I really hate it. I was on my high school’s lacrosse team and I used to come up with ways to avoid the running portion of practice. It was a mile, one measly mile that everyone seemed to fly through with ease and the thought of that distance was just completely unachievable. Some days I could make it around the track once, and I would pat myself on the back for a job well done. And then I would walk. It was humiliating. And it felt like no matter how hard I tried, I never got any better.
Since high school, I’ve had renewed bursts of interest in running. On the days when the weather would be just right I’d lace up my sneakers and pompously exit the house like an Olympian. Seriously, if someone could have gotten a look at my face right before I started running you would think I was going to run the New York City Marathon.
And then, about four or five minutes later, I’d be done. I’d be taking a stroll around my neighborhood, and when I would come home my sneakers would go away for another few months.
Then I developed an anxiety disorder.
In case you haven’t gotten the point, I hate running. I hate feeling like my legs are going to collapse underneath me. I hate the shortness of breath. I hate the way my ponytail slaps against my neck. I hate the too big shadow of myself that follows me on the pavement. I hate the way I can feel the impact of my sneakers sometimes in my shoulders. I hate how heavy and slow I feel. I hate how utterly boring it is. I hate when I don’t see a puddle and I accidentally get mud on my shoes.
I really hate it, and probably what kept me from doing it for so long is what I snuck into the middle of that last paragraph. I hate how heavy and slow I feel. Because that’s how I feel. I know there are people that describe feeling quick and fast. Never will I ever feel like that. I’m a sack of bricks and I feel it every step of the way.
I’ve been running on a semi-regular basis now for months, and every time I see someone afterwards the first words out of my mouth are, “God, I hate running.” Because ITS THE WORST. And then I get these looks like, “Wait, I don’t understand.”
And running and I can be friends because of the fact that I hate it. When I run I focus all of my energy into thinking about how awful it is. And this is the important part: when I run I don’t have the time or energy to focus on anything else, including being anxious.
I don’t have the time to consider impending doom and destruction. I don’t have the time for the black hole in my chest to open up and for the fear to make me shake. I don’t have the time to think about that because instead I’m thinking, I’m never going to make it up this hill, ever, I will be moving at this glacial pace upward until I die.
Those moments when I’m running have become a moment of freedom from my fears, and because of that I love it a little. Hopefully not enough that I can start loving it and stop hating it, because then we’ll be back to square one. But enough that I ran three miles yesterday and seventeen year old me stared in awe.
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