Nobody\u2019s asking – because nobody reads this – but if they did, they might ask why I stopped posting for nearly four years. If they saw the dates of my last posts before that time and saw December 2019, they’d probably have a guess, and that guess would probably be at least partly right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everybody knows about the Covid pandemic and experienced its effects. What most don\u2019t know is that I kind of got a jump on it, at least for someone living in the US. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
In the middle of January, I lost a friend to suicide, and it really hit hard. In some ways I\u2019m still trying to process it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did a couple of races before Covid closed down everything here. The second was just about a week before people starting going home to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I actually did pretty good during a lot of 2020. I like being out and around people, but I also have hermit tendencies that (if my mom is to be believed) might be genetic. And unlike so many people, I wasn\u2019t at home by myself. Kris had already been working from home for a few years at that point so she was an old hand at it. And we also had the cats. It was kind of a cozy time, at least when we were at home. Stressful doing just about anything outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I kept up running for quite a while, continued okay through the spring and summer. I wasn\u2019t doing training-level running because I didn\u2019t have anything to train for. But it was okay maintenance. The nearby campus of Chandler Gilbert Community College turned into a ghost town, and I fell in love with running there – I’ve always had a fascination with abandoned places and it was wild to see it so empty for so long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was able to do a lot of backpacking. Mostly just weekend (or long weekend) trips, but quite a few of them looking back now. At the beginning of the year, I had decided I was going to make a goal to cover all of the AZT (Arizona Trail) that year. Covid derailed that plan pretty hard, but I did make some good progress on the trail even in spite of it. I had a really good time doing that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But\u2026 remember that I said I did pretty good for \u201ca lot of\u201d 2020. As the year moved on, I started falling off of just about everything as we got into fall and winter. I\u2019ve never been that good about being self-motivated without a project of some kind, and recognizing that there was no way I was going to be able to do my AZT project that year, I was left without a project. And of course there was a lot of sociopolitical stuff to try and live with too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first half (or so) of 2021 was the real struggle for me – I became deeply, clinically depressed, and left the house very little for several months. And when I did make it out, it felt like a monumental task to prepare and get out the door. Some of that feeling still pops up whenever I\u2019m packing for a weekend camping trip or something like that. I’d really like to move past that, but so far it’s still there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I mostly got out of it, eventually. Starting to reconnect with friends helped a lot. So did riding a bike and having fun doing that – that first time zipping along the downhill side of Pemberton (out at McDowell Mountain Park) was like a desperately-needed jumpstart to the part of my brain where \u201cfun\u201d registers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a lot to say about all this, but a lot of us went through the same thing. I\u2019m not sure I need to spell it out, and I have a tendency to overwrite anyway. It\u2019s enough to say that for a very long time, it didn\u2019t seem like there was any point to writing here, and then I just didn\u2019t know what to say. I still don\u2019t, but this is the best I can do and that will have to be enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nobody\u2019s asking – because nobody reads this – but if they did, they might ask why I stopped posting for nearly four years. If they saw the dates of my last posts before that time and saw December 2019, they’d probably have a guess, and that guess would probably be at least partly right. Everybody… Continue reading Reflecting On a Global Pandemic and Its Effects<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1061,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-miscellany","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1060"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1158,"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060\/revisions\/1158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azventurer.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}