On Running

I started running. It means a lot to me.

When I talk about running, I immediately cop to newness, to uncertainty. To the fact that despite logging 700 miles last year and paying to enter races and carving out time every Monday and Thursday and Saturday, I still don’t know how sold I am. I never like running when it’s something I have to do. I sometimes like it when I’m doing it. I always like it when I’ve done it.

I started running mostly because I never thought I would. I was never very fast growing up, which I took to mean that I was not very good at running, and I have always been hesitant to do things I am not very good at. But last fall, radicalized by friends who ran the New York City marathon and a TikTok algorithm that detected my general feelings of malaised unfitness, I decided to see if I could change my mind. To test my theory that a “runner’s high” or a “good run” or an “easy 5 miles” were only possible for people who weren’t me.

My best friend and roommate, Lena, already ran a little, usually just a mile and back down our street, and she agreed to start running with me in a vaguely disciplined way. We decided to start running three days a week.

It was November, and so we mostly ran in the dark. We ran segments of the loop in Prospect Park until we could run the whole thing at once. We memorized its bends, the places where ice tended to stick, where the big hill on the east side tricks you into thinking you’re done with it.

We learned to love the cold, the dark, the emptiness of the park in winter. We learned that you can run objectively slowly and still be running too fast. The only running I’d ever done was all out, all at once—out of the rain, to first base, to catch the bus—and I’d never learned how to modulate my speed.

But one night, Lena and I unlocked it. We ran the slowest miles we’ve ever run, but we did not stop. We discovered that it was possible to talk while running. That we could just keep going forever. We floated out of the park and around Grand Army Plaza. We ran what felt like all of Prospect Heights. We experienced what it felt like to have a good run. To love running.

With every run, we discovered the truth of a new cliché. You are stronger than you think. The mind does quit before the body. The only way out is through. We said these things out loud, wrote them down as Strava captions, repeated them as mantras, and went on our weekly runs until two miles became four miles became six became ten. Until our first half marathon last May.

When people ask how the race was, my answer is always the same: awful. I’d imagined it as a capstone to six months of discipline and hard work, a decisive display of fitness and strength. Lena and I ran it together, because we run everything together. We both had a terrible time.

Usually, our partnership is a defense against the mental weakness that threatens to derail every run: if I claim I need to quit, Lena tells me I don’t. If Lena says she want to stop, I tell her we can’t. But somewhere on Ocean Parkway, nine miles into our race—but, crucially, with four miles remaining—during the stretch that everyone on r/RunNYC tells you is flat to downhill but actually feels, somehow, like an incline, we both lost the faith, lost our persuasiveness to ourselves and each other.

And so we walked a little. And when you walk a little, once, on a run, you will always walk more. Usually, that’s enough reason not to give in: if I feel like I want to walk, it means I want to be done, off my feet, and walking will only delay that. But four miles felt like a very long way to go. No matter what, we were still going to be on our feet for a while.

So we might as well walk, we thought. We might actually need to, physiologically speaking. It was 60 degrees, after all. Practically hazardous. We were used to freezing temperatures, to hardly breaking a sweat. If we kept running, we reasoned, we might overheat, keel over, develop heatstroke or rhabdomyolysis or debilitating and permanent muscle cramps. Maybe die, right then and there, on an embarrassing stretch of south Brooklyn asphalt with no spectators, our bodies stepped on and over by peppy runners with glitter on their cheekbones and sticky energy gel packets between their teeth. And that really wouldn’t be good. We should think of our families. All the things we have left to do in our lives. How silly for us to throw it all away for pride, for the reason of not walking. We’d still finish the race. But we really should walk from Avenue X to Avenue Z. It was only responsible.

If running makes you anything, it makes you a liar—for better and for worse.

We walked at water stations; .1 miles here, two blocks there. But we ran the entire last mile: finish strong, or something like that. I’d imagined the end of the race as a breath of fresh air: a triumphant sprint down the Coney Island boardwalk, smiling with my head high, my legs pure muscle, lithe and long, propelling me towards a graceful, impressive finish. I imagined I'd look out at the ocean; I'd go to the beach. I wouldn't need to catch my breath because, somehow, I wouldn't have lost it in the first place. Lena and I would pump our fists in exhilaration, in victory—over previous versions of ourselves and also everyone who’d run slower than we had. But not that our time would matter; we were after a feeling. One of satisfaction, of gratitude. Of understanding how people could possibly keep going for another 13.1 miles.

But this is not the ending we made for ourselves; this was not our finish.

Our final mile was hard and heaving. Our legs were not pure muscle but pure weight. We could not think of smiling because we were too concerned with breathing. We were not satisfied, and we were only grateful because we were done.

I think I still roll my eyes when people say running is more of a mental game than a physical one. It’s not my mind that’s going to throw up, I think, it’s my body. But I also know I agree: thirteen miles is really not so different from ten, and ten is really not so different from six, and six is really not so different from three. It’s all just time. Longer distances pending, I am never actually at risk of collapse; my tenth consecutive 10-minute mile will not kill me.

The best runs silence my endless internal dialogue, my constant self-debate. The worst amplify it. The best runs are effortless, a body hurtling through time and space; they require no persuasion. The worst runs require a commitment to self-coercion: to talking myself into every step, every tenth of a mile, to believing that two miles is actually almost ten, if you think about it right. I never know whether a run will be the best kind or the worst until I’m at least a mile into it.

I recently read Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and I agree with his sentiment that there are some things only runners understand. I think, if you run long distances, there are things I fundamentally know about you. We share something. But I don’t consider myself a serious runner; usually, I don’t even call myself a runner. I just go for runs. I don’t know why I care about the distinction. Being committed to something I’m not good at is uncomfortable, I guess. Mildly embarrassing for no reason.

My mom, who ran track in college but, owing to a degenerative spine condition, has not run in my lifetime, is always asking me if I see myself running forever, running for as many years as I can. I sometimes worry that I’ll forget to go on a run and inadvertently quit, my last run being a loop of Prospect Park that I didn’t realize I’d never run again, the HOKA “stability shoes” my archless feet require gathering dust beneath my bed. Forget about forever, I want to tell her; sometimes, I can hardly see myself running even one more mile. But I do, and then I run three more, or ten. And I hate it, or I don’t.

But in either case, I take off my socks and shoes and wash my hair and clothes and do it all again two days later. I map out a route and I untangle my headphones. I stop for too long at traffic lights; I wave cars on. I pretend to stretch. I sprint down Eastern Parkway; I stop and take photos in the middle of the Manhattan Bridge. Lena and I roll out our calves; we pummel our quads with the mini Theragun she got me for my birthday. And that’s all it is: leaving the house one day, and then deciding to leave it again.

Running is too easy a metaphor: for life, for writing, for relationships, for commitment, for discipline, for being a person with goals and the willpower to achieve them. But I like it best when it’s just itself: feet on pavement, the top of a hill, miles pounded into muscles, a feeling of ecstasy or exhaustion—or both—remembered for just this moment, or forever. A cliché rediscovered, made real: today, I will take it one step at a time. Tomorrow, I will consider the rest.

a Nike ad at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, where runners wait for their ride to the start of the NYC Marathon. photo from @sapdevi on Twitter