Pandemic Diary, I: The Crucible — Hard Times and Stress; Mental and Physical Strength

The runners and bicyclists shall inherit the earth, is a truism of this Coronavirus pandemic crisis, as I see it. 

The hot-yoga and spin-cycle studios — the mixed martial artists and cross-fitters — the swimmers and weight-lifters — they are all shut down. The state has closed their places of business. Such exercise is almost at a standstill.

The State of California would probably stop people from running and biking, if they could. But they can’t close down the open road. So I have ridden hundreds of miles in the past few months. Sometimes twice in one day. I have become an ardent cyclist these past three months out of necessity. As an exercise, during the darkest moments of the Coronavirus lockdown mandates, it was almost all I had.

Never have I seen so many bikers and runners out on the roads as during the past few months, and good for them. I have seen my neighbors also taking walks, although that is a much lesser form of exercise. But good for them, too. Mediocre physical activity is way better than no physical activity.

This pandemic crisis has presented me, and everyone else, with mental health challenges. All this time on our hands. All this uncertainty — it sometimes seems that the only certainty is uncertainty in terms of the spread of this SARS-CoV2 virus. From top to bottom nobody really knows what they are doing, and they are making it up as they go. With government lock-downs there is too little to do and too much family on top of each other. Some 125,000 dead from the novel COVID-19 so far in the United States. A self-induced major economic crisis from the lock-downs designed to limit the spread of illness. 35 million unemployment claims and the worst financial numbers since the Great Depression. Businesses going under left and right. Days and weeks and months all bleeding the one into the other. Boredom, anxiety, fear, and anger. It can be too much. The first few weeks I just waited to see what would happen. But I came quickly to see that “normal life” would not be returning anytime soon.

So I got out my bike out and headed for the open road.

There is a certain type of American I have known: a female from 15 to 35-years of age; not fond of physical exercise; highly engaged in political activism and social media— Very Liberal and Very Online; and intense and neurotic, disposed to psychiatric meds. I know this sort of person is at home — posting to others about the pandemic on Twitter to “Stay inside!” “This is NOT a vacation!” — and looking at their phone every fifteen minutes, worried about the spread of COVID-19 or Black Lives Matter movement. Their amygdala is firing over and over again in a perpetual “fight or flight” reaction. They are exhausted; they get no rest. It is a crisis 24/7. Their smartphone pings with a new notification every five minutes. Their mental health is not doing well, to put it mildly.

I very consciously decided to go in the opposite direction.

In times of stress I exercise intensely to reach equilibrium. This is how I have dealt with difficult periods of emotional upheaval in my past: I would burn off the crazy with exercise. The more stress I experienced, the more I would sweat. I would attempt to gain release through extreme physical exertion. This time would be no different. It had worked in the past. Why not now? Exercise as a naturally-occurring anxiolytic, no pharmaceuticals required — all you needed was the fortitude to get off your ass and do it.

When my first love broke my heart during my junior year of college, I took out my frustration in a genuine paroxysm of tremendous exercise during the memorable summer of 1988. When my mom was sick and dying in 1996, I didn’t hit the bottle — I hit the road. I biked thousands and thousands of miles. In fact, it was in response to the trauma of mother’s illness and death that I first got into road biking. I exorcised my frustration and sadness through the crucible of arduous exercise. In retrospect, these were healthy coping mechanisms. When I recovered my emotional equilibrium — which I eventually did — I was in good shape. I would try to use exercise in a similar fashion during this Coronavirus pandemic period.

So I played tennis and rode my bike hour after hour. I did this again and again during the “shelter in place” months of 2020. I hadn’t been in this good of physical shape in a long time. My biggest problem was that I was just getting horribly sunburnt. I could feel the sun still radiating on my skin at night when I went to sleep. Way too much sun, but it could not be helped if I wanted the exercise. Since all businesses were closed by order of the health dept, if you didn’t want to stay in your house all day you were outdoors under the sun. So it was with me. I developed a deep suntan. I used copious amounts of sunscreen but it did not seem to help much. My lips were always chapped and sun-scorched. I worried about skin cancer, but I needed the workouts. With my golden suntan I looked like I just returned from a vacation. I was sort of on “vacation,” but not really. Silver-linings notwithstanding, this was a horrible time.

