Running Didn’t Make Me A Better Person

Untangling Exercise, Thinness, and What It Means to Be Good

If quitting any habit is hard, quitting patterns of thinking you grew up with is nearly impossible. Leaving behind the bits of understanding that have filled in the circuitry of your brain is perhaps one of the more difficult aspects of human growth.

A lot of what we learn and have reinforced as kids is good—be nice to others, wash your hands. But plenty of it is not.

Raised well before the era of body positivity in a culture that directly linked my physical appearance to my worth, I’m currently in the process of unlearning a lot about the body, strength, thinness, eating, discipline, and what it takes to be loved. And one of the single most apparent (and most tightly-bound) points of conversion of all of those things is running.

Fucking running.

Let me back up.

Like any collection of teenagers, my high school had social strata based on shared interests. But instead of Breakfast Club-like tropes—football players and rich girls and weirdo and nerds—our graduating class was divided and sub-divided into groups which, I found out only after meeting kids who didn’t grow up in the crunchy Willamette Valley, weren’t exactly standards.

Football players weren’t cool at all. Girls who made their own clothes were. Yoga was in, driving an expensive car was out. A Northface liner and a Nalgene bottle (before the big BPA reveal) were the must-have accessories. The most-loved sports were water polo, soccer, and track.

All of the coolest kids ran track. Which isn’t, perhaps, surprising in a city which hosts the Olympic Track & Field trials, which is the birthplace of Nike, and whose most-known moniker is “Tracktown, USA.”

People in Eugene talk about Steve Prefontaine the way people from Minneapolis talk about Prince. Everyone’s parents have a story about the time they saw him, partied with him, or better yet, lost a race to him. Runners leave their racing bibs at Pre’s Rock. They quote him for inspiration. They tell their friends from out of town about Bill Bowerman and the waffle iron shoe.

Running is a big deal. And not running is a big problem.

I’d known I wasn’t a runner since I was young. Neither of my parents ran (though my dad does now and he could easily lap me on his sprints through the foothills) and, in fact, we would often mock runners, perhaps as a method of deflection.

My family aren’t a tall people. We have thick thighs, meaty calves, ample backsides. We are not built to run, nor did we put in the effort to do it. Add in the fact that I wasn’t in any way savvy about health or eating as a kid (the only way I knew to lose weight was “don’t eat”) and was, for years, pretty chubby, and my inability to blow down the trails became…a thing.

In junior high, when we were required to take the Presidential Fitness Test, the running portion — just a short distance, really, about half a mile — left me red in the face, panting, and in pain.

I just wasn’t built to run, I reasoned.

And that made me inferior.

I believed running wasn’t just about being genetically blessed (though that was a big part of it!). It was also plainly about being better.

Running families tended to have money, which my family decidedly did not. People who are making good life decisions and earn a lot of money and have fancy lives run.

Runners were Good People. Runners were Cool People. Runners went on vacations and drove new vehicles that didn’t break down every other week. Runners could do anything. Running long distances was literally the highest achievement a human being could aspire to. Nobel Prize? Pulitzer? Second place to completing a half-marathon.

In essence, running stood for everything I wanted in the world and never had.

Somewhere in my mind, the strands connected. If I wanted to become a Good Person—read: wealthy, upper-middle class, thin—I would need to also be a person who ran.

So I tried. In high school, I would set out on the street in my LA Gears just to see if I could turn my fortune, but was dismayed by how much I hated it and how slow I was. Still, I’d plod up and down the roads in my parents neighborhoods, knowing that every step brought me closer to glory.

By the time I got to college and had access to a gym membership, my determination had solidified and the means were at my disposal. Damnit, I was going to become one of those people. I was going to become a runner.

I ran my first consecutive mile the winter of my freshman year and felt like it was more meaningful than anything else I’d ever do.

After that, running became a constant current in my life. It lived quietly in the background of everything else—graduating from college, moving, breaking up, moving, breaking up—like a ghost or a disease undiagnosed.

Either I was actively running a lot (which meant carving out hours of the week to spend on things other than work or friends) or I was beating myself up for having gone too long between runs (often because I was prioritizing other things).

I would push myself in fits and starts, working my way up to a lap around a lake near my school, then a 5k, and then eventually running my first 10k at the YMCA in Downtown Seattle when I was feeling particularly angsty.

I devoured scientific studies and articles about running. I crafted high-protein diets and stretching regimens. I carefully crafted playlists with songs that were the correct beats-per-minute.

And, I should note, I hated literally every minute of every run.

Running was miserable. It was hard. It was painful. It was slow.

But I kept doing it because I had to. I was endlessly motivated, not by a desire to become stronger or faster, but by my own consuming need to be thin and to be better than other people who could run, too. Every time I’d see someone else I knew sharing their finishing time on Facebook or their bib number on Instagram, I’d seethe. If they could do it, I could do it.

What do you call FOMO that isn’t based on missing out, but rather, feeling inferior?

In my mid-20s, I began setting out on Saturday mornings, regardless of the weather, and running around Lake Union, around Capitol Hill, around Downtown. I’d get stoned sometimes and take the bus to a large expanse of grass and trees and trails and take a lazy, dreamlike jog. I wrote about running for my job, I received free shoes from running companies, I read Runner’s World. I lost a toenail.

Finally, I ran my first double-digit distance while training for a half-marathon. I was finally almost a real runner! I texted my dad to tell him. I was so proud.

