Trigger Warning: disordered eating/exercise is mentioned.
Running usually precedes a negative response. Fun run Friday. Ugh. Why. You said how many laps? I’ll run tomorrow, just not today. Did you say a 5k? These are common statements that people may grunt out when thinking about doing this common activity. It’s the sport where all you need is your own body, and so in a way, it tends to be one of the first exercises someone thinks of. You either hate it or you love it. It seems to be something that everyone has tried at least once.
The aversive reactions I mentioned above are missing just one response, and that is the response I had in high school. Only my responses weren’t statements, they were interrogatives that ended in question marks I would one day regret seeking the answer to. They were something like this: how many calories does running a lap burn? How many minutes of running will burn off a piece of cake? How much running per day do I have to run in order to lose ten pounds in a week? These were the things flying through my young thirteen-year-old mind.
The first time I let running into my life, it wasn’t because I enjoyed it or because it was a hobby of mine. It was simply the medium I chose to lose weight. It would soon become my enemy because it would start hurting me more than it would help me. I learned that doing something for an extrinsic motivation rather than an internal one never feels as good. I was seeing the results that I wanted on the outside – on the scale that was slowly going down, up, but mostly down. I was getting what I wanted – but not – at the same time. I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so proud of my weight loss and my hours spent on the treadmill but somehow still upset. I wasn’t happy. The outside was beautiful and perfect and the inside was a negative infinity symbol. The more I kept doing it, the more tired I got. I was sweaty and full of tears as I would try to muster up whatever energy I had left in me to do my runs. I started making myself do it on less food than the previous day, and it got harder and harder.
The short story of what happened is I started to hate running almost as much as it seemed to hate me. I destroyed my relationship with it.
It wasn’t until a couple years after that, when I realized running to burn calories and striving for a perfection that didn’t exist was wrong, that I picked up running again. It felt like the first time I’d ever done it though because it was so much different. The second time I tried running, I was doing it because I had just gotten broken up with and I wanted some release. I used it as a pain reliever instead of a pain inflictor, and this time, on the outside my body was aching a little bit but on the inside I was glowing. I was listening to music and thinking of memories of my ex and it helped me to let them go. I ran and it was like all our memories stayed in me and blew away with the wind at the same time. I kept the memories that made me stronger but got rid of the ones I didn’t need. I felt on top of the world.
After that, I started running to relieve stress and to clear my mind, but not to count calories. It changed everything for me because the one thing that I used to hurt myself, I was now using to recover. The thing itself was never the problem, it was how I was using it. I thought I would hate running forever, but I was wrong. Running to me is like a soulmate that gets pushed away because they find their person at the wrong time. And then, that other person gets through their slump, comes back healthy, and then as soulmates they are inseparable and the root of envy for every single person on the planet. That was what our relationship felt like. It went from toxic to empowering, and I can’t even explain it in words.
After obsessing over controlling what I ate and what I didn’t eat, I replaced it with a different kind of control. And that is the control to decide how I want to run. The control to take something evil and turn it into something good.
I run every single week now, and not once do I look to see how many calories I’ve burned. Because I don’t run for the calories. I run for the feeling.