I'ma keep running

A winner don't quit on themselves

My son helping me pick up my bib at the Brooklyn Half Marathon in 2014.

You lace up your running shoes and wonder if today is the day that your body will tell you it’s your last run. You pray it’s not. You’ve been benched for most of the summer due to injury and have just started slowly ramping back up over the last 5-6 weeks. It’s taken your body longer to recover this time than previous returns-to-running – not a good sign.

Today is the day you’re supposed to run at your pre-injury regular distance. If it goes well, you’ll be back to this distance every other day, at least until your next injury. You wish you could be a runner who runs every day, but your body simply won’t let that happen. After 35+ years of running, the injuries come more frequently now, and take longer to push through. 

You set out and everything feels okay. You slip into the zone, thinking about the debate last night and glorying in Kamala’s performance with each thud of your foot on the pavement. You remember how you went for a run on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, after you’d brought your almost-4-year-old son to watch you cast your ballot for who you were sure would be the first female president. You remember how jubilant you felt on that run, excited to watch the election returns that night and to tell your son when he woke up the next morning that history had been made.

You keep going. Your body is holding up, and you’re grateful. You’re grateful for running – it has been a constant in your life since you can remember. You went for your first run ever in grade school with your dad, who was a runner back then. You loved it. You did track in junior high and then started running regularly on your own, on the rural Illinois country roads snaking through tall corn in the late summer and bleakly flat and fallow in the winter. In college and your 20s, running was the best hangover cure. Sometimes you’d even smoke a cigarette (or two) right after your run because you just felt so goddamn invincible. That’s how running makes you feel – invincible. 

You love everything about running. You’re a bit vain, of course, so you like the way your legs look and feel when you’re running regularly – long, taut, lithe, strong. You like that running happens outside and you get to sink into your surroundings and the seasons (except in high summer, which you despise). You like the solitary nature of it; you NEED the solitary nature of it. You’ve dated other runners and have always had to politely explain that no, you do not want to go running together, because running is your time. You can’t fathom joining a running club. You run so you can chase away your anxiety, so you can get lost in your own thoughts, so you can compose those cathartic emails in your head to an ex or a difficult boss that you’ll never send, so you can just be alone. 

In your mid-30s, you got really into running. You geeked out on all the running gear and gels and form tutorials. You were a running machine. You structured your life around running. Then you tore your glute muscle, and on the day you were supposed to get a steroid shot for it, you took a pregnancy test that was positive. You were elated – running didn’t matter at that moment. You carried and birthed an almost 10-pound baby, and your body has never quite been the same. But you ran again eventually. 

At this point, you’ve been running for so long that you don’t need to go to a doctor or physical therapist when you get injured. You’ve been through multiple stretches of PT, you’ve been through and recovered from shin splints, a torn glute, hip bursitis, runner’s knee. Like most runners, you know your running body well enough to self-diagnose, and you know which exercises you need to do to rebuild and recover.

You sometimes wish you had more of a natural runner’s body. You wonder whether if you were more masculine, lean, straight, you’d get injured less often or be faster. But you got curves, baby. So you just keep bouncing along.  

You live for the runner’s high, that feeling of elation and euphoria that makes you feel hopeful and, there it is again, this word, invincible. It doesn’t happen on every run, but when it does, it makes every blister and every tough finish worth it. You feel like you can do anything. You’re not a natural optimist (not in a Pollyanna way, at least), nor are you a natural pessimist. Rather, you like to think you’re resilient, with gritty, earned hope. And those runner’s high moments are when you’re really feeling your resilient self. You downright fucking inspire yourself, you get lost in yourself yet you’re outside of yourself. This feeling fades pretty much after the run ends or at least after you shower, but you’ll keep chasing it. You think there can’t possibly be a drug that feels like that, but man, if there were… Actually, there probably is a drug that feels like that but you’ve always been a bit of a scaredy-cat, goody-goody about drugs other than alcohol and weed, so you’ll just stick with the running. 

You know you will keep running for the rest of your life until a medical professional tells you that you must stop. You see women in the park in their 70s running – they are slow but they are out there, doing it – and you will do anything if you can be lucky and privileged enough to be one of those women. You will do all the therapies and have any surgeries or joint replacements that you have to if it means you can keep running. 

You’re still thinking about Kamala and the debate. Your run is almost over, and it looks like your knee is holding up and you’re back in action, for now at least. But it’s been a relatively joyless run. Since you started running again a few weeks ago, it’s all been pretty mechanical. You haven’t had that feeling. You’re running again, but it feels like going through the motions. You’ll take it though. Maybe your brain is moving as slowly as your body these days and just needs more time to get back to running state.

The song “Shake It Out” by Florence + The Machine comes up on your playlist that you aspirationally titled “marathon” several years ago when you started to train for the NYC marathon but were sidelined by chronic injuries. You remember that this was the song pumping through your headphones when you crossed the finish line of your first half-marathon 10 years ago in 2014. You remember how triumphant you felt that day. You’d trained for months, driven by the trauma and rage of a sudden divorce and by a primal desire to make your body your own again after birthing and nursing another human. And you did it. When you crossed the finish line that day, you felt like you could do anything. Like, literally anything. Nothing could stop you. What a feeling. Now you don’t have any long-race goals; you just want to be able to keep running at all, no matter how slowly and no matter the distance.

You start thinking about the last 10 years and what a slog it has been in some ways. But there’s also been so much beauty and joy. Seeing your baby become a toddler become a kid become a middle schooler. Falling in love. Finding some of your chosen family. Damn, you are lucky. 

The song and these thoughts start to work their magic on you, and before you know it, you’re ugly crying while you pant and sweat your way through the park. Florence is reminding you that it’s always darkest before the dawn. You are overtaken. Catharsis. And then. And then. And then you hit the transitional 3-minute mark of the song. You stop crying and break out into a grin. You start sprinting, as fast as you can, amazed at yourself and your creaky, injured body’s ability to bounce back and keep going. You feel it all. You see it all. You are beyond grateful that you’re able to recapture that hopeful, euphoric feeling that makes you feel like you can accomplish anything. You think that if you can do it, maybe your country can too. 

This is why you run.

This is why I run.