Why I Run (and why I didn’t for so long)

I’ve loved reading these “why I run” stories and thought I would throw out my own.  I hope to hear a couple more as we go.

As for me, I’ve always been very competitive about sports.  In high school, I played four sports and, honestly, they were far more important to me than any of my academic pursuits (if you can call them that) at the time.  I went on to play soccer in college my freshman year but after a terrible first year of school academically, I needed to take some time off.  For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that I had taken two years off from soccer, I just couldn’t get back to playing competitively again.  Consequently, my involvement in sports in any sort of formal sense ended much sooner than I wanted it to and, sadly, I had a very difficult time getting myself motivated for intramurals or anything less formal.

What became really frustrating about all this is that near the end of college and in graduate school, I started to gain weight.  I had always been underweight when I was playing sports so the idea of watching what I ate was completely foreign to me.  I got bigger and bigger and in my last year of graduate school I was quite overweight, bordering on obese (that's not hyperbole, I was really big), and needed to make some serious changes.  I had tried running off and on in graduate school and in college. I had run track for two years in high school so it shouldn’t have been hard for me to get into a running routine but, without practices, meets, teammates, etc., I just couldn’t stay interested.   Every attempt was somewhat futile and pathetic. I would go for a run of between one and three miles and would basically pass out for the day when I got back (the Mississippi sun didn’t help matters).  

Even once I became really committed to losing weight, I didn’t find myself running very often.  I would try and go out once a week or so but it just never seemed to last very long.  Somehow, I managed to lose around 45 pounds by watching what I ate and running every other week or so.  Despite being happy that I had lost so much, it still felt sort of futile.  I felt like I couldn’t possibly stick to those eating habits for the long term and I finally got motivated to start running seriously. 

I picked a race, just a 5K, that I wanted to train for and found a running plan online that looked like it would work.  Even though I had run track, I don’t think I had ever run more than three miles in a single stretch so it felt like a monumental task.  I’m not entirely sure why it worked that time but I think it was because I had decided on the specific goal of running a race rather than the more abstract goal of getting healthy/losing weight.

Part of what made this fun for me is that I started tracking everything about my runs.  Not just the distance and times but the weather, how much effort I put into it, and how good it felt.  I started writing notes on things that worked, that didn’t work, etc. I’m a lover of data and being able to monitor my progress on a host of different variables (weight, speed, distance, attitude, enjoyment, etc.) made it more fun for me. 

I had never really thought seriously about running a marathon (in fact, I never really thought I could run that far) but, one day, Adolfo popped into my office (thanks Adolfo) and asked if I would consider training with him.  The two of us got to running weekly and I started to cover distances I had never thought I could go.  I distinctly remember returning from a 16 mile run together and thinking to myself, “That wasn’t so bad.  If I can do 16, I can do 10 more."

That May, I ran the Cellcom Marathon.  I was slow but I had more fun that day than I ever had playing soccer.  I tried to recapture that feeling a couple more times by running the Fox Cities Marathon (didn’t go so well) and the Twin Cities Marathon (super fun) but realized that marathons are just too hard for me to train for at this point in my life.  Instead, I’ve tried to find other interesting races that I can get excited for.

I think what I realized during all of this is that I didn’t need to compete against other people to make it fun and that competing with myself is far more interesting (and I'm more likely to win).  Every race is now about doing better than I did the time before or doing something I’ve never done before.   I’ve wanted to run a Ragnar for several years now since I first heard about them but didn’t know enough runners to get a team together.  Thanks, everyone, for making it possible!