It's Not About Running

But it's sort of about running

Preamble

What is happening in America right now is incredibly overwhelming /horrifying /disappointing /choose your descriptor

So I moved to Canada, and I run a lot.

That’s pretty much all I can handle doing at the moment. I’m not going to write about the state of things — because I literally don’t know how.

So I’m going to write about running. Because running is one tiny little thing that is under my control and makes me feel stong. And we need to be strong.

In 1998, I was in a TV movie in which a technologically advanced house was trying to kill my family and me.

(It was called Dream House. I highly recommend you don’t watch it.)

In one scene, my character was running on a wooded trail, like, for exercise. Not only was my running style awkward, but it always seemed like I was running AWAY from something. It was an action so seemingly painful that I must do it only under duress. Which was not the point of the scene.

During rehearsals, the director said, “Umm, so, are you going to run like that…on the day?” Translation: when we are actually filming — filming something that an audience will watch — must you still run so oddly?

They cut the running scene down to about three seconds.

Thankfully, my running wasn’t the worst thing about that show. In various scenes, a dishwasher attacked me with a knife, and a shower attempted to drown me.

This is me being almost drowned by a killer shower. The internet got all worked up because there was a flash of boob when my character busts through the shower door. They were right. There was boob. But it was stunt double boob.

All that to say, between the murderous appliances and my unique running style, the show's believability was questionable, causing Rotten Tomatoes to give us a rating of 17% — which I feel was overly generous.

So this indelible fact was cemented in the late 90s: I can’t run.

Even so, I’ve always liked the idea of running. I watch Sprint on Netflix. I frequently volunteer at running events, handing out bananas and tiny cups of water. I cheer on my runner friends, and I cry watching people hold up motivational signs in support of total strangers, who are doing a very hard thing. But I was only ever on the sidelines.

About six months ago, something shifted when we sold our house, and I no longer had a home gym. I started going to a real gym and got interested in that shiny treadmill. I had listened to a podcast that told me that interval running (like short bursts of 10-second running) was beneficial for perimenopausal women. Cool. Even I could run for 10 seconds. Right? And maybe with practice, I could learn how to run in a way that didn’t look like fleeing?

So that was how it started, and over the last six months, running has evolved into an immersive mental framework for my life. Coach Bennett of Nike Run Club, the app that keeps me company on many of my runs, has a brilliant philosophy: “This is about running, and it’s not about running.”

Here are some of my learnings that expand to many other areas of my life:

Yoga teacher stretches before her first 5k.

Forward is a pace

For a while, I felt I wasn’t a real runner because I don’t run fast. Or far. And I often take walking breaks.

I made all these excuses to diminish my efforts because I didn’t think I measured up to some ever-shifting prerequisite that someone, somewhere, had set. (And honestly, I like being a slow runner. I like slow. I try to slow down in many different areas of my life.)

I have a pattern of imposter syndrome: I once felt I couldn’t call myself a writer because there was some unspoken target I had yet to hit with my writing. I eventually got over myself and realized that people who spend time writing are called writers. We all get to define ourselves.

I am a writer. And a runner. Because I write. And I run.

Rest days are sacred

Rest is essential for injury prevention. Usain Bolt has said, “I need to rest and recover for the training I do to be absorbed by my body.” He gets it.

Culturally, many of us have been told that rest is lazy. That’s wrong. Rest isn’t a luxury; it’s a strategy. In yoga, Abhyasa & Vairagya (effort and surrender) are the “two wings of the yogi.” They are considered essential; if you go too far in either direction, you lose your balance.

This endless hustle culture just feels like it’s all about coercing us to work harder to make more money so we can buy the things they’re trying to sell us, so we can feel entertained by that dopamine hit and don’t notice the dumpster fire burning around us. (At least that’s how it feels to me.)

I’m gonna opt out and rest up.

A little + frequently = a lot

Sometimes I lack the time or energy to do what I have ridiculously termed “a real run.” That means thirty minutes or more. That’s silly. If I run for ten minutes, that’s ten minutes of running! It’s easy to default to thinking that if I can’t do something at 110%, it’s not worth it. An all-or-nothing attitude prevents us from creating sustainable habits and reaching our goals.

I run when I’m tired, when I am sad, when I think that the director was right, and I look ridiculous when I run. The best thing about consistency is that it consistently makes me better. But sometimes that means I need to do just a little bit of it, because as you might have noticed, looking around at * waving arms * all this — life is complicated.

Celebrate all of the things

Coach Bennett of the Nike Run Club App is so cheerful, I swear he has done more for my sense of self-worth than years of therapy. His guided runs remind us to celebrate everything.

Did you put your running shoes on? Celebrate. Click play on a guided run? Celebrate. Get halfway through? Celebrate. Manage to feel proud that you didn’t quit while you struggled on that third mile? Celebrate the shit out of that.

When we own our accomplishments, we get a break from looking for the next problem to tackle. Constantly striving for the next thing is a great way to feel perpetually dissatisfied. Let’s have some damn fun already.

Resilience comes from breathing through discomfort

Discomfort is different from pain, and that’s the first part to learn. But after that, we learn to tolerate the ick that often shows up on that first mile. The sluggishness, the weird hip thing, the nagging desire to go home and curl up on the couch.

All that whining is very loud in that first mile. But in my experience, once I shake out that beginning part, once I quiet the noise and deepen the breath, the rest of the run gets better. Not just better. It usually gets awesome.

And then I notice that when I run, for the briefest little tiny moment, I’m flying.

Jus fuckin give ’er, bud. (Canadian slang for: Don’t overcomplicate it)

So many things can keep me from running. I go down Reddit rabbit holes about foot strike, heart rate zones, fueling, compression socks, tracking apps, stability shoes, and it consumes my attention and makes me think that if I don’t have the ideal everything — I’ll somehow do it all wrong.

Unsurprisingly, this shows up in many other areas of my life. I get in my head a lot. I overthink. But I try to remember that perfect is the enemy of the good. At its core, running is incredibly simple.

We were literally born to do this.

Moral superiority is motivating (Gross, but true.)

It was 49°F and pouring rain the other day here in the Pacific Northwest. And yet, I still laced up and went out for a run. I ran along a well-populated path, and as I passed other runners, there was a look we gave each other.

It was this broad smile, like you’d see on a kid who was currently splashing in a puddle. It often came with a head nod; sometimes a hand gesture like a wave/peace sign combination. But the message was clear:

YOU ARE A FUCKING BADASS AND SO AM I. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE NOT BRAVE ENOUGH TO DO THIS HARD THING?

There are so few opportunities (in my life, anyway) to feel great about what we are doing in that exact moment. Feeling proud of myself is a fleeting, complex emotion that often gets steamrolled by other things. So when I can feel awesome about doing something, I cling to that as long as I can.

“Joy is a moral obligation.” - André Gide

The joy I get from watching seaplanes land is enormous. I am so very lucky to see this kind of thing during my run.

Running takes me to places I don’t get to explore otherwise, and I feel more connected to nature than I have in a long time. Even when I’m not running in a place this gorgeous, I still appreciate the reality of the world around me. That is a pure kind of joy that I want to nurture, especially right now. (And in case you are, like me, wondering what place joy has in a world like this — Dan Harris did a good job with that question.)

Whether you find your joy in running or reading or dogs or grilled cheese sandwiches, I hope you are actively searching out chances to see what is beautiful in our world. As our friend Rumi says:

“If everything around seems dark, look again, you might be the light.”

Thank you for being here, friends. Comments are open if you want to say hi.

Much love,

~Lisa