My Relationship with Running

I grew up living a very active life. I played soccer and basketball from a very young age and throughout high school. I loved the two sports, and more than that I loved staying fit. My sophomore year of high school, I decided to join the spring track team. My best friend ran track nearly year round, and since my intense love for soccer and basketball started to fade, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try something new.

I ended up absolutely loving it. My first meet, I raced my first ever mile on the track and clocked a 5:57. I didn’t understand why people were impressed, I knew nothing about the sport of track except that I wasn’t fast enough to be a sprinter, so I fell into mid to long distance running groups. After that first meet, I realized that I could be good at this sport if I put in the effort. It started as something to do with my best friend and keep me fit, but it turned into one of the things that I love the most.

My times kept getting better. I don’t really remember my pr from that first year, but I believe I shaved my time down to the 5:40 range. My junior year was definitely my best season, with a 5:35 pb. Sometimes I’d run the 800, but I wasn’t that great at it. I’m not great at pacing myself for a race that short, but I loved the 1200 in the DMR which is only an extra lap. Kind of confusing, but I knew that the race I loved most was the mile.

I know that to a lot of really dedicated and avid runners, these times may not be that impressive. I knew I would never be a D1 runner and I was always okay with that. But I held myself to a high standard, and if I wasn’t constantly improving, I considered myself to be failing. I was always proud of what I ran those first two years though, because for me it was typically enough.

That summer, I made the difficult decision to quit soccer and join the cross country team. Training over the summer, I had ran a low 5:30 mile on the track and felt confident that if I stayed running, my senior year would be my best season yet. There were a lot more factors in quitting other than just wanting to join the XC team, and it made the most sense for me. Soccer didn’t make me happy anymore, at least at the point in my life and where I played. Running did, and I had a fantastic time with many of my friends who join me in jumping from soccer to XC.

I nearly quit basketball, too, and sometimes I look back and wish I did. Although I have a lot of love for the sport, I never experienced indoor track, and I wish I had. A lot of factors outside of the game itself for basketball started to make me resent the sport, but three very close friends of mine played, and made not quitting worth it. Still, my favorite part of practice was always the running and agility parts, and the only thing on my mind was finishing the season and getting to track.

My senior year track season was the worst I ever ran. It was extremely disappointing for me, I had been improving so much, and then all of the sudden I couldn’t break a 5:40 mile. I had committed to college at that point and signed to join the track and field team, and I was so discouraged I wanted to back out of it all. I have a lot of struggles mentally when it comes to not improving at something that I work very hard at, and something that I loved so much started to turn to something I resented.

After my first semester in college, I realized that I didn’t want to run track for a team anymore. I felt myself improving again and felt confident in myself, but coaches and other factors (like school, extracurriculars, etc.) ultimately led me to quit the team. I don’t regret it at all, but it led me into a very strange few years of on and off running.

Sometimes I’d run with the running club at my college, but I slowly stopped going. My freshmen year is when COVID hit, and when I went back home I stayed pretty active, until all of the sudden I realized I hadn’t went on a run in a few months. Throughout my sophomore and junior year, I’d run a day here and there, and despite having so much love for the sport, the fact that I couldn’t run an 8 mile run at a 7:30 pace made me not want to run anymore. Being average at something that I used to be good at was a very hard pill to swallow for myself.

My senior year of college, I tried very hard to be active again. Surprisingly, I had lost about 20-25 pounds as I entered my senior year (accidentally and not in a healthy way, may I add), and because I was so much lighter I just figured running would come back to me easily. I lived a block away from a wonderful trail, and I barely took advantage of it until May hit.

I started to grow very consistent in my routine. I’d get up early to stretch, run, and then do a quick at home workout before I started my day. I wasn’t doing very long runs, but I was so happy to see my average mile time drop from 9:30 to 8 minutes. I started to extend my runs and overall I felt so good. When I moved back home after I graduated, I continued my routine. Not as often, but enough to where I kept improving. I was so happy to feel the same love I had when I first started running.

Then, once September hit, for some reason I stopped. Similar to when COVID hit, all of the sudden I realized I hadn’t gone for a run in a few weeks. So I started again, and felt as if I was back at square run. For me, I felt like I was running slow and felt embarrassed and upset that all my hard work got thrown away. The cherry on top had to be the fact that all the sudden, my knees felt extremely weak after a run, so I had to actually stop for a while until they got better.

Now it’s November. This past week, I started to run again. I’m trying so hard to stay motivated and ignore the fact that I’m not going as fast as I would like to. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not 16 anymore, I don’t play sports year round and commit myself to them, and I’m responsible to tell myself to get up, lace up my shoes, and go for a run. There’s no coach to tell me what to do or group chat of my team asking where I am and why I’m late to practice.

I’m finally feeling motivated again, and talking about it helps. Even just posting something on a private story helps, because in a way, it holds me responsible. If I post about running, then I need to actually run. And if I actually run and stick to the schedule I created, I can work back down to where I used to be. Being your own coach is not easy. It’s so simple to just tell myself ‘I’ll go tomorrow’ or ‘I deserve a rest day, I’m a little sore’. But whenever I do that, I end up feeling awful, and I missed out on an opportunity to do something that I love and makes me feel good!

I love running, it is such an important thing to me. At the same time, when I think about it now, I get so frustrated that I ever stopped in the first place. Racing to win first place is something I stopped caring about in high school. But I love feeling accomplished, and running those fast, average mile pace on long runs makes me feel accomplished. I hope that by the new year, I love running the way I used to just a few years ago.

I also have a lot of goals for running, one of the main ones being that I really want to run my first half marathon next year before summer hits. I really wanted to this year, and then I stopped running. I have something to work towards, and now that I’ve written all about it, it’ll be easier to stick to my word— that’s what I hope, at least.