On your good days, run hard. On your bad days, run as long as you need.
~Author Unknown
“Don’t forget to breathe.” My cross-country coach’s voice echoed in my head. “Look straight ahead. Chin down. Don’t have lazy arms.”
I focused on the person in the red jersey running ahead of me, adopting her pace as my own and catching up to her.
“Pick up your legs. Don’t twist your hips. Relax your shoulders.” I could smell the autumn leaves in the air and feel them crunching underneath my sneakers. Then I passed her.
I loved racing. When I was racing, I ran as fast as I could. I ran as if I were being chased by more than just the opposing team’s runners. I ran for my life. I ran from my life.
Actually, I was running long before I started running.
There are ways of running that aren’t physical. Growing up, my family moved around a lot. We left most things unsaid, swept them under the proverbial rug. I never knew why my father went to jail, but I was grateful to be in a new town where no one would know, where I’d have a new chance to keep all the secrets inside, where I wouldn’t have to face the truth.
When I ran the required mile for gym class in middle school, I unexpectedly got one of the fastest times. My name was written on the “leaderboard” in the girls’ locker room where everyone would see it. All the other top runners were popular girls, skinny cross-country runners who wore coordinated outfits to school, girls whose fathers weren’t in jail, girls I didn’t relate to.
I joined the track team. I won medals running the 400- and 800-meter races. With growing confidence, I joined the cross-country team in high school, renowned for being the best in the district. We trained like Olympic athletes. I learned I needed the right running shoes and expensive orthopedic inserts because my arch-less feet made me over-pronate and caused excruciating shin splints. I needed a watch that could beep at repeated intervals. I needed to journal my water intake, lift weights and eat carbs like a mad woman.
I loved all the rituals. I felt like I was a part of something. It made me feel seen after a whole lifetime of hiding.
I ran every day after school and on Saturday mornings. The same girls who were “out of my league” became my best friends. I enjoyed a camaraderie that has yet to be matched, with pre-meet spaghetti dinners, routine sleepovers and collective ice baths. I belonged somewhere. I was our fifth best runner, but a crucial runner in the scoring of cross-country races.
“The fifth runner wins or loses the meet,” my coach told me. “A lot of teams have a few all-star runners, but to have a solid fifth runner means you have five all-star runners.” I had something to prove, and I welcomed the pressure. Running was my escape from everything that I didn’t want to face.
I liked the teamwork, but the running itself was a more selfish endeavor, a strange mental game I’d play with myself. People always said that running is one percent physical and 99 percent mental. Training the body is the easy part because muscle memory was on my side. My body did a lot of work to be a successful runner, but finding the discipline to do it wasn’t that difficult. Sitting with my own mind for three, five, ten miles — that’s the challenge. My mind is a savage animal that manufactures disturbing thoughts that desperately taunt me into attaching value to them, into believing them. When I’m running, my only defense is my own breath. Can I just keep breathing? Sometimes, my mind convinces me I can’t.
Running is how I figured things out — things I didn’t even know needed to be figured out. In that way, running has always functioned a lot like writing. It’s how I’ve gotten through the worst times. It’s the way I accessed that typically inaccessible part of my mind, the buried feelings in my heart. Running let me get to those parts of myself that I hid from the world — the ugly parts, the parts I felt ashamed to acknowledge. Running was always there at the end of a bad day, waiting for me like an old friend with a secret to share. When I was angry, I especially loved to run. I felt as if I was stomping all over whomever I was angry at, like I was running at them.
I learned in graduate school that sometimes my best insights come to me around mile 3. Every breakthrough I had in my master’s thesis came after I’d stomped out three miles of self-doubt. Running was the ultimate freedom. For the duration of a run, nothing else mattered. It was just me and my thoughts. Passersby may see me running, but they have no idea if I’m ruminating over how my boss interrupted me three times, why my last boyfriend told me he loved me and then abruptly disappeared, or why my father had to die. Or perhaps I’m just blissfully unaware of any buried pain, jogging casually, taking in the jasmine and the honeysuckle blossoms, the cars honking at each other, and the sun on my face.
Running is a breeding ground. I can obsess over something that’s happened, all the things I could have said or wish I’d said differently, or something that’s not happened yet and probably won’t ever happen. Running helps me gain perspective, clarity, and objectivity. It helps me become right-sized again. Maybe that’s why runners always look so deep in thought. We’re preoccupied. I can run to Ocean Beach, through Golden Gate Park, or into a busy city intersection, but I can never run away from myself, from my thoughts, from me. My mind goes with me wherever I run.
Sometimes, I am just taking in the scenery, filling my lungs with fresh air and running on autopilot in a blissful, Zen state. My mind takes a vacation, and my body thinks it can run forever. Sometimes, I can get to that place in a few miles; sometimes, it takes 10 miles; sometimes, I never get there. Runners call it the elusive “runner’s high,” when the brain is flooded with endorphins. That’s a freedom, too.
Running is a paradox. I run to get away from it all, but I run to get closer, too. Now, running is how I lean into myself, how I call myself back to myself.
Running gave me friends; it gave me a community, a way to belong and a way to improve my health. But running gave me the greatest gift of all — the ability to be with myself. I don’t have to run away anymore.
All I have to do is breathe.
— Niko Bellott —