The Importance of Community
By: Erin E. Wood, Ph.D
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another”
– Proverbs 27:17
I know two things to be true in this world:
1. I dislike running
2. Moving sucks
Now, I know what you are probably thinking.
“ERIN!!! You specifically created ALL PACES AND FACES WELCOME to promote the running, cycling, and outdoor adventure stories! You can NOT say that you dislike running”
But just as firmly as I know that I dislike running, I know that I hate lying. That is why I will not lie to you and make you think that I love – or even like running. Most days I barely tolerate it.
As a kid, I volunteered to play catcher during softball season and goalie during soccer games just because I was under the impression that I would not have to run. I wasn’t good at running. I didn’t know how to hold my arms. I didn’t know how to move my legs properly. I was just flat out bad.
Like, being on second base and having your teammate literally push you down the 3rd base line towards home plate because they lapped you after hitting an in-the-park homerun bad.
But eventually I improved my form. I learned how to hold my arms and pump them to save energy. I learned the different ways you could place your feet or kick your legs based on whether you were going for distance or speed. By the time I reached college, I was a runner. Even if I didn’t want to admit. When I moved to college, I ran occasionally - signing up for two half-marathons on a whim – but it wasn’t until graduate school when I would officially lean into running.
Like many graduate students, by my second year of my program I had fallen into a deep, dark depression. My feelings of "imposter syndrome" had never been worse. I didn't know if I was cut out for graduate school. I felt "stuck." Due to personal reasons, I had decided to stay at Oklahoma State University for my graduate training (rumored to be a major taboo for people wanting a Ph.D). While I had loved my undergraduate experience, I was quick to find out that it was largely because of the amazing friends I had, and not because Stillwater is an amazing, bustling metropolis full of non-stop fun. Now, two years after my friends from undergrad had moved on with their lives, I was in the same college town where I was too old to hang out with the college students and too young to fit in with most of the non-student community member. While stuck in this limbo, questioning my decisions, I watched many of my college friends go off on grand adventures, land amazing jobs, get married, and start having families of their own.
So, not really knowing what else to do, I put back on my running shoes.
Through a series of events, I was welcomed to join a Wednesday night “pub run” that met outside a local townie bar called Finnegan's. Like anyone in a new social situation, I felt out of place for the first few runs. I wasn’t as fast as everyone else and was in a completely different stage of life than almost everyone there. However, while this was a group where I should have felt like a fish-out-of-water, this group was one of the first groups in my life to accept me for who I was and where I was at. They made Stillwater feel like “home.”
As the weeks went on, I built friendships with many of these runners that went outside the bounds of our Wednesday night runs. I now had friends that I could go to football games with, go day-drinking with, build a Bachelor Brackets with when the Bachelor and Bachelorette were airing on ABC, and who cheered me on no matter what. I had found friends who encouraged me to wake up at 5am during the week and on Saturdays to go run. I still wasn't as fast as the other people in the group (and as things often go, as I got faster, they got faster, too) but they were always willing to wait out in the parking lot or sit around and drink coffee while I caught up. They were the friends who encouraged me to train for my first marathon, and ultimately created the coRUNa Virus Marathon-- a self-supported marathon around Stillwater created when the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon was cancelled due to COVID-19. Because of these friends, and this support, I went out on every run determined to become a better version of myself.
Through all of this I never liked running, but I loved the people I was running with.
As COVID-19 shut the world down opportunities to be outside opened up. With work and school going remote, and people being encouraged to socialize outside, much of my hobbies did not change. I was able to keep running (albeit we met in church parking lots with coolers of beer and soccer chairs so we could social distance instead of air-conditioned bars). I was even able to venture into new outdoor hobbies.
In October 2019, around five months before the start of the pandemic, I had purchased an entry-level Salsa Journeyman from District Bicycles. I didn’t know if I would like cycling, but I figured it could be a new way to make friends. I dipped my toes into the cycling community by going to the Thursday Ladies Ride and the Sunday S.A.F.E. (Sundays Are For Everyone) group rides. At these rides I met two other women who were equally new to cycling and looking to find individuals of similar pace and ability to begin to ride with more regularly. Across the first summer of the pandemic, we rode over 2,000 miles together—taking our relationship from riding partners to true ride-or-die friends (pun intended). We were bonded by our shared love of snacks, stopping to take photos of our bikes, and just riding our bikes to have fun.
As we rode together, we got stronger. Not just in our physical ability, but also mentally. Through our collective experiences, we were able to teach each other tricks and skills we learned to become better cyclists. We became braver in choosing our routes. We became ambitious with our distances. We became (mostly) self-sufficient. Something that I do not think we would have been able to do if we had been working alone.
