Just a little further…

The value of running.

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I started running in the eighth grade, when I was 13 years old. I did not particularly want to run, I was sort of forced into it. I attended a small school where extracurricular sport was mandatory; we had so few kids that we needed everyone to play sport just to fill the teams. Very few sports were available to the junior pupils (Grades 1 to 7), which meant that I was forced to play field hockey in winter and cricket in summer. I have not been blessed with a talent for ball skills and this school rule regularly served as a reminder. I was so poor at catching, throwing and hitting the hard balls used in cricket and hockey that I was relegated to practice with the grade below me. I was also petrified of getting hurt, which impaired what little skill I had. This invited absolutely no teasing at all, as I’m sure you remember how kind and understanding your peers were when you were twelve. I was miserable. Imagine my relief and joy, then, to find that many other sports were available to senior pupils; I tossed my shin guards in the bin the minute I graduated seventh grade. Of course, after a rocky relationship with team sports in the first thirteen years of my life, many of my new sporting opportunities seemed either dull or traumatic—if the danger of hockey was too much for me, rugby wasn’t an option. In my wisdom I chose to be a sport photographer. Haha, I cheated the system! I won’t even do sport at my sport! Unfortunately, the head of photography asked me to step down 6 months later. It turned out that I was expected to be interested in sports, and should have been attending the 6 a.m. matches each Saturday to actually take photos. As I was still required to participate in a sport after I was fired, running became my last resort. The sport was actually called ‘Casual Running’ on the sign up sheet. This was a great help, and I also experienced no teasing at all because of this title, you remember how considerate and empathetic teenagers are.

Coincidentally, my dad started his running habit around the same time. Two years prior to my casual running, we adopted a puppy with limitless energy. In hopes of tiring him out, my dad began to run a bit of the walk he took the dog on. The first ten metres turned into half of the route, and my mom still remembers the day that my dad came home and exclaimed that he had run the whole way. He was beaming. Twelve years down the line that 2.4km dog walk has turned into a cool 80km per week (for my dad only, our puppy is an old dog now). In October my dad will be running his first ultra marathon—that’s any distance over 42km, this one is 65km. My routine is far more modest, I manage to get out twice or three times a week. In the years since I first reluctantly agreed to run, my relationship with running has had ups and downs. I have been committed and disciplined: in Grade 9, after a year of running twice a week for half an hour, I began to lose weight and get a little faster. Enjoying the physical results of my efforts and the newfound attention it yielded, I began running four times per week, totalling around 20km. I kept this schedule up for another two years; almost every day after school, a friend and I would change into our running clothes and go for a quick jog around the block. We became regulars, cars often hooted as they passed us, grinning pupils stuck their heads out of windows to wave. Other years I avoided running entirely. My gap year after I graduated high school was filled with doubt, confusion and emotional overeating, but very little running. Yet, two years later I completed my first half marathon. We were quarantined the next Monday. My erratic running patterns have left me with a wealth of experience, of pushing myself to the limits of my endurance and of restarting with absolutely no ability at all.

I took a week off from running and yesterday was my first day back. Even though I’ve been running fairly regularly for the last four or so months, I was shocked at how hard it was. Not the physicality of it, I don’t think. It kept occurring to me that I could stop at any time, and that if I stopped, the ache in my feet would surely disappear. I only ran 6km. I’ve run this distance over and over again in the ten years since I was thirteen. Why isn’t it easier? While running I began developing the theory that difficult things never get less difficult, we only grow more resilient. Running a half marathon, or an ultra for that matter, is just hard. No two ways about it. I think that the people who complete those feats recognise their difficulty, and keep on jogging anyway. That was the exercise that exhausted me when my feet hit the road again this week: persistence. Long distance running, whether casual or serious, has a very different demand from any other exercise I’ve experienced. If you want to run 65km, all you really have to do is not stop. Side note: this is a partial oversimplification, of course. Many long distance races have a cut off time, after which racers receive a ‘did not finish’. But I have been a very slow runner, and I am of the opinion that once you pass a certain fitness threshold, much of the work is done in the mind. Pushing back against my instinct to give up is the muscle that I’ve trained the most while running.

My dad sent me an article some time ago, titled “The Case For Doing Hard Shit.” In it, Michael Easter writes this: “a growing body of evidence shows that people are at their best—physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder—after doing hard shit.” Michael’s hard shit included roughing it in the Arctic, and while I recognise that my 6km run is nowhere as difficult, his words resonate with my running journey. While I was overtly exercising my legs and my heart, I was covertly exercising some other part of me. The persistence I developed while running informed the way I coped with the overwhelming workload in my third year of university. The difficulty in restarting my running from scratch again and again taught me how to approach new and difficult-to-acquire skills, from snowboarding to Photoshop. The gorgeous vistas I’ve witnessed while running through forests and cities remind me that beauty often lies on the other side of difficulty. Of late, I’ve been running just to think. Or sometimes to cry. Or to just be with my thoughts and get away from the noise and the stress of it all. If I’m fit enough I can escape into my body and it just takes me somewhere while I wrestle with the difficulties of unemployment and emigration and adulthood and just being a person. It’s easy to see the how the endurance I built to finish a half marathon informs the endurance I need to approach complex work, but I wonder which skills my running has taught me that remain hidden? In the last year it has taken the new form of escape, a boon I didn’t know I had access to, or needed. I think my measly 6km runs, twice a week have also made me a little physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder.

My father, too, has been shaped by his running addiction; the muscles and tendons in his legs look like steel cables. But, in contrast to my experience, I think he quickly became a good runner because he already possessed persistence in spades; he only had to build fitness. Far before he was a runner, he faced challenges with stoicism and fierce tenacity. He will protest when he reads this and reassure me that he, too, had to build his perseverance when he began running. Ultra marathons are no match for his relentless spirit, whether he agrees with me or not (I am, of course, correct, though). I think I gave up more often before I was a runner. Perhaps I didn’t believe in myself, perhaps it was too easy to quit. I wonder if I would’ve been a better hockey player if I was a runner, first… There are many difficult things you will face in life. I am certain that it isn’t necessary to take on every challenge you encounter, and I am just as certain it is imperative that some challenges are faced and conquered. I am worried that we steadily face fewer challenges in our lives, and that this inflates the perceived difficulty of the ones which are unavoidable. I am unwilling to say that running has changed my life; even if it has, it sounds a little stale to me. I do, however, acknowledge that it has made me tougher, more capable of enduring struggle and more willing to approach new problems. In my exhausting and exhaustive experience, running is a fantastic tool to build your spirit and teach yourself that you can, indeed, do hard shit.

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Because of my bad experiences with sport earlier on in my life, I have always been hesitant to exaggerate the impact running has had on me—but I believe I’ve accurately represented the truth. If you love someone who would love this, please share it with them.