Because of this, I was pushing my 53-year old body to the very limit with so much vigorous exercise. I paid close attention to stretching and recovery, too. If I had gotten injured during the pandemic, if I then had had to stay home all the time, I might have found myself in the same state of mind as those neurotic female social media activists glued to their phones all day and all night — no thank you. Refreshing the news apps over and over again to see COVID-19 updates and the number of newly infected and news of police brutality protests and looting — that way lies madness.

I had a number of memorable bike rides during the Coronavirus pandemic that I will never forget. In particular, on Sunday May 3rd, 2020 when they began to relax the lock-downs, I rode from the Pierpont area in Ventura up to Carpinteria and back along the beach. There were hundreds of people out — maybe thousands — most of them seemingly from inland coming to the beach for fresh air and exercise because the beach was the only place open. Valencia, Santa Clarita, Moorpark, Fillmore, and Santa Paula seemed to empty to the coast and Ventura in search of a cathartic walk on the beach. It would not surprise me if people as far away as Lancaster and Bakersfield had driven all the way to the coast after the stay-at-home orders started easing in desperate search of Something Different. I wouldn’t blame them. I had been out biking all the time but most everyone else had not. After some seven weeks of near total lockdown I could almost feel these people had been holding their breath. Now it was like the county was exhaling and coming back to life. I could almost sense the mental health of my neighbors improving. There were family after family walking together along the Ventura boardwalk near the pier and county fairgrounds, and others cruising around on beat-up beach cruisers and other bikes that had not seen the light of day in years. People had ghetto blasters playing in the front baskets of their bikes or dogs peaking out of their backpacks.

Welcome, my neighbors, and well met! I thought to myself as I biked through the throngs. Great to see you active and outdoors! Drink up the sun! Enjoy the beach! Breathe in the salt air of the sea! It will all be ok!

Of course the scolds and the shut-ins were loud in urging everyone to remain indoors. “This pandemic is NOT over! Stay home!” They were stuck in the unhealthy and unsustainable pose of trying to freeze the world and move everyone underground in a posture of fear to hide from the SARS-CoV2 virus. Everything was an emergency all the time, and adrenaline coursed through their veins night and day. They would stay inside their house until eventually a vaccine was developed. End of story. There is the singular phenomenon of FEAR, and then there are fear’s kissing cousins, hysteria and panic.

But everyone along the Ventura coast that day was six or more feet away from each other. Nobody was huddled together or breathing on each other. We were outside. We weren’t spreading disease. We were using the outdoors in a responsible manner. In my solitary bike rides and tennis matches I always had been doing so. There was no spike in local infection rates two weeks later. We could use the beaches and public parks safely.

I would not hide inside. I refused to live in fear.

I think the California authorities might reply to me that you, Richard, might act in a responsible manner but others won’t. So in the name of safety for all we will close everything for everybody, even if it is overkill. The consequences be damned.

I wasn’t going to go along with that.

This isn’t Communist China where the authorities raise their hand and everyone scampers to obey.

