Why I Keep Quitting Running

I promise this is also about writing

Hi friends,

Yeah yeah holiday food, yeah yeah diet culture, yeah yeah self-care and self-improvement. I’m not talking about any of that here. I’m talking about running, which has not always been divorced from body image and weight for me, but for now, it is. Consider this your non-disclaimer. There’s no mention of weight loss here.

So, I have long hated running, until I didn’t. Walked every Presidential Fitness Test mile ever forced upon me, struggled to run more than that distance until I joined the crew team in college. I joined the crew team in college because I didn’t live in the dorms freshman year and my apartment-complex provided roommate joined and, well, I just did it. And then I rowed for 4 years. There’s a possibility I’ve always been a secret jock, but just a lazy one. At crew practice, we ran a mile and a half every day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year. That’s very roughly almost 1000 miles over my college career. And every one of them was pulling teeth to me.

Then, sometime after college, maybe even ten years later, I started running again. In Brooklyn. I think I did the Couch to 5k program, or maybe just winged, and it started to feel good. One year, I ran from Park Slope to Greenpoint, but took the train back. It was like 6 miles. I’d never run that far before. I remember listening to Serial the whole way, forgetting that my legs were tired, that I was breathing heavily. It felt good to move my body. It felt good to have run all those miles.

I stopped and started running a few more times before I ran a half marathon last in October, 2019. Every time I would start and stop, it would follow the same trajectory: overly ambitious running schedule, too focused on what I should be running, how fast I should be going, the purchase of gear I didn’t need, thinking it would make up for my shortfalls. All of that was wrong. I am a slow runner. It took me until I was over 40 to figure that out.

I signed up for that half marathon mostly on a whim because my friends were doing it, and I had always vaguely wanted to do something big like that. I don’t, however, like running with people—I get too anxious that they’re thinking gah she’s slow and it ruins it for me—so I missed out on some of the friends part of signing up for it. That’s ok. I have a young kid, so alone time is no hardship for me. I trained and put in the work and bought some gear, but only what I needed, and in the end, I finished the half with splits averaging several minutes faster than my training runs. I ran the whole thing, alone, and didn’t walk once, even though I’d given myself permission to do so at anytime. It felt wonderful.

Since then, over year later, I have run like 5 times, barely more than 2 miles at a time. I just…didn’t want to. The pandemic made it hard to A: leave the house and B: leave my family for long stretches while we tried to balance work and childcare and self-care. We did what we had to do to get by. I felt guilty about it, like I’d wasted all that time training for the half, but also knew that was bullshit thinking.

And then, a few weeks ago, I got the bug to run again. And this time, it felt different. This time I felt like I knew how it was going to go. I would do Couch to 5K again because those intervals really work for me and I know I can do it and it makes getting back up to speed not suck so much. I have gear that works for me and makes running more comfortable. I am not worried about my speed or time because it absolutely doesn’t matter. No one is watching me. No one cares. No one is judging me. I have done this before and I can do it again and I know my own pitfalls and the general pitfalls and I have survived them all before. I’m going to go running again this afternoon, if my inbox doesn’t explode. And it’s going to be great. I’m actually excited to do it, which college-Kate would never, ever believe.

What does this have to do with writing? Everything. I do writing this same way—make grand plans and then watch them collapse. Get mad at myself for not meeting arbitrary goals. Buy too much stuff that doesn’t actually help me (coughScrivnercough). Give up for a while and then get excited to start again when I’m ready. My writing and running cycles are eerily similar.

I am dragging my feet on my current writing project. I don’t know if I like it yet and it’s not particularly fun to write and I’m just not sure about it over all. I want to bail on it, and I absolutely can, just like I absolutely could walk anytime on that half marathon. But I also know, now, after 20 some odd years of writing, that I just need to keep going, that even a slow pace still gets you to the finish line, that trying to optimize anything is wasted energy. But also, these are the truths for me, because I’ve been here before, because I’ve seen this play out, and recognizing those patterns is half the battle of a writing, or running, career. You have to figure out what works and doesn’t work for YOU, and go from there. What everyone else is doing doesn’t matter.

Any morning I wake up and put some words on the page or do some thinking about the work is good. Any day I get out and move my body is good. I don’t have to be good all the time, but being good more often than not makes me feel better overall. It’s slow and stead wins the race, for me with writing or running. It’s nothing more complicated than that.

Wear a mask, loves.

XOXOX,

Kate