Why I Run

Over the past 2.5 months, I’ve run 250+ miles and spent 40+ hours running. Terms like fartleks, intervals, long runs, lactate threshold, and glycogen fill my daydream thoughts. Heck, I started writing this post on a plane back from NYC, where I ran my first half marathon. I enjoy running.

When I share this new running fixation with non-runners, they look at me like I’m crazy and ask for justification – “Running? Ugh. What do you like about it?” or “How’d you get into that?” or just, “Why?”

I usually stumble through some words about feeling healthy, the joy of running races, or getting prime introvert time; with my answers I wonder, am I actually gaslighting myself into enjoying this sport? How can an activity that I used to associate with punishment, soreness, sweat, pain, and vomit be fun at all?

3 months ago, I couldn’t imagine running 3 miles. Apple Health charts reported that I took about 100 steps most days. Yet, after hundreds of miles running the streets, I’ve changed.

Why I run

I run to practice broadening what I believe I’m capable of and pushing myself to reach for those limits.

Left to my natural tendencies, I am fearfully measured, sedentary, and tend to isolate myself from others. Running challenges these natural inclinations and pushes me to have a big imagination of what I believe to be possible.

Fearfully measured

If the movie, Inside Out was a perfectly accurate representation of how the human mind works, the purple character, Fear, would be at the helm of my life.

Each day, I face fears by imagining worst case scenarios and formulating plans for the future that mitigate those potential disasters. My life is measured; I engage in things I believe I’m capable of or things I’ve evaluated to have a low-enough risk profile. With fear at the helm, my natural inclination is to stay within my ring of safety and possibility. My running journey has challenged how I define that ring and how I live within it.

Over the past year multiple friends have asked me to go on 5k runs. Running incited dread in me and something about the metric system label made the distance even scarier. Imagining exacerbated lungs and throw up made it easy for Fear to shut down these invitations. “Running isn’t for me” or “I can’t run that far.”

However, in April, a few friends successfully coerced me into running for 3 consecutive weeks. My fears were realized; the runs incited lungs that burned with each breath, small throw ups that I swallowed back down, and multiple days of leg soreness. 5k was challenging, but then something changed. On the third week of running, my heart and lungs could keep up, and the distance that felt impossible had become very doable – the ring of possibility expanded in my life. Motivated by my rapid progression, I signed up to run the New Jersey half marathon, and now I go on a 5k run multiple times a week before work.

Running hasn’t single-handedly redeemed me from fear of the future – Fear still sits at the helm of “Headquarters” – but running has affected the boundaries of my fear-imagined futures. Running is a practice – each run iteratively developing my mental fortitude and pain tolerance to push forward even when things seem unattainable.

Sedentary Lifestyle

I have a genetic risk of heart disease due to high cholesterol. In more life scenarios than not, my life ends because of a heart-related illness - following the footsteps of many generations before me.

Left to my own devices, I am an unhealthy human - I have poor nutrition from my natural eating habits; I have a poor sleep schedule; I am capable of vegetating in front of a computer for multiple days; I have poor posture. The list goes on and will continue to grow if left unchecked. Running for performance has forced a holistically healthy lifestyle – I need to get enough sleep to let my body recover and adapt to increased training loads; I need to regularly get outside for runs; I need to eat enough carbs and protein to offset the high volume of calories I burn each day. The achievement-orientation of my brain has tethered running success to healthy lifestyle habits.

Isolated

As an introvert, it’s easy to spend a lot of time in solitude. But life is meant for more than being alone. As an apprentice to Jesus, the practice of solitude needs to be centered on loving others and God rather than being a selfish act.

I am not good at relating with others in my hobbies. I tend to live a guarded life, exclusively in relationship with others who are similar to me. But running is challenging this natural tendency.

I’ve learned that running is a communal sport. Runners work out together; they share advice with each other; and they like to hangout after runs. I’ve observed a culture that gathers people of all cultures, backgrounds, sexuality, etc. to partake in an activity that binds these differences together. It’s outside my natural behavior to make relationships with strangers, but the cultural grain of running challenges this.

Current goal: the impossible time

My current running goal is to run a marathon in 2:50:00 to qualify for and run the 2028 Boston Marathon.

That’s a 4 year target to log a race at 6:30/mi pace. It seems impossible given that my current half marathon pace is 8:15, and the fastest I’ve run a single mile is 6:20 during peak high school volleyball conditioning.

My imagination has expanded dramatically in just a few months that simply running a marathon without stopping feels extremely doable. I’m going to ride this wave of optimistic imagination and see how far it takes me.

To me, Boston qualification represents:

Running Boston is just a milestone along my running journey, not the finish line. The “impossible time” represents the outermost boundary of what I imagine to be possible. It’s a significant landmark to motivate training and measure progress against. After achieving the goal, the landscape of what I believe to be possible will expand further, and that’s very exciting.

What running is not

I name these things because these motives will cross my mind at some point along my running journey even though I believe they will detract from a sustainably enjoyable running lifestyle.