I remember in the heights of the panic the police arresting surfers who dared to go out in the water. These surfers weren’t going to spread disease while catching waves but other beach-goers on the sand might do so if there were too many of them. So California Gov. Gavin Newsom closed down all the beaches, surfers notwithstanding. Same with golf. Same with tennis. The Coronavirus epidemic caught the authorities by surprise. Not knowing what they were doing and trying to figure it out on the fly, they just shut everything down. There has to be a better, more targeted public health approach than that. I remember reading an article in the local newspaper about how they were prepared for an imminent deluge of 911 calls and overwhelmed hospitals. “It’s coming!” they advised. The flood of 911 calls and COVID-19 patients into local hospitals has not even come close to happening so far in Ventura, and the article looks like hysterical pro-government propaganda in retrospect. And in early May when they finally opened up the beaches, and allowed people to play golf, and unlocked the tennis courts, and permitted people to walk in the parks, the infection rates in Ventura did not go up. Was it overreach by panicked officials which shut down the beaches and parks in Ventura to begin with? Were such public places ever vectors for the transmission of this virus? Were their closures unnecessary? Why not close down rather bars and wineries, live music concerts, professional sports in front of an audience, and theaters and cinemas which have no value other than adult entertainment? Why not let my daughters play soccer again in the park and do summer camps at the beach? Let them go back to school?

I have no issue with prudent, reasonable measures — maybe the devil is in the details when it comes to how to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2. But there has to be a smarter public health policy than arresting surfers — or simply closing everything down mindlessly. In my more charitable moments, I remind myself that Gavin Newsom and his ilk were making tough decisions under enormous pressure without much time to think it through. They were going to be harshly criticized no matter what they did. But still. Had any government official in American history ordered a quarantine of not only the sick but of the healthy population, too? And mandated it en toto? These draconian measures might maker more sense if Bubonic Plague had broken out, but the survival rate for the Cornisvirus is so much higher. Has this been carefully thought out?

I wanted to send money to those arrested surfers to help pay legal costs. Governor Newsom is a liberal from urban San Francisco who would not know a surfboard if one fell on his head. He is not a beach guy. Not a workout guy. Newsom is a city guy into sitting in meetings, fine wine and dining, and himself. I’m an outdoors guy. The body enjoys a challenge — craves it. I need a cleansing sweat.

So the next weekend, on May 10th and 11th, 2020, I planned two wonderful bike rides sixty miles away in Orange County. I put my bike on my car and drove the 101 and then 405 freeways down there, and I passed sign after blinking electronic Caltrans sign warning me, “Be safe. Avoid gatherings. Stay home.”

Bullshit.

And f*ck you, Gavin Newsom.

I ignored all these signs.

Whether in my car or on my bike, I ignored them all. Rolled right past them. Across hundreds of miles of southern California road I did so. Without the slightest compunction.

I surely was not going to catch or spread the SARS-CoV2 virus in my long Newport Beach and Irvine bike rides by myself. The spring weather was beautiful, the beach inviting, and I was far from the only person on bike around the Back Bay, on Bayside Rd. up Newport Coast Rd, or through Shady Canyon. They were great 40 mile bike rides and I earned my appetite and good night’s sleep afterward. The only time I came into contact with someone else on that day was when I got an extra large plate of spicy Thai rice with chicken to go after the ride to re-fuel, and I wore a mask into the restaurant and ate the food in my car. (I also came into contact with my brother that evening when I stayed at his place in Dana Point.) No matter what demons you might be struggling with, after a hard three hour bike ride a person sleeps the sleep of the virtuous. When you’re 23-years old you might sleep well wherever you are and no matter what you do. But at 53-years of age a man must earn his good night’s full rest.

Nowhere at all when I was out and about during this trip could I find an open public bathroom. So I just peed — on three separate occasions, no less — in the completely deserted Boomers! Irvine miniature golf parking lot near Harvard Avenue and Michelson Drive. The lot was humongous and there was nobody to be seen anywhere; that is why I chose the place, with my bladder close to bursting. I made a huge pool of urine on the ground which had dried completely when I returned after my ride some four hours later to make another one. If the police had rousted me while doing this, I would have replied truthfully that there was not an open public bathroom anywhere for miles and miles around. What did they expect me to do?

Even in the darkest moments of the lock-downs one could get groceries and gas for one’s car. But there were next to no public bathrooms available anywhere. So one did what one had to do. I peed in a remarkable variety of hidden corners during my bike adventures.

So I had that wonderful bike ride on Saturday May 10th in Orange County which took almost three hours and left me spent. Then I did the same on the next day, May 11th. It was wonderful. Memorable.

