Summer is a fraught season for me. I know it’s coming, yet I still manage to be blindsided every year. One week, the world around me lies more or less dormant and I can run free, ignoring my maintenance inhaler and allergy medications as I take big, satisfying breaths of unpolluted air. The following week — the exact calendar date depends on my current latitude; in Colorado, it tends to come down during the third week of May — wildflowers bloom and the trees burst to life in electric shades of green. It’s all undeniably beautiful … and indefinably aggravating.
An estimated one in 13 people in the United States lives with asthma. Because asthma is so common and — for the most part — treatable, it tends to be overlooked as anything more than a minor annoyance. My fellow Gen-X'ers probably can name a dozen movies from the 80s and 90s where the romantic foil was some geek with an inhaler. It seems an easy thing to laugh about — oh, you need a silly little device just to breathe? What a wimp.
I was diagnosed with allergic asthma in 2015. Since then, I have regretted all of the years I lacked empathy for people like my father, who had to manage asthma for most of his adult life. We don’t like to think about it, but we all know the feeling of not being able to breathe. Maybe you had a terrible coughing fit, a mean older cousin who jokingly held you underwater in the swimming pool for a little too long, or fell off the monkey bars and got the wind knocked out of you. We’ve all had something like that happen at some point. I’d challenge anyone to deny that fighting for breath is one of the scariest things that ever happened to them.
And so summer has arrived with its burst of toxic particles that botanists like to call pollen. I’ve developed sensitivities to several evergreen trees common in Colorado, and I’m allergic to grass everywhere — both during pollen season and mid-summer when the grass dries and begins to break apart. I also have terrible sensitivities to wildfire smoke and other particulates, which of course tend to proliferate in the late summer. Given how scary I find a sudden inability to breathe, I anticipate the months between late May and late September with trepidation.
Still, this early summer in Colorado has been amazing. The Front Range recorded one of its wettest Mays in decades, and June is on a daily storm track that seems likely to last through at least the middle of the month. It’s million-dollar precipitation in the high desert. The mountains are still buried in snow and the foothills are bursting with wildflowers. The views across Boulder County feature an expanse of green more like Ireland than Colorado. I love it. I do. But as much as the rain brings temporary relief for my lungs, the aftermath is, well, fraught.
This past weekend brought an un-Colorado-like pattern of rain throughout the day. I thought I could take advantage of the system to spend more time outdoors. Rainy days are perfect for a long run — the pollen is tamped down and the trails are empty. It appears many folks in Colorado are allergic to rain the way I am allergic to summer. On Saturday, the rain fell in solid sheets and I felt so good that I extended my run to 15 miles. More rain was predicted for Sunday, so I thought I’d have no issues planning a 20-mile loop.
Despite forecasts, the rain stopped after my first hour on the trails. Immediately, the well-hydrated grass took the opportunity to get busy. As I climbed short ascents, tightness clamped down on my chest. Each exhalation was soon accompanied by a familiar wheeze, but I was determined to ignore the sound. I descended the rocky singletrack of Eldorado Canyon and plodded through a slippery mire of mud to reach the Mesa Trail. My wheezing took on a higher pitch. A few hits of my emergency inhaler can help, but only for so long. If I keep running, the inflammation keeps building. Eventually, my primitive brain will register with unhelpful panic: Stop running! Stop running! To which my conscious brain always replies, I can’t. I’m alone on a trail and miles from home.
This push and pull continued as I walked, then jogged, then walked, then stumbled as my breaths became shallower and more desperate. Whenever I have an asthma attack, I’m not sure whether to blame the inflammation in my lungs or the anxiety provoked by this inflammation. Does it matter? My primitive brain won out and I plopped down on the wet dirt in the middle of a switchback in Bear Canyon, alternating between panicked gasping and stern efforts to calm my breathing and regain control.
The strangest thoughts come to me when I’m in the middle of an asthma-slash-panic attack. I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared at the mud caked on my shoes while chanting: “Dance. Dance. Dance.” This “dance” was a word of advice in a self-help book my therapist recommended that I recently finished, “The Courage to be Disliked.” The author writes:
“Do not look at the past, and do not look at the future. One lives each complete moment like a dance. There is no need to compete with anyone, and one has no use for destinations. As long as you are dancing, you will get somewhere.”
In this one-word chant, I was thinking of the sort of “live in the moment” advice the author prescribes. I was admonishing myself for continuing to force the run when it clearly wasn’t a “running” day for my lungs. I should have just slowed down, walked, and shortened my route. I have this tendency to compete with myself, to want to “finish” the full route I set out to complete, and do so in the amount of time that my irritating ego might find respectable. I still believe I can use stubbornness to fight my body’s louder pleas, even though I’m wiser than that now. I tell myself I’m wiser. But I still hang on to past expectations and future goals, and fail to “dance in earnest the moments of the here and now.”
As I sat and chanted, my breathing calmed. I lifted my eyes from my muddy shoes to the golden banner flowers blooming along the trail. Bear Canyon is walled in by rust-colored cliffs. Tiny Bear Creek was practically roaring as spring runoff echoed through the gorge. Wisps of fog hung from the steep canyon walls. It was a small, perfect moment that I had all but smothered with desperation and angst. Why do I fight myself all of the time? Why is it so hard just to be right here, right now?
This seems like a lesson I should take to heart — to “dance” through the uncertainties that summer brings. It shouldn't be so hard, should it?
Hi Jill, I feel for you. I have exercise-induced asthma, more like bronchospasms, but it's triggered more from overuse (i.e. past 12 hours in an ultra) than the environment, except the cotton ball-like cottonwood pollen has affected in past years. I wrote a post about breathing you might find helpful and/or interesting https://sarahrunning.substack.com/p/at-least-i-could-breathe
If you make your way down to the southwest corner of CO near Telluride, I hope we can connect in person! Please feel free to reach out if you're in this area.
I've had a few times when I had trouble breathing, such as getting my breath knocked out of me. I can't imagine having to deal with that on a regular basis. All my aches and pains are minor by comparison. I hope you can find the mental space to dance and dance.