5k

(Or My Worth)

I’ve been working on building out some other pieces from this Substack & my previous blog, Amandathanks.com. Here’s a piece, I think, that is now finished:

I excel at hiding my mediocrity.

In high school, I played varsity field hockey all four years, which sounds impressive until I tell the whole truth: the school had just launched girls’ soccer, and not enough athletes signed up to fill both teams. I made varsity mostly by default.

That became my pattern. I made varsity by default in every season and joined track only after I was cut in the first round of softball tryouts.

The track coach took everyone: the potheads, the outcasts, and the performative overachievers like me who couldn’t stand being left out. He didn’t care if I was fast. He cared if I showed up. Sometimes I didn’t. The 400 was brutal. I would hit a wall before the finish, legs thick and unresponsive, lungs clawing for air, come in last, and still throw up. Hiding in the locker room was easier, and I often took the easy way out.

He never kicked me off. When I did show up, he cheered like I actually had a shot. A few times, I let myself believe him.

One afternoon, I decided to run home from practice.

Our school was too small and underfunded for a real track. We lapped the building and ran through town. My house was fifteen minutes by car, up a steep hill between two small New Hampshire towns. I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want witnesses if I quit early or failed.

Cathedral Road wasn’t built for pseudo-runners like me. It’s made of wide turns, endless pines, and a punishing hill. I ran without music. My sneakers tapped against the pavement. I played a game with the trees: run three, jog two, walk one. Up the hill, I mostly walked, tasting the dry, stale heat of my mouth, counting telephone poles like they were proof of courage. When the road tilted down again, I flew.

I remember the cold air, the ache in my side, and the look on my mother’s face when I burst through the door, red and grinning.

She was more surprised than impressed.

“I made it. I need a ride back to get my stuff.”

She was annoyed. I was supposed to call her twenty minutes before pickup. I was the oldest of four girls.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just decided to run home. I don’t know why. But I’m beat. Can you please drive me back? I have homework.”

I always had homework.

She drove me, unhappily, and waited as I raced inside. My coach was furious I had disappeared, but when I told him, “If I’d said it out loud, I don’t think I would’ve done it,” he nodded.

Thirty years later, long after I stopped pretending to be an athlete, I had another wild idea. I would run a 5K.

It was the Patrick Mulligan Memorial 5K, honoring an EMT who had died by suicide.

This time it was five months after emergency brain surgery for Stage IV melanoma. After months of immunotherapy. After losing my adrenal glands, the small organs that quietly make the hormone most people rely on to stand up in the morning without thinking about it. My body no longer does that on its own.

Before cancer, I was strong in measurable ways. My trainer and I tracked it in pounds and reps and neat upward graphs. No matter how much more I could lift, or run, or lose, I rarely gave myself credit in real time.

Because I excel at my own mediocrity.

Survival changed that.

I resent the new bar so much that I avoid pictures from before. I interrupt thoughts about the future. Expecting things to work out feels greedy.

I didn’t die. And still, I have this nagging ache to do more, be more, have more. There’s a part of me that understands there are no more guarantees. No extensions. No races. And a far more human part that still wants them anyway.

There is an ableist in me that feels wasteful not using the body, energy, and mind I still have. I have lived my entire life in a culture that invoices worth. So surviving feels like a debt forever in collections.

Without training or planning, I signed up for the race on my forty-fourth birthday. The idea of lining up with people who train on purpose felt almost arrogant. Making it through medical catastrophe is not a qualifier.

I wasn’t trying to compete. I was trying to blend.

I signed up my teenage son, Briggs, and me.

I got the date wrong. The race was Sunday, not Saturday. Briggs had baseball.

I almost used it as an excuse to stay home. My body is not predictable anymore. Some mornings I wake up steady. Most mornings, I wake up already tired.

Then I thought about Cathedral Road. The hill. The hiding. The coach who did not care if I was any good.

I thought about being alive.

So, I went.

My goals were simple.

Show up.
Thank the organizers.
Finish.

The morning was gray and wet. Before the race started, I spoke with Patrick’s aunt. She told me about her nephew and the scholarship in his name.

I told her about brain surgery, treatment, and the slow crawl back to feeling worthy of life.

When the horn sounded, I moved with the pack. Not sprinting. Steady. I felt the tug in my side and waited for panic. It did not come.

Run three. Jog two. Walk one.

My breath found its rhythm, lost it, found it again. I walked when I needed to. Picked up when I could. My legs grew heavy in the honest way bodies grow heavy when they have done enough.

The course smelled of pine and rain and thawing earth. I wasn’t a runner, but I belonged among the living.

Even mediocre is alive.

When I crossed the finish line, I didn’t check my time. I knew I’d allow the number to shrink the moment, so I simply avoided it.

Patrick’s mother waited near the end. She smiled the way people do when we learn to keep smiling through heartbreak. We hugged. Our griefs recognized each other without comparison.

Then I drove home, asked my son how baseball went, and took a nap.

I’ve been forced to give up the façade of being what the brutalist in me still considers accomplished.

Now, it’s about reconciling how it feels to keep showing up, again and again.

Until I really can’t.