In similar fashion during the pandemic, I would ride up to Carpinteria from Ventura along the beach and back. I did this ride routinely. I also rode on the back country roads among the citrus fields between Santa Paula and Ventura. Sometimes I did this bike ride two times in one day. I had so much time on my hands so why not? I played tennis again and again. I used my rowing machine. And I lay around exhausted afterwards, actively recovering by gently stretching my muscles, tendons, and ligaments. For me this was a stroke towards health and happiness, in contrast to all the negative energy in the ether from politics and public health.

It was no big sacrifice to observe “social distancing” rules. Even in pre-pandemic times I did not go to see live entertainment or visit crowded bars. I don’t attend church services. I did not mix in crowds and so did not miss them; I’m 53-year old married guy with two kids living in the suburbs. The vast majority of us don’t live in built-up geographical density — asshole-to-asshole, cheek-to-jowl — like they do in parts of Los Angeles and New York cities. The COVID-19 infection rates in Ventura County have so far been low.* In addition, I have never attended a music festival or gone to a political protest in my life. I’m a introvert of long-standing. In the pandemic months I put a mask on when I went into a store. Wearing a mask was annoying but not too difficult. I could do it for a while but sincerely hoped I was not wearing a face mask into grocery stores a year from now.

It was indeed strange. I had gone from watching videos of everyday people on the street in China wearing masks in public even during non-pandemic times to experiencing a deadly virus arrived from China with we Americans now wearing face masks just like them. I did not like it at all.  Yet it seemed the logical thing to do for now. But it was surreal; I could hardly believe my eyes. I would be in some store looking at everyone wearing masks and marvel at how I had never ever envisioned this as our national life. I can’t wait for it to end. In fact, wearing a mask is so unpleasant I don’t go to stores at all unless it is unavoidable. I will head out instead for the open road.

Pandemic or not, I have never been one to stay inside much. There are too many exciting things to do and beautiful places to see. Why stay at home? Or maybe this is more accurate: I loved to come and flop down in exhaustion and rest at home, after having spent most of the day and my energies elsewhere. So it continued even during the outbreak when everything was closed and there was so much less to do. And I love my family but spending all my time with them would grow tedious — or worse. Too much family. I would explain that to others and they would shake their head in agreement. Too much of the same people and same place all the time and you are going bat-shit stir-crazy.

So I went outside and exercised. I would burn off the anxiety with sweat. I would earn my emotional equilibrium. Some people gauge their workouts by how many days a week they exercise and for how long. I gauge them by how many sets of completely sweat-drenched workout clothes I leave in my laundry hamper. I was doing a lot of incredibly stinky post-workout laundry In April, May, and June of 2020. I once saw a car that had a bumper sticker which read, “Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat.” That was my kind of person, especially when times are tough.

My wife would occasionally look at me and say, “You are leaving to work out AGAIN?”

Yup. But there will still be all those hours at home afterwards, and we are not wanting for family time. I’ll be home in a bit. And I’ll be in a better mood after. Such is how I would survive this pandemic craziness.

On the other hand, there are those families on top of each other at home all the time. Nothing is open and there is nowhere to go. No release and you never get a break. Every day is the same. Stuck at home forever! Or those single people who experience next to no human contact — for months at a time! Even the extreme introverts will cry, “Enough already!” I can’t wait to go back to work. I am a high school teacher so work will entail some risk to me, and by extension to my family. I will take it. Take prudent precautions, limit the risk, and get on with life. Students need to be back in school learning. Instead of stagnating at home staring at their Chromebooks or smartphones, my daughters need to have the opportunity to go outside to explore and mature. They need to mix with other kids and learn to compete and cooperate. But the adults have shut down all organized activities for young people almost without exception. It is like the adult world has abandoned my daughters. “Stay home! Stay away from others!” Enough.

