but really I’m not sure. All I knew was that I was extraordinarily lucky, this was really special, and that my mile reps didn’t matter anymore.

The leveret bounded back past me and into the grass and was safe. I was left standing dumbfounded in the middle of the road, reeling from the magical, profound encounter, unsure how to proceed with anything at all. If you’re into this sort of thing, nothing matters after experiencing it. For the rest of the day I felt like that was all life needed to be, all the rest was noise. This has both a positive and negative effect: you feel enlightened, but in reality, you still have to turn knots on a factory line like you’re in a Charlie Chaplin film.

My mile reps felt slow, my shorts kept bunching up, my thighs were chafing. Jogging home was uncomfortable. I felt large and ungainly and the heat definitely didn’t help. But the hare didn’t seem to mind any of that. The hare came right up near to the scar on my leg, and I felt seen. I know this was just my own perception of the situation now, not substantiated by anything real, but I felt like it understood something about me. I felt part of something other, elsewhere, here. I have only had similar encounters a handful of times - seeing an owl has a similar effect - but it always seems to fully ground me, like a hug from a parent. And just like that hug, the moment comes to an end, and the creature seems to say: good, now continue like this. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine. This is all that really matters, and you will be fine.

Maybe it has something to do with innocence. All that noise - stress, work, body ideals - are anathema to the very fact of being alive and part of nature. I may be more robust in some ways, but I still need to be held by the sight of a leveret, we all do. My mile reps will get easier, but only by remaining healthy and fuelling my body properly. As Hogan went on to say in her post, “Fuelling yourself, staying healthy, and respecting your body will always take you farther than chasing an image ever could.” I’m super down with that. I want to run far again. Maybe not as fast as a baby hare, but definitely far.