How To Get (Back) Into Running

alt title: how to confront self-loathing

My feet hit the pavement but all I can hear is the creak and grind of bones. My running shorts — old, last worn three years ago — cut into my sides. There’s a knot under my ribcage and I imagine my shoes wearing down against the pavement.

I used to feel strong doing this, I remind myself. Now, my hair whips around my shoulders and catches in my mouth, too long to be practical. I look down and I hate the way my legs move, awkward and coltish, pale and slow.

The last time I called myself a runner was five years ago. I was 23 and still fit into the clothes I wore in high school. Now my body takes up more space. Back then, at least by the end of it, running didn’t feel like a punishment. I’m trying to channel that feeling right now.

oh hey there! this article is going to talk about my relationship to my body, weight, body image, and running. If that seems like something you don’t want to read right now, skip this one!

How to get back into running when you want to run because you love your body, not because you hate it

I can’t really talk about why I’ve started running again without talking about why I stopped.

It started in high school — years of being an average soccer player, picked on by the middle school mean girls, I met the cross country girls and they were nice to me. I started running with them. Spring came around, and I joined the track team. It was competitive in a personal way, both a team sport and not. Mostly though I liked the social aspect, feeling included.

And, damningly, I was good at it immediately. My head is wired in such a way that shaving off seconds and collapsing across a finish line appealed to me.

I ran my first six minute mile in gym class desperate to beat the boys.

Then it was the seconds. Seconds, seconds, seconds. 6:15, 6:07, six minute mile. Not remarkable, but I was consistent and a part of something.

Once you start watching the seconds drop its not long before you start looking for other numbers to shrink too.

115, 111, 107.

Blacking out on a road run. They call you a skinny kid and you glow with pride, seconds ticking down. 5:58, 5:55, 5:51.

No breakfast, a bagel for lunch. A granola bar before track practice. A 40-mile week. A persistent pain in your knee, we pass around ibuprofen like candy in the girls locker room. A skipped meal and weight kept falling but the mile time did not.

It wasn’t like that, part of me wants to insist. We weren’t like that, that’s just high school.

I think then of the tabloid headlines with photos of celebrities in their thirties with rolls on their stomach while sitting in a swimsuit, headlines about how these women have let themselves go, too young to realize that all stomachs have rolls when you sit naturally. Me at 107 pounds and standing in front of a mirror wondering if I could make my stomach flatter, because I don’t want to end up akin to the subject of shame on the front of the magazine, because it seemed like bodies were something to be ashamed of. They called Bridget Jones fat and I thought to myself is that what undesirable looks like? Thin Barbie dolls and tabloids, I firmly attached my self-worth to my body but not explicitly, no, because watching weight was embarrassing.

Watching your mile time was far more acceptable.

Finding the sweet spot:

High school ended and I ran in between classes in college. Hungover on a Friday afternoon, in the cool summer evenings, in the heat of the day to jump into the lake. I ditched the stopwatch and the 40-mile weeks. In college it was just an easy three miles a few times a week to listen to music, to sweat, anything but studying for pharmacology.

This was my sweat spot. Casual but regular. Active, for fun, with very little pressure. It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t a punishment.

I fell of the wagon after college.

Then I moved to Armenia for a year as a US Peace Corps Volunteer. This was the last year I ran. Until now.

Then twenty-three, I packed up and moved out to the strange red desert. It would cool off every evening just before sunset and I would run almost every night. Men would call after me in Russian — flat face, blond hair, blue eyes, a St. Petersburg girl they thought.

“What are you running from?” Grandmothers would joke while men in their 30s leered.

“A bear,” I would joke back, and they would laugh. The Russian girl is funny.

I would run up and out of the small and colorful downtown of the village up into the apricot groves and red rock mountain foothills and it wasn’t a punishment at all. I lived for those moments all dappled in golden sunlight, long shadows from the twin-peaked volcano slowly reaching across the valley.

Isn’t it beautiful that my body can do this? Isn’t the light in the trees, the dusty purple of the volcano silhouette, the old Silk Road outpost now a church something incredible? This world is so big and beautiful and how lucky am I to get to be in it?

Life in Armenia was colorful — drying fruit by the sun on the porch, English club and soccer games, tutoring a group of girls who wanted to go to American college, the red rocks and the mountains.

It was also the strange man who followed my host sister home once because I was with her, and being propositioned in the street by strangers in the city who mistook me for a Russian prostitute, a small slew of incidents on busses and refusing to be afraid or change a thing about me because damn if I let men stop me from really, really living. I smoked a cigarette in the city for the first time because it was taboo for women. That small act of rebellion once a month was enough to put on heels to teach and wipe away most of of my Americanness for the sake of safety —

A monthly cigarette and those endless sunset runs; so much of my identity was caught up in those two juxtaposed things.

When the pandemic hit, all of the Peace Corps Volunteers were evacuated on a day or two notice.

In a lot of ways I was grateful to be back in the United States, though it felt like I lost a whole life, and I felt guilty for that gratefulness.

But back in the Untied States I stopped running. It just didn’t hit like it used to.

one step at a time

So how do you get back into running when you cannot find the line between running because you love your body and want to care for it and celebrate what it can do, and running because you hate that you’ve sized up jeans and leftover teenage voice loudly notes that your thighs touch now?

How do you get back into running and not let it be a punishment for the dissatisfaction you feel with yourself?

How do you get back into running when once upon a time you did it as an escape and now you have nothing left to run from?

One step at a time.

Today running feels awkward on me. It isn’t fueled by meticulous numbers anymore, and it isn’t my escape to a beautiful place from a life that doesn’t quite fit right.

For the longest time I dreamed of a version of myself that was a morning runner — the type of girl who gets up with the sun and wipes the sleep out of her eyes and runs while everything is still and quiet. I wanted to be the type of girl who runs whens the world is blue and drinks matcha tea instead of coffee and does yoga in the morning after that long run and is thin and willowy and effortlessly tan and four inches taller.

And it’s still hard for me to run and not think of those other things. It’s hard to run for the sake of running and not from a place of dissatisfaction with my life and body and wanting to change.

I wanted to be a morning runner; I am settling for afternoons instead.

I listen to an audiobook. I make a playlist. I buy new clothes to run in and think maybe if I can look put together while I’m doing it — shorts that don’t cut into my skin, sports bras without the permanent sweat stain — I can erase the part of running that is a little bit always about changing what I see in the mirror.

And so I finish my run. It’s never far, just two or three miles with breaks for walking, every other day. I don’t look in the mirror, and I don’t stretch or do yoga, and sometimes I don’t even wear clean clothes, but I am trying to love running for the sake of running itself.

The only way to get back into running is one step at a time.