This blog is both about running, and not about running.
I am the world’s slowest runner. I run badly, I run ugly, and I will never win a race unless I live to be 105 and win a 100 meter footrace simply because I am the only competitor in my age group. I am overweight, though less overweight than when I started this journey. I have asthma. My legs are short. I have spider veins. Also, I’m not exactly young and I wasn’t exactly young when I started running, although “running” is a ridiculously optimistic label to give whatever it was that I was doing back then.
I run because life is running. Running is challenging and exhilarating, boring and endlessly fascinating, painful, tedious, cloying – and magnificent. It disappoints you, breaks your heart, and brings you places you could not have imagined. Running is hard and it is painful and it makes you face the things about you that you would rather not face and love the things about you that you would rather not love. It makes you confront your weaknesses and fears and it comforts you when you feel like everything is collapsing. It is brutal and kind and vicious and raw and gorgeous.
I believe running is why I got my Master’s in Business Administration as a single mom, and how I survived homelessness, and how it has helped me in my never-ending quest to become a badass.
It has also brought me face-to-face with loneliness, despair, and hopelessness.
Life is running. Running is life.
And whether you’re trying to figure out if you can make yourself run a half marathon or write that novel or risk everything for love or leave that bad relationship, the underlying philosophy, I believe, is the same: it’s better to go big than to risk your life shrinking away. It is better to move slowly than to not move at all.