Nobody plans on falling in love, let alone with a sport as painful as running, but I did. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but since I first stepped off the treadmill, I was hooked. However, I didn’t wake up planning to run; in fact, I fought actively against the idea for months. Why did I start running? I don’t want to sound clichéd, but this love story begins with a breakup.
Nothing Hurts Like Love
It happened at the end of August. My girlfriend and I had just come back from a family holiday, and things were going well. I’d started saving for a house deposit and began thinking about our future more seriously. It turns out she had a different vision for the future, one that didn’t involve me.
Our relationship had started in the shadow of the pandemic. So, after years in lockdown and moving out of London, my old life had drifted away. My old drinking buddies had all moved on with their lives. They’d traded Friday nights at the pub for nappies and Saturday night TV.
Amidst the emotional turmoil, I texted Will, my best friend and the only one without children. The problem was that he was somewhere in southern Africa. Yet, he was there to hear my woes, like he had been a hundred times before. But this time around, he had different advice.
“You should go for a run,” he said. He was a month into his new hobby and feeling great.
I told him to fuck off.
Start Running with An October Challenge? No
Will wasn’t the only person trying to get me to run. A few months on, two colleagues invited me to join a running challenge. It was a competition to see who could clock the most miles in a month. One was trying to get fit again, the other was trying to lose weight. Maybe they thought I needed something to focus on. Maybe, they thought I was letting myself go.
They weren’t wrong. Throughout the relationship, my weight had ballooned from an already overweight 88kg to tipping the scales at 100kg. Eating out on Friday nights, followed by a tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, seemed inconsequential to the evenings spent in front of the TV watching football with copious high-calorie beers. All of this was somehow justified by a short bike commute that left me breathless. I was out of shape, mentally and physically.
Yet, I told them to fuck off.
How Not to Start Running: The Excuses
I blamed it on shin splints. It was a terrible excuse since my shins haven’t suffered half as much as I thought they would. Memories of a sharp shooting pain down the length of my shins had prevented me from taking up the sport.
Now, I know the cause of the pain was due to the wrong shoes and poor form. It all started when a new coach took over my football team. Training moved from the muddy park to a community hall surrounded by residential streets. Tuesday night training meant laps around the block and planks in a freezing hall. Hard work for something that was supposed to be fun.
It wasn’t until later in life that I first noticed the twinging pain in my shins. It wasn’t after a run, but walking for hours on end. These injuries persisted throughout my twenties. They peaked on holidays when I walked more than I did at home, with familiar public transport and my bike.
Shin splints weren’t the only issue, preventing me from taking up a new hobby, based on endurance. Years of smoking had left me physically unfit. Yes, I cycle to work, but it was a challenging ride. At my worst, you’d find me with one hand on the handlebars, with the other clutching a quickly assembled roll-up. That left any chance of running voluntarily unlikely.
From Therapy to Tea to a Treadmill
It wasn’t the break-up. It was some long-held issues with Anxiety and my mental health. But it was time to tackle them head-on with the help of a therapist. We’d talk about many things, including the gym. I’d been on and off with gym routines, chasing aesthetics I didn’t really care about beyond losing weight. I’d lift heavy, lose motivation, and quit. Again, and again.
The problem was, I was in my head. One of the reasons I quit was due to time and missing sessions. I felt like I couldn’t commit to a whole program or miss too many sessions in a week. This led me to quit, justifying that I wouldn’t be able to do this exact routine in 6 months, so what was the point? Then, one day, my therapist said something that resonated with me.
“If something makes you happy, pursue it. It doesn’t matter if you’ll still be doing it in a week; you’re doing it now.”
That weekend, I also did something new. I bought a tea advent calendar. I didn’t have any interest in tea; it was just a new experience that I wouldn’t continue with after Christmas. It was silly, but it sparked joy. And that joy became my new compass.
With this new outlook, the end of this story seemed inevitable. It happened in the new year, but it wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. I headed to the gym in a pair of canvas shoes, refusing to let the lack of footwear stop me from trying something new. I ran, mostly walked, on a treadmill, and felt great.
There were no niggling worries over whether I’d run again tomorrow or if I’d establish a regular running routine. After starting, those first few runs were me carving out a time to head to the gym and run on the treadmill. It was a slow run, but progress proved quick. I’d set one goal that felt unachievable. To run 5km in under 30 minutes. That’s my easy run pace now.
A Brave New Year
Sometimes, I open Runna, look at my scheduled run, press start on my Garmin, lace up my Brooks, strap on my running vest, and load up my planned route from Strava, and I wonder how I got here. I have down days, and my weight is still considered overweight, if not obese. Yet, physically and mentally, I can see and feel a clear difference between now and those early days of running.
I’m not here because one journey ended abruptly. I’m here because another began, which led to another. And another, this new hobby of telling stories and making videos. Long runs come to an end, but the journey has only just begun. And it happened because when Will said I really should start running. This time, I ran.
Leave a ReplyCancel reply