I was always known for being an athlete. First, it was for tennis, then softball, then basketball, then swimming, then lacrosse, until finally I found running and forgot that all the other sports existed. In high school, I ran cross country, winter track, and spring track which meant running every day from July until the following June. Every day after school I had 8 miles to look forward to and on weekends I had anywhere from 10 miles on an easy day to 16 miles on a hard day. Looking back, it sounds absolutely crazy, but the craziest part is that I loved every minute of it. Running was such a large part of my identity. My self-confidence was built on my performance in races, my everyday happiness came from running mile after mile, and people either identified me as ‘the redhead’ or ‘the runner.’
But that part of my identity is gone now. In my final year of high school, I got a knee injury, cause apparently running 56 miles a week for 4 years will take a toll on your body, and just as quickly as I had risen to my positions as a varsity runner I fell to the bottom. Running no longer brought me an overwhelming sense of joy and mind-clearing relaxation that it used to. Instead, I was filled with frustration, sadness, and a sense of failure as I watched my 5:20 mile pace drastically fall to 7:00 then to 9:00, and then to 10:00. I watched the other varsity runners earn their medals in our final race knowing that place should have been on the podium beside them instead of clapping on the sidelines. I got home from my last race, put my running shoes in the back of my closet, and did not look at them again until going into my senior year of college.
When I pulled them out of my closet 4 years later, dusty, and more worn down looking than I remembered, it was the happy memories that came back to me, not the bitter ones from the end. I remembered when I first bought those Nike sneakers, bright pink and shiny, the first time I won a cross-country race when I broke my mile personal record, and the box of articles I had cut out from our local newspaper when my team would win a race that overflowed from their box stored under my bed. I debated for a few minutes whether to put them back in their forgotten place in my closet and try again 4 years later but at the last minute, I threw them in my suitcase packed for college.
I don’t run every day, I don’t always run every week, but when I do I never focus on the fact that sometimes I can’t even run more than a mile without having to stop or that it takes me 10 minutes to run that one mile. I focus on the peaceful feeling it brings me as I put on my Harry Styles playlist, breathe in the chilly Autumn air, and just let my legs do what they were trained to do. I am not fast, I don’t win medals, I no longer have the fit runner’s body, but I can say with full confidence that running brings me more happiness now than it had ever in the past.