I am reluctant to write the sentence, “I started running” because I feel like that may give the wrong impression. Like, you might think that means I put on tennis shoes and started running, just like that, just like someone who was capable of moving their body with some intentional forward momentum without dying, which is not at all the way it was.
I love reading books by runners, and typically these books involve those runners ACTUALLY BEING ABLE TO RUN when they start off. Maybe not fast, maybe not far, maybe that first 5-miler since high school sucks a little, but they can for sure run.
This was not in any way true for me.
When my friend Lori lovingly suggested running as an answer to my life incinerating in a psychic mushroom cloud, she probably thought this was something I could realistically do. I was staying in the basement of her house while going through a soul-crushing divorce, and she was worried about me, and this was her helpful suggestion. She thought running would help alleviate stress.
But my first night of “Couch to 5k,” during which I ran a total of 4 minutes split up over 20 minutes, might as well have been a 100-mile ultramarathon up Kilimanjaro for how achievable it felt. Apart from giving birth to my two kids, those 4 minutes were among the most physically challenging of my life. I gasped, and I choked, and I cried, and felt like I was going to throw up; my heart raced, my vision blurred, and I felt nearly completely certain I was having a heart attack.
I’ve run 2 full marathons and 8 half marathons at this point, and I’m training for an ultramarathon. But I can still remember the impossible difficulty of those 4 minutes, those horrible 4 minutes divided by significant walking segments – and also how that difficulty was part of what sparked the germ of a realization: that running would be something I would be doing for a long, long time.
I tell everyone I started running at the age of 36, that this horrible 4 minutes of running was my initial effort. This is not, strictly speaking, true.
When I was 16 and in high school I was desperately obsessed with a long-haired boy who played the guitar, because it is important for every girl at some point in time to fulfill a host of cliches. Chris was everything my parents hated: long-haired, grungy, a Bob Dylan fan, and not even a little bit Mormon, which made him absolutely irresistible to me.
Chris and I started dating when I was in recovery for an eating disorder and dangerously thin. When I began putting on enough weight that my bones no longer stuck out of my skin like crooked tent poles, Chris was nonplussed.
“I can love you for who you ARE,” he said, “but I can only be attracted to you for what you LOOK LIKE.”
Running, he declared, was the answer to my fleshier form. He would take me running, and then I would develop the long, elegant shanks of a gazelle and a belly as concave as a scooped-out cantaloupe rind, and he would once again find me attractive.
I laced up my cheap tennis shoes and did my best attempt at a runner’s stretch beside him on the high school track. He effortlessly stretched one lengthy, leanly muscled quadricep and tossed his ponytail over his shoulder.
“You ready?” he said, and before I answered, began to lope forward in long, easy strides.
He was 4 or 5 inches taller than I was but that really wasn’t the problem, I realized instantly, or at least it wasn’t the main problem. The problem wasn’t even that his legs were roughly half of his anatomy and I have short, stubby nubs of legs. The problem was that running was the WORST THING EVER AND I COULD NOT DO IT.
I think I managed two, maybe three minutes of abortive lurching, a cross between a slow zombie and a camel giving birth, until I staggered to a halt, clutching my side. “It’s a cramp,” I called out in explanation.
“What, like an abdominal cramp?” he said, pulling up beside me, not even winded. “Those can be hard. Where is it?”
I showed him.
His mouth curved downward in disgust. “That’s not an abdominal cramp, that’s a lung cramp, and everyone gets them. You just run through them.”
I could feel tears at the corners of my eyes. “I can’t,” I said. “It hurts too much.”
“It’s just a lung cramp,” he said. “Don’t be a baby.”
But it turned out I was a baby, and could not run through it.
Our relationship did not outlast this by a significant margin. He didn’t say that he was breaking up with me because he thought I was too fat, but I knew that was it. He’d been showing more than platonic interest in one of our mutual friends, who had run on the cross country team in high school, and there was no doubt her legs were better than mine and there it was, really.
After that I made the declaration to myself that I was done with running. I would not do it.
