By Hannah Truby
Not every winter leaves the same impression. Out West, this one was lean—late to arrive, early to go—leaving a suboptimal snowpack in its wake and little to remember it by. For the Tahoe community, it will be remembered in part for its slow season, and for the loss of nine lives at Castle Peak.
For me anyway, winters like this one make it harder to look away from the bigger stuff that already does a fine enough job of vying for your attention—like growing up, a warming climate, or the realities of the wider world.
Climate anxiety is something I've always felt deeply. Even as a kid—maybe especially then— I felt the stress of smoky California summers, sparse snow on Highway 80, sound waves of talk on overpopulation drifting from mom’s car radio as I sat in the backseat. It gave me a kind of ache I didn’t yet have the language to express. Seasons like this one bring it up.
And that kind of unease doesn’t stay limited to climate or season.
I decided to study journalism for my Master’s because I like to write and because I wasn’t ready to become a teacher.
Since graduating last May, one of the biggest learning curves in moving from writer to journalist has been this: while the former survives on feeling, the latter thrives on discernment.
Discernment matters, is crucial even, but in practice, it hasn’t made the work any lighter.
As a freelancer, “keeping up” is part of the gig, but I've found that doesn’t really end when I close my laptop at the end of the day. the stories that fill my working hours—many of them on civics and the environment—have a way of collecting into a growing stockpile in my nervous system, even after the reporting is done.
There’s a concept in anthropology called Dunbar’s Number that suggests our brains can only meaningfully hold so many realities—the lived experiences of others—at once, about 150. Modern media stretches that limit far beyond its original scale. Even if only digitally, we are aware of millions of lives today, all their realities, tragedies, and complexities. But awareness isn’t the same as capacity. And even when we can’t hold them meaningfully, they still register—often more deeply than we realize.
News fatigue. Info overload. Digital burnout (insert your preferred buzzword here). You don’t have to work in journalism anymore to recognize these feelings—and I’d bet many, if not all, of you do.
But burnout, I learned this winter, doesn’t always look like stopping; sometimes it looks like doing more to hold onto the one thing that feels controllable. Counterproductive as it seems, work became that for me.
This winter was the first in my life that I didn’t want to ride more than I did.
It was strange and sad; snowboarding—something I’ve loved for so long—started to feel like a chore. I didn’t have the reserves for it. The low-tide winter offered an easy out. It was easy to point to the conditions, to say the season just wasn’t there (which, I know, is a lame excuse), when in reality, I wasn’t either.
Calendar by Jillian Gane / @beautyndirt
Of all the ways we can work through our stuff—write, cry, go to therapy, vent to friends, even overwork—each has its limits. Eventually, whatever you’re carrying has to be processed somewhere more embodied than thought. I knew this on some level, so in December, restless but still burnt out, I made a list of goals for the year ahead. Among them: Run a 10K by May. Run a half marathon by September. I’m still not entirely sure why, but running seemed easier than snowboarding—it didn’t ask much of me beyond stepping outside and going. And with a winter that felt more like spring, even that part came easily.
I’ve had a few different relationships with running over the years. In high school, because I ran track with my girlfriends, it was a part of my daily routine I looked forward to—something fun and close to easy. In my early 20s, it became more like a necessary evil, a way to offset everything else one tends to do at that age. More recently, I’ve found myself on the sidelines, watching friends take up the sport—training for their own “quarter-life marathon”—proud, certainly, but with the sense that running carried a meaning I was not privy to.
I thought I caught a glimmer of that meaning last October, when I followed Kilian Jornet and his team on a leg of his States of Elevation project. He travelled over 600 miles on foot (and another 2,400 by bike)—just for the heck of it, for the pure love of the game. Watching him that day, I saw for myself: Running really means something to people.
Maybe I could find out what.
In the beginning, I rarely warmed up, and almost never stretched. I tried to follow what I’d been told by real runners:
Breathe into where it hurts.
Expand around the pain.
Or something like that.
I ran nearly every day, aware, on some level, that I was running from the things I didn’t want to sit with. But isn’t that why most people start running anyway?
If you run, you know this already—running is a paradox. Even when you think you’re moving away, it has a way of bringing you back to yourself—maybe for no reason other than that it forces you to meet yourself, and then stay with it. Which is to say, running can be an excellent antidote to burnout—a sweet, if unintended, side effect.
You never know what a long run has in store for you. It can be joyful or overwhelming or painful or freeing. Whatever it is, you get better at staying with it. And soon, every run became a moment to meet myself, a chance to reconnect, a lesson on how to stay present, even when presence is inconvenient. And in the midst of a winter during which I was tempted to check out (and definitely tried), that lesson turned out to be one I really needed.
Not clarity. Not resolution. But a different relationship to discomfort, to uncertainty.
That I was wearing shorts in December was not lost on my climate anxiety, but running helped that, too: There was nothing to do except be in it. At least it was a beautiful day to be in it.
As she often does, winter made one final return to the Sierra Nevadas. On April 1, a late-season storm brought fresh snow to my local mountains—a parting gift—where I’ll be this weekend, taking my final laps of the season.
