Racing Super Power

It’s only recently that I’ve realized my super power when it comes to races: I dissociate from my body. I don’t feel pain while racing and often don’t feel it while training, either, at least if I make sure that I’m training hard enough to float away from myself. You can imagine that I hate doing training that requires me to actually be present in my body, which it turns out that I’m supposed to be doing more often than I do. One year, when I hired a coach, he told me to take “two weeks off” after my racing season. This was one thing I absolutely could not do. I needed to do training in order to dissociate. How was I going to get through two weeks without doing that?

For me, the worst part of any race is the moment I cross the finish line, which is when my brain and body crash into each other again and I feel all the pain that I’ve been holding off, in one terrible wave that I can’t push back anymore. It took me a long time to understand that this was not how other people raced. Most people feel a gradual increase of pain during training or a race, and a decrease of pain when they finish. Not me.

I learned how to dissociate from my body as a kid, enduring physical abuse from my father. I just never unlearned it. It was useful as a Mormon woman, doing childbirth at home and unmedicated, and I played with it as a Mormon doomsday prepper, as well. I don’t think all Mormon women do this. But I thought that it made me a better Mormon and a better wife and mother. I didn’t need sleep like other people did. I could endure deprivation and other kinds of pain at a level that other people didn’t even try. I studied harder, rarely rested or recovered, didn’t have any idea what “rest” or “fun” were. And I thought for a long time this made me better than other people. It certainly made me more productive.

And then when my daughter died, I crashed. My world and my faith were swept away. But I didn’t’ stop dissociating, oh no. Why would I do that? It was my one reliable way of getting out of my body and floating away from everything. So I kept finding new ways to dissociate, so I could do it more often and for longer periods.

I know this isn’t healthy and probably isn’t safe. However, it’s a habit and it feels like it’s useful since I get all these bonus points for having such an impressive resume and being able to “endure pain” in a way no one else does. Forcing myself to learn how to stop dissociating and sit inside my actual meat sack isn’t very fun. Letting myself experience pain or almost anything is tricky. You’d think that I’d be all for more pleasure, but that’s another problem for me, honestly. Pleasure and pain haven’t gotten all mixed up in my brain and I don’t trust either of them. I’m not used to that. I’m used to floating away.

All this is to say that figuring yourself out isn’t always fun. It’s a lot of weird work that it can be hard to explain to anyone who enjoys being in their meat sack.