Nourishment: The Foundation of Running and Life

A coming of age story: learning to fuel the dream

Dec 08, 2024

If you follow me on Astrology Journal, you may have seen my most recent post on the current Mars retrograde transit. In that article, I mentioned that an old challenge may be up for us, one we’ll have a chance to wrestle with, if need be, and then resolve as Mars appears to make its way backwards through the sky.

One date, in particular, relevant to that cycle stood out for me. It was October 24th. While Mars wasn’t retrograde at that time, it was in its sensitive preparation phase. Around that time, I overdid my training and set myself back. My first post about it was on October 20th. By the end of the month, it was clear it was going to take a while to recover from that effort.

Symbolically, October 24th corresponded to a potential introduction to a challenge that would be up for us during Mars’ retrograde transit. During different stages of Mars’ apparent retrograde cycle, if a challenge arose for us, we may find ourselves revisiting it throughout the cycle.

As we approached December 6th, the date on which Mars appeared to stop and then begin moving backwards through the sky, I began to track my calories. I have never done that because weight has never really been an issue for me in the usual way. For me, generally, it has been harder to maintain weight than to lose it; so, for the most part, limiting how much I eat wasn’t a concern.

One of the manifestations of chronic illness is that I have developed a lot of food sensitivities. That, combined with the challenge my body has had in digesting food from an energy standpoint and current financial constraints has made it challenging to get in the calories I need. As I have been recording what I eat over these last few days, I have been shocked to find that, on a good day, I take in just under 1,500 calories. Often, I take in fewer, sometimes less than 1,000.

Nourishing myself has been an issue ever since I graduated from college. I didn’t grow up cooking and, furious at the expectation that I become a mother and housewife, I quietly refused to learn. That rebellion, while reasonable given the reality I grew up in, was not reasonable given my body’s needs and the charge we all must take regarding our bodies to tend to those needs.

As I have walked with this illness over the past 25 years, I have come to trace its roots to my poor nutritional habits when I was younger. Those roots trace back to my childhood. I grew up eating a lot of sugar and transfats.

For decades, I walked with the belief that I was fortunate to have eaten a healthy diet growing up. Sometime during the second decade of illness, I started to realize it wasn’t so great. It took that long because, during the first decade, I was having to contend with the mighty resistance I’d built up against caring for my body.

While I have not yet taken up cooking, today, I do eat healthy, meaning I eat almost exclusively whole foods. The one regular exception is unsweetened non-dairy yogurt, usually almond but sometimes oat or cashew. It has been a calorie lifesaver, but, in the last few months, my body has been rebelling. I have been relying too heavily on it at the expense of nutritional variety.

Last month, I began to experiment with diversifying my diet by increasing my food intake. I hadn’t started tracking my calories but I could tell from my body’s signals that I would need to take in more if I was going to progress in training. Tracking calories was the next evolution of my attempts to resolve this lifelong issue.

When I decided to try diversifying my diet, the strategy I chose was to eat more frequently. That did help me get in more calories. But, both my body and mind were having a hard time adapting. On the body side, my digestive and energy systems were struggling to keep up. On the being side, I began to feel chained to food. It seemed like every time I turned around, I needed to eat again. Life came to feel like a constant vigil for the next meal.

Since that experiment, I’ve been in a lull, contemplating what the next experiment might be. It has been during this lull that the inspiration to track my calories arose. I think that’s an important step. It will give my being the data it needs to understand that this issue is real. This awareness, in turn, will translate into more experiments until the solution that works for me for this stretch in my life is found.

I suspect I will be working with this issue throughout the Mars retrograde cycle, a cycle that I see as being about coming of age, as I wrote about in my article on Astrology Journal. As I see it, coming of age is an experience that arises in the context of a developmental growth spurt. This developmental spurt brings with it a challenge we must meet. Our task is to meet that challenge. Ideally, we do so within a supportive context.

In meeting the challenge, we step into greater independence and autonomy within ourselves and in the world and naturally begin assuming more responsibility for ourselves, our wants, and our needs. Thus, as I see it, coming-of-age moments are a natural part of the human developmental design to grow towards greater and greater independence and self-responsibility.

For myself, I feel like this crisis around feeding myself is the coming-of-age moment that is up. In meeting this challenge, I will enter into a new phase of independence, self-responsibility, and dream possibility. Whether I nail this challenge during Mars’ retrograde cycle or sometime after isn’t relevant. What matters is that I have reached this outer gate, one that I did not reach earlier in my life because of my inner resistance. That, already, is a huge developmental advancement. Realization is only a matter of time.

If we consider Mars’ retrograde period, it began on December 6th and will continue until February 23rd. But it is only one part of a larger cycle. The larger cycle includes an opening preparation period and a closing integration period. This larger cycle began on October 6th and will continue until May 2nd.

Based on my experience, the point Mars reached on October 24th during the preparation phase may symbolize a growth challenge that arises for us, one we are meant to meet and resolve before going further. We might think of it as the code we have to crack to open the developmental gate that arises within and before us.

On January 15th, during its retrograde period, Mars will return to and pass over the point it reached on October 24th, this time with the sun spotlighting it. On April 8th, moving forward again, it will do the same one last time. I am curious to see what comes clear around that first date and what I might (or what might) resolve around that second date.

In the meantime, I keep experimenting.

Addendum

Below, I have included the updated version of the Running Body model I shared in last week's post. In this updated version, I have included the internal body and mind systems relevant to running, such as the digestive system and mental-emotional systems, to make it a more complete model. In this model, how we feed ourselves is as important as how we train ourselves. The reason? Because how we feed ourselves determines how far we can go with our dreams, including dreams we might have around running and training, and life more generally.