Hello friend! Welcome to Scrap Facts.
I’m a health care reporter, and a general maximal enthusiast. Each issue, I'll write to you about what I’ve learned through life and on the job.
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Toward the end of September, I ran 100 kilometers, or 62 miles (and maybe change).
“Run” may be a strong word for what was happening toward the end there, but it happened. I was participating in an event designed to be a 5k every hour, on the hour, for 24 hours (“race” feels like the wrong word when time isn’t really the goal). We started at 7 pm the night before, ran through the dark, sullen hours of the night, and kept going through morning. I got to 20 before calling it a day.
Truthfully, finishing felt anticlimactic. I jogged over the finish line and shuffled over to the aid station for a snack. My parter brought me a celebratory beer.
And then, we got to work: We packed up our camp, hopped in the car, and began the 4-hour journey home (which included an emergency stop at a drug store because I had accrued the kind of chafing that requires diaper rash cream). By the time we pulled onto our parking pad, all I could do was haul my protesting legs just a little farther into the shower before crawling into bed.
With that, I mentally filed away away every single kilometer I ran as a completed task so I could focus on the week ahead.
Two days later, as I sighed at the prospect of the days’ tasks ahead of me, I went to go write in my line-a-day journal I started in 2020. I noticed that my entry for the day after I had participated in the same event read shockingly similar to how I felt in 2021: I wish I felt like the kind of person who ran all that way, past KEF wrote.
It hit me then that I forgot to savor myself after that race. And if you are anything like me dear reader, I suspect that you may occasionally forget to savor yourself, too.
The problem, I think, is two-fold. First, there’s ambition’s annoying shadow: a dearth of time. Life asks us to squeeze so many tasks into our days and so many events in our weeks that we sometimes can’t even fully plan ahead, let alone reflect on the past. Without this space to recognize ourselves, we simply don’t.
The second half of the problem, at least for me, is that success never feels the way I expect it to — which can lead me to not recognize it even if it’s chafing me in the, er, nether regions.
The finish line or final buzzer scenes we see televised are adrenaline-filled spectacles. We see a flash of triumphs, relief or even disbelief on athletes’ faces as they stumble to a stop or high-five a teammate while catching their breath. We see the joy on the faces of coaches, loved ones, and crowds. And then, the feed cuts to commercial, so we don’t see the ugly parts.
Real life doesn’t cut to commercial. After I crossed the finish line, I felt Very Bad. By that point, the extreme pain in my legs was there regardless of whether I was moving or not, and I was barely keeping my exhaustion nausea at bay with copious amounts of Mountain Dew. I didn’t feel triumphant at all — I felt weary. So I didn’t treat it as a triumph. I treated it as yet another source of exhaustion.
This pattern plays out in other aspects of my life. When an ambitious story of mine publishes, I usually spend at least a few hours worrying about whether a mistake somehow slipped through my third or fourth fact check. Or, I recall writing it as a series of learning curves I had to climb along the way. And if something doesn’t feel like a struggle, I tend to chalk it up common sense or dumb luck.
But there is a danger of failing to savor successes — and it’s not just that we won’t feel proud of ourselves. It’s that we’ll never learn from them.
We tend to keep meticulous track records of all the times we take a big swing and miss because we want to avoid the feelings of frustration or embarrassment in the future. But if we pay the same kinds of attention to our wins, we’ll never be able to recreate those situations again.
When I look back on how I completed those 100ks, some of it still feels like good fortune, which is true: I’m privileged to be healthy enough to even consider such a race.
But some of it was also a 20-year commitment to running, the longest relationship I’ve ever had. I strategically changed my clothes every six hours, hydrated before I was thirsty, and I made a point to walk a lap when I needed to eat to allow my GI tract to absorb nutrients.
It was a mental fitness. Over the years, I’ve learned to view running as a celebration of being alive, which means I run for joy instead of discipline. When night fell and the trail got dark, that gratitude carried me along the winding trail under the watchful eyes of spiders, whose sparkling eyes were sprinkled like glitter just beyond the path.
My wish for you, dear reader is that you find a few minutes today, maybe after you read this email, to think about everything you’ve done right in your life. Pick apart those achievements the same way you would any of your perceived shortcomings. As the nights get longer here in the northern hemisphere, don’t forget to savor yourself. You can always be your own shining light if you just remember to do so.
Finish line photo from Ben, the best pit crew I could ever ask for.
What else have I been up to?
A selection of my work for POLITICO from the last few weeks:
Merck’s promising experimental Covid-19 drug raises hopes for pill to fight virus
FDA authorizes first Covid vaccine for kids ages 5-11
FDA advisers endorse Moderna booster shot: Three takeaways
FDA authorizes first e-cigarette, sparking concern among public health advocates
A shot of me at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal in conversation with the CEOs of Clue, a digital birth control app with FDA clearance.
That’s all for now—stay curious, friend ❤️
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Top image by E. Y. Smith; headshot by Matt Anzur.