I AM still alive.
That was the first useful thing I could tell a friend after getting home late Monday night.
I was actually running a lot. Early mornings and commute runs were happening. Most everything else had, in my own words, "just gone to shit."
Work at Aaptiv kept moving. The engineering inbox never stopped. Outside of work, the loft needed a tenant renewal while the building was still trying to give me a construction schedule. A car upstate needed a title, insurance, and a DMV plan. I was also squeezing a meeting with two founders into an evening after work.
Every one of those things had its own email thread. None of them cared that the others existed.
No single item was a catastrophe. Together they filled every open space. A simple question about the loft depended on a construction date. The construction date affected the renewal. The car needed an upstate trip, but the trip depended on the correct DMV office, the right paperwork, and hours that worked around everything else.
Running was the one part that kept fitting. I could do it before everybody else started asking questions. I could run part of the commute. It did not require a building manager, an insurance quote, or another calendar negotiation.
It still required maintenance. The increase in mileage was creating new problems on top of the hip mobility and back work I was already doing. I needed to keep up with physical therapy instead of treating it like another optional item on the list.
The week became a strange little running tour. Thursday night I was at the Armory watching indoor track. Saturday I left the city with friends and went up to the Shawangunk Ridge.
We ran around High Point in Minnewaska State Park Preserve. The water below the ridge was frozen. The sky was gray, the rock was exposed, and the view kept opening farther than it ever does on an early commute through Brooklyn.
The trail moved between open rock, low forest, and water. We stopped at the overlooks because it would have been stupid not to. It was cold enough for hats and neck gaiters, but clear enough to see a long way across the ridge.
There were four of us on the trail. We stopped long enough for a few group pictures, then kept moving through the cold. Nobody needed a pitch or an update. The basic job was to follow the trail and stay together.
The inbox was still going to be there when I got back. So were the tenant forms, the car paperwork, and the next week at Aaptiv.
I took a selfie above the frozen water. I look extremely alive.