Chapter Two “Digging Deep”
January 8
My
heart pounded as I leapt up the carpeted stairs, amazed that my legs were already
back to normal.
“Holly, what’re you doing here? How was your 5K?” Jo asked as I entered the office near her
yoga studio. She had repeatedly told me
I was crazy for running a race in the middle of winter, but not without a hint
of encouragement in her voice.
“I
ran the whole thing, Jo, even beat the New Year! And I’m so
glad I found you. Can I schedule an appointment with you this
week?”
A few days later, I returned,
standing alone with Jo in a room silent other than soft music. Incense smoke lightly spiraled in the
air.
“Take a few minutes to undress, but
leave your underwear on so it’s not awkward for me knowing you’re ne-ked,” she joked.
Undressing in a new environment was
always exciting and scary. I studied
each corner of the room, even though I knew I was alone. The window blinds shut out the cars passing
on the street outside of Yoga Jo’s in North Ogden. I had been taking Jo’s classes since May, my
first class nearly bringing me to tears as I struggled to hold the poses. I felt nervous about tonight, hearing this
might be painful, but the light inside the room was the dim, comforting yellow
of a bedside lamp. I folded my clothes
neatly and set them on an armchair.
When Jo knocked on the door a few
minutes later, I feebly called, “I’m ready!” from beneath a tucked white sheet
and wool blanket.
Jo opened the door, pausing by her
stereo. “This just isn’t me today,” she
said, turning off the soft music and playing Jimmy Buffett instead. “So tell me more about your New Year’s
resolution,” Jo said, rubbing my temples with oil smelling of eucalyptus and
tree bark. “You’re really going to do something new each week?”
“Yes.”
“So if you do two new things in one
week, you can rest the next.”
“No, I have to do something new every week—no cheating.”
“You’re really dedicated to this, huh?”
she asked.
“If it’s 11:59 on a Saturday night and I
haven’t done anything new for the week, I will literally find a bug and eat
it.”
“Well, that’s disgusting, good luck with
that one. You should do more crazy races,”
she said lifting my right arm and kneading my shoulder, working all the way
down to my hand and fingertips.
“I’m not much of a runner—”
“You liar, you just ran a 5K! I would
never willingly do that; I’ve blocked out all the times someone’s forced me
to run.”
“I hated it for a while,” I said. “Ten years ago, I ran in my junior high track
team, but by high school, I stopped running and whenever I tried again, I felt
miserable. I felt like I could barely run
for thirty seconds before wanting to quit.
Last summer, when I first started classes here, I said, ‘Okay, fine,
I’ll just run for thirty seconds.’ There’s
a church right behind my parents’ house, and I’d run from one end of the church
to the other. I did it several times a
week, and before I knew it I circled the whole church, then circled it twice.”
“So it was a church that got you back into running. I knew having a Mormon church on every corner
was good for something,” Jo said. Over
half of Utahans are Latter-day Saints or LDS, commonly known as Mormons. I was unsure whether Jo was being sarcastic when
she added, “Maybe religion will even creep into your new experiences.” I had not been to church in years.
Jo’s fingers dug sharply into my right
shin. She told me she straightened and
lengthened the muscles, getting out all the knots. Talking distracted me from the pressure.
“Running around that church definitely
helped me. I started running farther and
farther. Then there was this one
Sunday—I was really sad about that guy I told you about—remember Aaron? Yeah, I wanted to just cry in bed all
morning, but I’ve already been there, done that, so I said, ‘I’m going to my
old high school track and running a mile.’
It was my first mile since the track team—my first mile in ten years.
“That whole day, I kept thinking, ‘I
could have spent all day in bed crying, but look what I accomplished
instead.’ And I just kept running a
couple times each week. I go to the
track every Sunday and haven’t missed a week yet.” Before the mile, I had contemplated going
back to something far worse than crying in bed all day; I wondered if in this
intimate setting, Jo would figure out what it was.
“So what happened with Aaron that was so
bad?”
“Well, I tried to help him through some
things and it backfired on me.” I knew
the first time I saw Aaron, a twenty-year-old redhead with baggy jeans and a
pronounced jaw, something was bound to backfire. Yet he was the break in my routine I craved,
and continued to crave.
“You
can always use that experience as an art project,” Jo offered. “There you go, make some new art for your
some of your experiences—and check out music you’d never listen to. And you must skydive.”
“I don’t have any plans yet, but everyone
who knows about my goal has lots of ideas for me,” I said. One idea came from my cheery Mormon coworker,
Anna, and it sounded so unlike me, I could not see myself doing it, this year
or any year.
“Time to flip over,” Jo said, and I turned
to face my pillow.
“Ooh, that hurts just a bit,” I yelped
as her hands returned to my ankles.
“I’ll ease up; deep tissue massage is
not like other massage. So were you
freezing your butt off in the 5K?” Jo
asked.
“You know what’s interesting? I’ve always felt like I had a low cold tolerance,
but ever since I’ve been running, it’s not so bad. I run on the track even though it’s covered
with snow.”
“And why?”
“I figure if I can be a human plow, I
won’t let anything stop me from running again.
When I stopped after junior high, it wasn’t on purpose; I just had a
little excuse here and a little excuse there, until ten years passed without
even realizing I’d quit.”
By the end of the hour, my limbs had
melted into the massage table. “Did you
like the massage?” Jo asked.
“Yeah, it could be uncomfortable at
times but now I feel amazing.”
Jo smiled. “I’m glad you ran that crazy 5K. And I wouldn’t worry about Aaron. These adventures are gonna lead you to
someone new.”
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