Twenty years passed, during which I finished college, got married, had two children, held several rather underwhelming jobs, put on 50 pounds, and watched my marriage collapse. I sometimes exercised, by which I mean I put on workout DVDs or went for walks, but this in no way meant that I was fit. Or even capable of running for my life. I dreamed of one day having a toned, muscular body, or at least about looking presentable in a pair of jeans and being able to climb stairs without being winded, but I was not 100% sure how one would accomplish these goals.
Crisis dismantles you. When you lose a foundation on which you’ve constructed your identity, like a 14-year marriage, it feels like walking across a bridge that begins to crumble under your feet, or like taking a deep breath only to discover you’re underwater. You know that everything has changed, but you don’t know what it means. Crisis of all sorts does this: losing a job, a lifestyle, a support system, a relationship. Suddenly, it’s like you’re naked in the dark. You aren’t sure where you are, and you aren’t sure WHO you are. Your illusions aren’t strong enough to sustain you, if they ever were.
And it was in the middle of this crisis that I started running again, for the first time.
At the end of that first, brutal, impossible run, at age 36 and 50 pounds overweight – that 20 minutes with only 4 minutes of running that had nonetheless seemed like an elite athletic event – I felt my mind clear. I felt like I had conquered something very significant. I felt like I had achieved something. I felt like my life might hold something besides unmitigated disaster, maybe, at some point in the future.
I felt like maybe I could do more, next time.
I called my little sister, Emily, who was living in Florida with her husband. Emily is, by a substantial margin, the most athletic member of our family, a chemistry professor, and an all-round good human being. She makes far better choices than I do so I like to run things by her. I told her what I had just done.
“I’ll tell you what we should do,” she said. “You’ll be close to completing ‘Couch to 5k’ by Thanksgiving. Come to Florida for the holiday, and we’ll do a Thanksgiving 5k together.”
It was September. November was 12 million or so years away. Surely I would be basically sprinting 7-15 miles with ease by then and could easily handle a 5k, which was only 3.1 miles, after all. I agreed.
If you have ever, at any stage of your life, ever, been athletic, I promise that you cannot imagine what the next 9 or so weeks were like for me. Running. Was. Torture. Although the training program kept walking intervals throughout, the running segments got longer and longer and they never, not once, got easier for me. Sure, my legs hurt, but breathing was the hardest part. I could not for the life of me figure out how to catch my breath. Who knew that bodies were so in the way? Who could have guessed that lugging them around on a run was like trying to drag a gorilla with cement-encased feet?
But I am very bad at saying that I can’t do something (a state of affairs that has led to more than one disaster in my life), so I was damned if I was going to tell Emily that I couldn’t run a 5k. Also, even though my runs were horrible, every time I finished one I felt a little better about myself.
November in Florida was sunny, but also blessedly cool. All four of my sisters, as well as my dad, had signed up for the 5k. My sister Elizabeth had been stationed on an aircraft carrier training with the Dutch frogmen, so she was going to kick everyone else’s ass. Melissa and Amy, the two youngest, were planning on walking the whole thing.
Emily was 6 months pregnant. “I’ll stay with you,” she promised me.
We started at the back, and the back was where we stayed. I put everything I had into that 5k, and then “ran” it at the speed of a glacier shifting. As promised, Emily stayed with me, and in spite of being 6 months pregnant she wasn’t even slightly winded by the pace I set. Elizabeth crossed the finish line and then sprinted back and made me homicidal by trying to hype me into speeding up, which was just not going to happen.
I finished that 5k in over 43 minutes.
Most people would have walked it faster.
I was slow. I was not a beautiful runner. The gazelle legs had never happened. I was lumbering and ungainly and there had been nothing skillful about what I just did.
I was still homeless; I was still divorcing, underemployed, and the mother of two kids who felt wretched and unsettled. I was poor as shit and I had no idea who I was.
But I was starting to get an idea of who I could be. Maybe, just maybe, I was a person who could do hard things.
Like running.
You are amazing!