recovery

For me, recovery is the hardest part of sprinting.

Watch beeps and I look down, silently counting how many more intervals I have yet to go on this run, because the part I dread isn’t the sprint itself but the breath-starved gulping that comes when the effort is over.  Resolved, I spring forward, legs and abdomen burning as I push myself to move as fast and as hard as I can.  I focus my eyes on the mica glints in the asphalt.

Go go go go GO

It’s odd, I know, but during the outpouring—sweat, energy, gratitude, prayer–I lose all concern for breathing and never feel out of breath.  God has made the human body wonderfully well, with remarkable efficiency when it comes to flight, and unless I’m flying from fear, I actually enjoy the rush. My mind shifts to the generation of power in my legs and arms and abdomen and away from inhaling and exhaling, entrusting that function to my autonomic nervous system.  Of course, breathing is always an involuntary function, so the difference-making change of mind comes from trusting what is already true, because I’m too busy running to entertain any illusion of control anyway.

Watch beeps again, and I downshift into a jog for active recovery.  Scientists who have studied these things conclude that active recovery rounds out sprint interval training to produce gains in endurance, which is to say that the recovery phase happens to be at least as important as the sprint itself, even if it is the gasping-ugly, empty-feeling, messy-weak part, when I come back down to earth, and the reality of my limitations reassert themselves.

So, before you think I’m not a runner, and click yourself right away from here, let me say this, Dorothy:

There’s more than one kind of sprint and more than one kind of recovery, and sprinting isn’t only about running fast but about expending all your resources in the effort.  Ever been there?  Ever let yourself be poured right out or felt life do it to you?  Ever do something with God that bent your body?

Last night, I watched ultrafast Olympic runners after the finish of a qualifying heat doing an odd, hyperventilated dance.  One runner sat—chest heaving–in the track, lighting her eyes just for the camera, another—the winner—tried to raise her arms in victory ‘v’ while bending at the waist, her mouth a round, gulping ‘o’.  The whole group seemed to swell and contract, weaving together and drifting apart, some holding their waists, others limp-armed.  It occurred to me that recovery comes after every sprint, regardless of a runner’s fitness, that even at my very best, I’m human, and I’ll need to recover.

I’m ultra ultra slow when compared to those ultrafast Olympians, and pretty sure they wouldn’t even call what I do ‘sprinting’, but it’s all relative, isn’t it?  The effort that makes a sprint for me may not be the effort that makes a sprint for someone else, and that doesn’t make one outpouring more significant than another, or any recovery easy.

I’ve found that in recovery, I must firmly and repeatedly instruct myself to keep moving, to keep breathing breaths as full and deep as I can manage, the words exhaled in a whisper.  I’ve learned that relief comes slowly and that the behavior that will help my body through this feels, on some level, counterintuitive and even counterproductive.  My limbic system and cerebral cortex grapple like a couple of adolescents arm wrestling, one urging me to stop and lay down right there in the street, the other encouraging me to be patient and trust the process.

That’s where I am now, jogging down the road just trying to catch my breath, grounding myself in careful notice of the heavy, pink-bloomed branches of the crepe myrtles, the pollinators hovering, the bold, blue sweep of the sky.  That phrase, catch my breath, feels apt because I do, in some primal way, feel that I have been chasing something vital, that I have exhaled the wind.  The shallow gasps that facilitated my acceleration, feel, in recovery, like quick grabs at the tail of a draft.

I’m praying silently—Lord, help, coaxing my body to breathe breathe breathe, when it comes to me that recovery is hard in any context, and especially alarming in the spiritual landscape.  When God is your breath and you can’t quite breathe and you wonder if you’ll ever know His peace again the way you used to, well, it can feel like a fight to abide.

So it went for Elijah with his double portion of the Holy Spirit–the deepest and fullest of breaths.  After defeating hundreds of prophets of Ba’al in the most epic duel in scripture, after literally outrunning a horse-drawn chariot and ending a drought with his prayers, Elijah lay down under a bush and asked to die.  I’ve had enough, he told God.  I used to wonder how a man so full of God could ever think he’d run out of breath.  How could he, after such an outpouring, run for his life?  But I get it now.  He’d just finished a sprint, and that passed out, hollowed out, emptied out journey to reconnect with the presence of God represented his recovery.

Listen now, it will be like this on the back half of any hard pressing, after any outpouring, when comes the recovery that is every bit as much a part of our training for endurance as the effort, when suddenly we experience with aching clarity our utter dependence, our desperate need of Breath, the thorough overwhelm that is the reality of human weakness.  It will feel—for just a while–like you can’t quite inhale, when, having lived from the fullness of extraordinary power, your mortal soul suddenly downshifts, and you come crashing back down from the heights, which may also circumstantially have felt like the depths, the rising like fatal pressure.  What you need to do in those floundering, lung-heaving moments will feel counterintuitive, and maybe even counterproductive.  This is the time for active recovery, so keep moving, keep breathing, as deeply and fully as you can, and remember that you were never really relying on your consciousness for breathing anyway.  As you make your journey to the mountain of God, to find Him again in the quietest whisper, remember that yes, Elijah passed out along the way, but it was also then that God sent an angel to make his dinner.