With so many people living alone and glued to their screens, America was already a lonely country before the pandemic. But during the lock-downs of 2020, Americans became even more isolated and more lonely, in my opinion. It would be hard to underestimate how damaging this was. This SARS-CoV2 virus from Wuhan, China directly affected the physical health of relatively few of my 330 million fellow Americans. But the pandemic challenged the mental health of almost everyone. It has affected the very young and the very old the hardest and the most directly.

Whether our country suffered more from illness and death from COVID-19 or from the economic damage of the lock-downs and resulting mental health decline is a tricky question. Time will tell and historians will judge, but I would like to know the answer.

Because I could see by late April that this radically changed quarantine situation was not temporary but would go on indefinitely. I could see that my normal life was shattered by government orders to “shelter in place,” so I would make a plan to render my new life bearable. I would actively take steps to replace what was taken away and replace it with substitutes which worked for me. I would not be a passive victim and sit at home, nonplussed by events and waiting for it to end. If my Plan A was no longer available or working, time to find a Plan B.

But other Americans — with too much time on their hands, their smartphones and social media, SSRI medication for anxiety and depression, and deteriorating mental health — might go in the opposite direction. Unemployment numbers are through the roof. Murders in many big cities are up. Drug overdoses are up. Will the number of suicides surge, too? I would be surprised if they didn’t. The same with an increase in divorces.

I remember reading about a marijuana delivery guy who sincerely believed he was performing an essential and heroic service to his neighbors during the pandemic by delivering cannabis night and day to customers. Or those who have countered the trauma of the lock-downs by markedly increasing their alcohol intake. Or swallowing their negative emotions by binge-eating.

Beware, beware!

It is not that simple. Escaping into a cannabis cloud or alcohol cocoon for months at a time as a response to stress will come back to bite you in the butt. Stress eating yet another pan of calorie-laden brownies will not help. Life is not that easy. To seek short-term relief from anxiety and boredom by building negative long-term behaviors via anxiogenic agents is to play with fire. Such a person might point to the Coronavirus pandemic of early 2020 as the beginning of a long decline which took years to counteract.

Because time still passes, even during an emergency — I saw this as equally true during the Thomas Fire disaster of late 2017 which regrettably I also found myself in.

This virus crisis started in March of 2020. It is now almost July. September and December will be here soon. As will February and then April 2021. The months will pass.

99% of the moms I know are medicated right now— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) September 17, 2020

Eventually all this COVID-19 business will recede. This is not the first pandemic humans have endured. It won’t be the last.

But I ask you this, esteemed reader: Will you exit this unusual period of national life in better or worse shape than you entered it? Will you take counsel from your fears or from your courage?

Stress and hard times will come to each of us in doses large and small. Now and in the future. How will you choose to react to it?

Will you be a passive victim? Sitting at home scratching your head and wondering what happened and why? Floundering in pain? Exhausted and dyspeptic? Querulous and unpleasant?

Or will you actively make choices to adapt to change and keep yourself healthy? Seek to get your needs taken care of? Think it all through? Take concrete actions consciously to maximize your opportunities for growth and happiness?

Or you can just go back to the bong or eat an edible. Pour yourself another glass of wine. Lay back some more in bed and look at social media on your smartphone, see the hive-mind quiver in anger, and grow yet more anxious. That pale glow of your skin from too much inside time while your body grows softer from lack of exercise. The bulges of fat from the unburned excess calories you have consumed.

Life during a crisis is like “normal” life but only more so. The pressure of hardship can provide the impetus for breakthrough moments of personal growth, if you are open to it. Everything, even trauma, can serve as a teacher. And suffering is ever one of life’s best teachers, if you are willing to learn. My fellow Americans, I urge you to work on your mental/physical strength and emotional resilience, and thereby seek to emerge stronger from this pandemic than you were when you entered it.

See you on the other side of COVID-19, America.