But, like all good things, my time in Stillwater had came to an end. When I graduated, I had the opportunity to stay in Oklahoma - I even had the opportunity to stay in Stillwater - but I knew that I needed to leave. While running and biking had become my solace, I had some experiences that had done severe damage to me mentally and spiritually. I needed to leave Oklahoma to know that I could. I needed to know that if I ever came back to live in Stillwater, or anywhere in Oklahoma for that matter, I would be doing so because I wanted to, not because I had to. So, after graduating I loaded up my life and moved down to San Antonio, Texas to start a new life. To become a new and better version of myself.
Even though I was afraid to be in a city, the three years of feeling loved and included in a running and cycling community gave me the confidence to try new things and new places without knowing a single person. I excitedly began to search Facebook and Instagram, trying to find groups that would be the best replica of the groups I had been a part of in Stillwater. With the population of San Antonio being 47.4x greater than Stillwater I was definitely not in short supply. So, for the first two months living in San Antonio I spent literally every . single . evening . and . weekend . going out on runs and rides attempting to find my niche.
In my first two months, I went on rides that advertised themselves as "friendly paced" and "no drop" only to be dropped in the middle of nowhere. I went to social rides where women literally turned the other way to block me out of conversations when I was just trying to join their group. I went on runs where afterwards I would ask if I could sit next to someone and they literally said "no."
I was spending so much time and effort trying to be accepted only to leave every event feeling unwelcome and unwanted.
You see, humans are social animals. We thrive in community. If we were still living like our ancestors, many of us probably would probably die without community. As a developmental psychologist, much of the research my colleagues and I are interested in looks at how the body responds to stressors and social rejection. While more salient for female than males, social rejection is a major stressor (Clauss & Byrd-Craven, 2019; Slavich et al., 2010; Stroud et al., 2002). In early hunter-gatherer societies (and many present-day hunter-gatherer societies since they still exist, FYI) if a woman was excluded by her community this would literally be a death sentence for her and her children (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2003). By being excluded she would not have access to the resources needed for survival, making it to where any potential indication that she was being excluded could cause a massive stress response (Fischer et al., 2017). While most of us no-longer live in hunter-gatherer societies where we risk death by being excluded, the human body has yet to fully adapt to all of the changes that have occurred in our society. Therefore, what was salient for our ancestors thousands of years ago is still salient for us today.
My first few months in San Antonio was like being thrown into a real-life case-study of all our past experiments. While I have a stable job and pay-check that ensures my physical needs are being met, by not being able to find community I was my mental and emotional needs were not. Every time I went to a social situation in which I was made to feel like an outsider, my body mounted a similar stress response to the women living in hunter-gatherer societies. And, seeing that our stress responses often facilitate learning, I came to expect that any attempt at social interaction would yield in the same stress and disappointment. Therefore, after two months of failed attempts I stopped putting myself out there as a survival mechanism to preserve the parts of me that were remaining.
But, as any psychologist knows, if you’re looking for a community and have been unsuccessful you will not increase your chances of success by isolating yourself. In addition, repeating the same, failed strategy, hoping for different results, is ludicrous Therefore, a few months, I decided to post on Facebook and Instagram that I was going to ride on a Sunday. If I had been unsuccessful in making friends when I had been going out my way to go people, I would have the people come to me.
The first few rides only had a few people, but over the next few months I made some friends who helped share the rides on their social media and get the word out. By January we had over 25 people showing up for the Sunday ride. Twenty-five people with whom I could hope to form a friendship. Then, with the beginning of the San Antonio Gravel Collective, this group of 25 expanded exponentially as we now had people from Austin and Houston coming to ride with us. On these rides, we have several different groups and several different routes so that everyone can feel included whether they are beginner or advanced—fast or slow. While it is still in its infancy, this is a group that has the opportunity to foster so much community and provide a welcoming environment to those who need it most. As long as I live in San Antonio, I look forward to being a part of that community and trying my best to make sure that everyone feels welcome and wanted—because I never want anyone to ever feel like they are not.
At the beginning of this post I included a passage from Proverbs. Whether you are religious or not, it is probably a proverb you have heard a hundred – if not a thousand – times. As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. We are all human. We are all built for community. While we can survive alone, we thrive together. By building community, we are able to transmit knowledge and assist those in need. We are able to become stronger as we learn better ways of knowing and better ways of living. We become kinder, nicer, more patient people as we expand our communities to make room for everyone, and make sure they all feel included, supported, and valued.
Life is meant to be lived and shared.
I hope you all find your community and you treasure it always.
.jpg)
Comments