Shortly thereafter, the pain the in ball of my foot, which I’d been ignoring until one long run followed by a longer night in heels, would become too much to bear and I’d visit a sports medicine doctor who’d tell me, grimacing at the x-rays, that it was a stress fracture and I needed to stay off it.

Sustaining an injury from running felt like a badge of honor in and of itself; I’d run so much that my feet had literally given out from under me. But it was not. My injury wasn’t a symptom of becoming stronger or even becoming a better runner, but rather, becoming less of a person.

My bones were weakened from years of struggling with an eating disorder (which, unsurprisingly, was at its worst when I was running the most because I also believed that Good People don’t eat much) and I was forced into a rather unflattering air-boot and some time off the treadmill and the road.

I subsequently gained weight, lost momentum, lost progress, and stopped running for over a year. I resigned myself to being a Bad Person again.

During that time, the Instagram posts continued. People training. People completing races. People pushing themselves to new distances that I couldn’t even fathom. Without the miracle crutch of running, I felt entirely worthless.

What I have come to realize, through writing and therapy and yes, even a bit of running (and ballet, and weight-lifting, and yoga) post-injury is that I had moralized running to turn it into the action which symbolized every piece of myself that I was insecure about, every one of the worst things I believed were true about me (and everything).

Short. Poor. Chubby. Slow. Undisciplined. Lazy.

For entirely too long, I held toxic, harmful beliefs about thinness, discipline, and morality. So when I believed that running would make me a better person, the actual locus of that is my belief that being thin would make me a better person and that running would make me thin.

Never mind the fact that there are plenty of much better, more swift, more accomplished runners than I who are not thin, or the fact that there’s actually no such thing as a “runner’s body” other than “a body belonging to someone who runs.” I’d swallowed any number of stereotypes about the human body—mostly inwardly turned, though many of those same commonly-held beliefs have real-life consequences—and they sat inside of me like a rock.

At no point would I ever have consciously said that I believed thin people were better people — but now I am can see repulsively clearly that I definitely kind of thought that.

My thinking was as such:

• It takes discipline to do something you don’t want to do for longer than you want to do it (like running a long distance instead of sleeping in or playing with the dog or even doing a kind of exercise you actually like, which I’ll get back to later).
• Thus, it takes discipline to do things that make you thin.
• Thus, it takes discipline to be thin.
• Thus, I must develop and exude discipline so that all of my dreams may come true.

It is uncomfortable and shameful to admit every single one of these points. But, like my sense of smell and my ability to feel the shoes around my feet, they felt baked into my experience of being a person.

And therein was the true moral center of my believe that running was the highest achievement, the most impressive, the acme of human accomplishment. I wanted to run because I wanted to be thin.

And with thinness, I thought, came everything else.

It’s not as if, though, this magnificently upsetting understanding of the world sprung from my own mind or heart, either; socially, anti-fat bias is well-documented and starts alarmingly early. Weight is also often conflated with laziness and a lack of discipline, both in personal beliefs and in pop culture—which can even impact the earning potential of larger people.

Both implicitly and explicitly, we (as a society) actively attach ideas about thinness to ideas about success and financial stability. And for years, I believed it.

If I could just be a runner, I was convinced, I would finally achieve my ultimate goal of thinness. If I could just get that part of it figured out, everything else would shake out, too. My baseline, my foundation, needed to be A Person Who Can Run A Long Distance Somewhat Effortlessly And Enjoy It because that would also assuage my insatiable need to be proving myself to myself (and the world).

I didn’t enjoy it. It didn’t make me stronger. It didn’t clear my head.

But I continued to do it — I have run hundreds, if not thousands of miles — because being a runner was something I thought would make me a better person. And when it failed to do so, I did it anyway.

The truth is, I still run. I went for a run yesterday. I go about every other week now, for short distances (about a 5k), mostly to please my Fitbit. It’s much more common that you’ll find me going to yoga (which I enjoy and am fairly okay at), ballet (which I enjoy and am terrible at), or the gym for weights (which I enjoy and am getting better at every day). I don’t do any of these things to be more impressive or even to get thinner; I just want to be able to lift heavy things, move gracefully, and feel powerful.

Every time someone posts a bib on Instagram, though, a small string is plucked somewhere inside of me and I think oh, I should start adding distance again. I should go back to 10ks. I should go back to training for a half.

Because we really do play up the fact that running is an absolute. That running long distances is what Good People do.

And it’s not as if running is somehow not impressive. Pushing the body to cover miles and miles, well past the point of exhaustion, is an exceptionally difficult and empowering thing to do for a lot of people.

But it is not the best thing any human being can ever do. Because every human being is different and every human being doesn’t have to run a fucking marathon to be the best version of themselves and I can’t believe it took me almost 30 years to get that.

We attach moral purity and to any number of behaviors, traits, professions, measurements, and body types.

We tell ourselves that doing this one thing will somehow create a cascade of positive effects.

We sweat and pant and cough and hack and vomit just to be able to share it on Twitter and make other people say “wow, they managed to run consecutively for two hours without pooping their pants, they must also be great at literally every other facet of their lives.”

Running still makes me feel accomplished, and I like to use it as a way to measure the strength I’m gaining from my other pursuits. And on a nice day, a lap around the lake really can set the tone for a sunny weekend.

But I’m not spending an hour on a treadmill anymore just to feel like it will somehow make me kinder, smarter, or more valued at my job. Just because we link those things in our brains doesn’t mean they’re threaded in the real world.

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