Earlier this year, I saw the documentary The Chase about the Cocodona 250 race last year. As I prepare to volunteer at this year’s race, (and honestly as I reflect on my recent birthday and what I want out of this new year…) I keep thinking about one of the lines in the film, after one of the competitors realizes he won’t be making the podium in the race, he said he realized that he was going to focus on chasing his ghost- beating his old record. It made me want to share some things I have noticed about my time in the mountains with my own ghosts.

While I spend a good amount of time running with friends or in groups, my training calls for plenty of solo runs as well. And many of those runs seem to revolve around one of three things- either running from what’s haunting me, chasing my own ghost, or, and this is by far the best scenario, dancing with my ghosts.

Some days I just need to run away from what’s haunting me. Perhaps that means a decision I don’t feel ready to make, or the regrets of long ago or my most recent mistake. Often what haunts me are unkind words said to me that keep replaying in my mind or the general chaos and dystopian feel of the world right now. Whatever it is, these kid of runs seem to happen when I am in a place where physical pain sounds preferable to the emotional or mental pain. If I just run a little harder or further, my head will quiet as my body screams and I’ll get a little break from that particular ghost. Once in a while, these runs can be deeply cathartic and helpful. But if I run this way repeatedly, I know odds of injury are going to skyrocket, and eventually I am going to have to confront some of these thoughts and decisions or I’ll just find it harder and harder to escape them. It’s like a drug where your tolerance gets higher and higher until it is controlling your whole life to get just a small high compared to what you first had.

Chasing my ghosts can be similar. Sometimes it is an incredibly motivating thing to chase that PR or think about how the me from high school used to fake sick to get out of running the mile and now here I am, showing the old me how much better, faster, stronger I am. (Yes, that was a Daft Punk reference… a great soundtrack for chasing your ghosts…) I spend a more time on the trail than I’d like to admit chasing the “ghost ships” of other lives I might have lived or paths I might have chosen. Cheryl Strayed used this term in her column Dear Sugar: “I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” Instead of saluting it, I tend to chase it sometimes. I try to wrangle it in to telling me if I made the “right” choice. Or if I can still incorporate that whole other life into my present one. But just like running from your ghosts, this is not a sustainable way to run. For one, most of my falls or wrong turns tend to happen on these runs, thanks to getting lost in my thoughts. When I’m focusing so hard on speed alone to nab that PR it often doesn’t lead to the best experiences. While chasing your ghost is certainly motivating sometimes, you simply can’t PR every single run. Eventually you lose against yourself, your ghost ships move on to other shores, and that high you get from chasing your ghosts will fail you.

This brings me to my favorite kind of solo run: Those times on the trail when I find myself dancing with my ghosts. In those moments, I’m not showing my old self that I’m better than she was, I’m having an incredible dialogue of marveling at how far I’ve come, while thanking that old self for holding on through the dark times and setbacks so I could get here. Instead of wrestling the ghost ships of other lives into telling my ego I didn’t make a mistake, I ask them for a piece of wisdom I can use in the life I DID choose. I spin around with that imagined life for a while in hopes of returning to shore/the trailhead a better version of me, ready to step more fully into the real life I have. Often, those times feel like prayer, or like quieting my mind enough to just go live in the flow of the music of trail running. Those runs where I feel sure of every step, and I swear I can hear reminders, advice, encouragement from people I love who I have lost. Those are the runs I completely lose track of the miles I’ve gone and am surprised to be at the end of my planned route. Those are the times I know trail running is so much more than a physical activity- it is a deeply spiritual one as well.

So my wish for you, whether you’re a runner or not, is that you find opportunities to dance with your ghosts. Running from them isn’t healing. Chasing them isn’t as productive as you think it is. Dance with them. Let them teach you new moves, new rhythms. Let them be partners, not adversities. Let them crack you wide open to new possibilities and give you the strength to stand in old truths. Those may seem total opposites, but I deeply believe that paradox is where miracles happen. Speaking of, the mountains are calling me right now, and who am I to turn down a dance on their summits?!