But how will it all look in retrospect? It seems clear to me now that today, as in March when the pandemic arrived to California, we should protect vulnerable populations as much as possible, take reasonable precautions to limit the spread of disease, and then get on with it. Re-emerge into the world. Live your life as well as you can. Limit the damage and suffer what one must suffer. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!”

You can live with courage and conviction. You can move forward. Or you can crouch in fear and paralysis.

“Post-traumatic growth.” Google it.

If you are 75-years old or have some serious medical condition, I can understand living like a recluse out of fear of SARS-CoV-2, if you can endure it. But otherwise, use your common sense and get on with your life.

I wonder what those who survived the Athens plague of 430 BC, or the “Black Death” of Medieval Europe, or the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 would say if they saw us. Would they think that we, for all our vastly superior science and greater relative wealth, were pussies? Unused to disruption and calamity on such a scale? That we had little moral grit? Scant internal fortitude? That we allowed ourselves to be undone by suffering and misfortune? That for all our technology and money, we were weak? With such thankfully better outcomes than they, we were so scared by what we could not avoid? With so many fewer sick and dead, are we more unhinged?

I know the ICU doctor or nurse in the hardest hit areas dealing with bed after hospital bed of COVID-19 patients were not weak. They’ve proven that.

But the average American at home with their smartphone and their anxiety and fear?

* The above graphic claims that one has a 99.7% survival rate from COVID-19. I don’t where that number came from. But on the date of this writing on June 17, 2020 in Ventura County the average person has a .22% chance of contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus, although that is probably too low. But the chance of dying from COVID-19 in Ventura County is .004965% by my calculations, and that number is exactly right. (Info: 1,835 known cases and 42 deaths in a Ventura County with a population of 846,000.)

P.S. Twenty two days after I wrote this essay, the Coronavirus infection numbers in Ventura County have undergone a much ballyhooed “surge.” There are now 4,245 infections with 53 deaths, and so the the new higher chance of infection is .5% and chance of dying is .01% over four full months. This is still a low probability of getting sick, and an even lower one for dying. If you are not elderly nor have existing health problems, your chances of dying from the novel Coronoavirus in Ventura are very low. (It is low even if you are old or have health problems.) And if you don’t work or live in a prison or a nursing home, or spend time in meatpacking warehouses or as a farm-worker, you are safer still. /end

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THE OTHER APPROACH — ANXIOUS, “TRIGGERED,” AND OVERWHELMED —
“One negative thought precedes the other, and together, they keep revolving in our heads, making us feel anxious and depressed.”
— Dr. Prem Jagyasi

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P.P.S. Here we are 83 days after the original post, and we are still locked down tight in Ventura County. The COVID-19 numbers are low, but here we are… My daughters still cannot practice with their club soccer teams, and school is “distance only” — with no ability for kids to mix and socialize while learning. Physical isolation and lack of opportunity prevent my daughters from engaging their peers: so much remains closed, by government order. The government has put up some “#AloneTogether” propaganda billboards to intimate that we are all in this together. We are told to stay at home but be together somehow — that is the theory. In practice, it means we are just alone.

So fuck you two times, California Governor Gavin Newsom! And same to you Mark Ghaly, California Secretary of Health and Human Services and Robert Levin, Health Officer of Ventura County. Same also to Mayor Matt LaVere and others on the City Council here in Ventura. The playing fields in nearby Santa Paula and Camarillo are open to sports teams, other parents tell me, but not in the City of Ventura.

Almost across the street from where I live is Huntzinger Park where today I took the following photos. The City of Ventura has put concrete barriers on the local baseball field to prevent anyone sneaking on to the field and playing when the police are not looking —

IMPORTANT QUESTIONS:

Were the government-mandated lock-downs of entire societies in 2020 reasonable and necessary in the context of the outbreak of the deadly SARS-COV-2 virus? Or were they overly-blunt and incredibly-costly overreactions by panicked public officials? How will posterity look upon all this? Quarantine of not only the sick but also the healthy? Concrete blocks on baseball infields? Traffic cones in basketball hoops? Let history judge.