Running: A Love Story (stolen from a book by the same name)

I hadn't run in about a week; with work and travel and then the rules that tell us we won't be safe outside the walls of the hotel. With the heat and pollution and ruts in the road, I wouldn't get far anyways. The high is supposed to be 108 today and at 9 am temperatures were climbing far into the 90s.

But I made it downstairs to the single treadmill. I hate running on treadmills. Most runners do. We enjoy the space of the outdoors, the silence of the sky above, opening up for a sprint and feeling like our minds open with our speed. I've always enjoyed learning about new places through my runs, seeing roads and trails I never would have seen - little glimpses inside people's homes as they awake for coffee, sometimes, what they've planted in their gardens, the different shades of greens in the trees. These are things you don't see from inside a vehicle.

But today in Ouagadougou the single treadmill in the basement called out to me. I hopped on and started running. All the pressure inside my head defused. The sweat washed out the stress inside me. The a/c barely churned, so the sweat was profuse - just what I needed to make it through the day.

I've struggled with depression since I was a teenager, and big changes in my life over the past two or so years - my mother's death, divorce, new relationships, relocating - have made the depression -flanked with whole hours and sometimes days and nights filled with anxiety  - so much worse.

In all my writing, I've rarely ever admitted to this thing called "depression." It seems so silly and superficial when you are traveling in an effort to fix some of the world's problems, and these problems are huge: poverty, gender-based violence, hunger, thirst.

I talked to a woman in Yemen who  had 11 children, one dying after the other from conditions of poverty. Despite these circumstances, she kept getting pregnant again and again, nevertheless, because she didn't have any money to purchase contraception and even if she did, pharmacies with condoms and pills don't exist where she lives, and who knows if her husband would have even allowed them to use either. The woman said she was around my age at the time - barely more than 30 -- although she didn't know her exact age, She looked more like 55.

I've seen men, grown men, scramble in the sand for Cheerios I had dropped because they were so hungry. I've seen people digging meters and meters in to the hard, dry earth just to find water. I've written about little girls who were married off at the age of 8. I've seen people drinking water that looks like mud.

So, depression: what do I really have to be depressed about besides this never-ending string of global strife? I'll never really know - maybe it is just a genetic chemical imbalance passed down through my mother or maybe I am just too fortunate - a fortunate one - where even the slightest graying of the sky can turn my mood down.

All that I know is that running is my greatest love, my only antidote, no matter where in the problematic world I've landed.