Zibby Mag

By Amanda Parrish Morgan

I’ve been thinking lately about the notion of bittersweet, the topic of Susan Cain’s recent book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Cain sees bittersweet as a “tendency toward states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow” that comes from an awareness of life’s fleeting nature and the way beauty persists not in spite of sorrow but because of it. Many of the things we love are bittersweet: music in a minor key, tales of unrequited love, the bright, dying leaves of autumn.

When I taught high school English, I often started the year with The Great Gatsby. I expected to find it stale or otherwise diminished by its frequent inclusion in high school literature classrooms, but it instead seemed to be more perfect each time I read it.

The novel is imbued with bittersweetness in time and place and conflict. Gatsby is longing for Daisy and the out-of-reach promise of reinvention. Nick is longing for Gatsby and his “younger and more vulnerable years.” The decadent splendor of the parties is weighted with what readers know is the coming collapse, and the days are growing shorter and crisper as summer turns to autumn. Even Fitzgerald’s language is bittersweet. Just before the novel’s famous last line about beating on like boats against the current, Nick muses: “Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And one fine morning—”

I taught the novel to my AP students and, in order to justify my inclusion of fiction in our otherwise nonfiction-focused course, felt I ought to make some nod to analyzing the kind of rhetorical and syntactic details that comprise the AP exam. We spent a lot of time talking about the punctuation in the book’s final passage.

Stretch our arms farther and what? And one fine morning what? How is the ellipsis, a trailing off, functioning differently than the interruption of the em-dash?

One of the boys on the track team told his English teacher that he thought Gatsby must have been a track and field athlete. This delighted her, and although I was unimpressed at the time (wasn’t that a bit literal? Run faster…), I’ve thought about it often since.

I started running when I was 14, the slowest girl on my high school cross country team. I was overweight and struggled to complete the warm-up without walking. I loved it, even though I was so bad that every run was intensely painful. I initially loved improving quickly and then loved being on a team that won the state championships. By the time I’d decided to run in college, I loved the grind itself: the clean, wrung-out feeling after a humid summer run; the soreness in my calves the morning after I’d run a new personal record; the gradual accumulation of miles that, for the most part, matched neatly with a decrease in my race times. I was relieved to discover an ability to do just what the cheesy t-shirts and locker room posters encouraged: to see pain as temporary, to use my mind to ignore bodily cues, to always try so hard that I knew I could not have found even another second to shave off my finish time.

When I started running, I had no notion that runners might continue to train and compete after college, but I couldn’t walk away from the routine of intervals and long runs, the rhythm of goal races, the thrill that came from hoping to get just a little bit faster.

By the time I was in my mid-thirties with two kids, I was thrilled and a little surprised to find myself faster than I had been at 18, 21, 30. I started to notice a mantra splashed across t-shirts, running magazines, and social media: faster as a master.

Masters runners are over 40, and the women (almost always women) using the phrase were running their best times at an age when conventional wisdom said they ought to be slowing down. Faster as a master sounded empowering and even a little rebellious, if also slightly cheesy for its echoes of girlboss affirmations. It was the opposite of bittersweet, but despite my inclination to the bittersweet, I imagined that I, too, would be faster still when I was a master. Even though I reflected (often aloud) on the bittersweet aspects of being an aging athlete, I also committed to increasingly lofty goals. At 37, I trained with a group of older women hoping to break three hours in the marathon (I did not, but many of the other women did).

I loved the grind itself: the clean, wrung-out feeling after a humid summer run; the soreness in my calves the morning after I’d broken a new personal record; the gradual accumulation of miles that, for the most part, matched neatly with a decrease in my race times.

Shortly after my attempt at the sub-three marathon, the pandemic began. With races cleared from my calendar, I ran instead to release the almost intolerable sense of buzzing anxiety. When races started to happen again, I signed up for the 2021 Boston Marathon. In the hotel room the night before, I watched a video my parents sent of them at home with my kids, cheering and waving signs. I cried a little: how lucky was I to still have parents who could cheer me on, two healthy children, and a body that still tolerated sixty miles of pounding each week?

On race day, my husband dropped me off at the start, and despite the humid weather and the symmetrical streaks of gray hair framing my face, I ran from Hopkinton to Back Bay faster than I ever had before. Though I loved the thrill of competition, this race felt different—like a celebration of large events resuming post-vaccination, pursuing personal goals as a parent, and the bittersweet.

After the race, I spent a week eating french fries and gingerly walking down stairs sideways to avoid straining my macerated quad muscles. Perhaps I’d sign up for a spring half marathon or try to lower my 5k time. But then my hamstring hurt, it was Christmas, and I had a mind-numbing amount of work due all at once. Then I got Covid and found myself just a few weeks shy of 40 and not at all poised to be faster as a master.

I began to really wonder if my fastest days might be behind me. I examined the parts of this feeling that were physical—my age itself, my increasingly stiff hamstring, and the metabolic changes of perimenopause. I also considered the nonphysical things that make athletic goals harder as we age. Perhaps, I thought, if I committed to physical therapy or biweekly strength-training or ate less ice cream or drank less wine I could, at least for a few more years, chase after demonstrable, numeric improvement. Then I allowed myself to consider for the first time that I might not want to.

I didn’t like that I’d thought this, so I asked my friend Mary to write me a training plan. I thought having someone else write down exactly what to do would provide an extension to the years in which I might reasonably expect to improve.

And it just might make me faster as a master.

Mary’s training plan is good, my hamstring hasn’t been bothering me as much lately, and most days I still feel the spark of whatever it is that made me go back to cross country practice each day. I’ve also come to see the ways in which I’ve been running as fast as I can to get some distance from what Susan Cain says is the most bittersweet truth of all: that I, and everyone I love, will someday die.

Cain suggests that children are often drawn to the bittersweet (so many children’s stories about orphans and dying pets!) because they intuit the existence of longing, loss, and poignancy long before anyone acknowledges it. Hearing a piece of music in the minor key or reading Where the Red Fern Grows might be a relief.

Lately, I’ve been wondering about relief: does accepting impermanence mean no longer trying to run faster, or does it just mean accepting that someday I no longer will. Near the end of my college racing career I would see classmates leave the gym and head to the basement pub on campus with seemingly no emotional attachment to the time they’d spent running. I envied them. I dreamed of a day when I could see my run not as a measure of my worth but as a place to meet general health requirements for exercise.

My high school students often interpreted the em-dash at the end of Gatsby as a reference to his death. And one fine morning it’s over. You wind up floating dead in your fancy pool. I think this is a reasonable interpretation, but I also think that it’s more specific to Gatsby than the sweeping, elegiac tone of the novel’s final chapters. One fine morning—maybe without your ever having acknowledged it’s happened—you must accept the impermanence of all that we build our lives around.

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Amanda Parrish Morgan is the author of Stroller (Bloomsbury 2022) which The New Yorker named one of the best books of 2022, noting that “the central strength of the book is not comprehensiveness but the way the stroller, and Morgan’s experience of her own strollering years, become an omnidirectional magnet, pulling disparate material into friendly proximity.”

Amanda’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, LitHub, Guernica, The Millions, n+1, Electric Literature, Carve, The American Scholar, the Ploughshares Blog, JSTOR Daily, The Washington Post, Real Simple, Women’s Running and ESPNW.

Amanda lives in Connecticut with her husband and two kids where she teaches at Fairfield University and the Westport Writers’ Workshop.