How I gradually became obsessed with running
A love story?
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Happy June, friends. We made it to the best month of the year! June is so full of promise—the days are long and we have the whole summer ahead of us. Anything can happen! It’s also a great time of year to be a runner. You can run at 5 am or 8 pm and not worry about street lights being on, and hopefully the heat isn’t too debilitating where you live. If you’re running a fall marathon, your training is still in the fun and easy phase, if it’s even started. People are out in their bras or shirtless; they’re sweaty and smelly and just loving life. It’s great!
I went on my first run postpartum the other day and it was… fine. It felt a little awkward physically but I’ve been doing pelvic floor and “deep core” (still not exactly sure where that is) work to tighten things up. I was mostly taken aback by how hard it was aerobically. This time last year, I was preparing to run a marathon at 7:15 pace, and now I can barely run an 11-minute mile without stopping. The human body is magical!
While I was struggling through my one-mile run, I started to reflect on why I’ve chosen to dedicate so much time to this sport that is so fricken’ hard. I realized that I’ve been running somewhat regularly for 20 years(!) I came to the conclusion that running is so ingrained into who I am and essential to how I experience life that I have no choice but to power through these difficult months of getting back into shape.
On that note, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about how I got into running. It’s not a particularly interesting story but I’m feeling nostalgic and maybe you’ll find parts of it relatable. Enjoy!
I started running my freshman year of high school when my mom made me join the cross-country team. I didn’t want to, but I can see in retrospect why she strongly recommended it. I went to a big public school and even though I had a decent amount of friends going in, I was shy and scared of alcohol, weed, and boys, so I was easily ditchable. I wasn’t nerdy but I was very into academics and being at home; my after-school routine consisted of watching ABC Family, taking a nap, then doing homework. Clearly, I needed an extracurricular.
The cross-country team was a large, unintimidating group of about 60 girls who weren’t cool but weren’t uncool either. During the fall season, they threw wholesome psych parties on Friday nights before meets where we’d eat pasta and TP the boys’ captains’ houses (TP = throw toilet paper across the front lawn). So yeah, I was busy most weekends and didn’t have to worry about normal high school parties I wasn’t invited to/would give me anxiety if I were. My social life was taken care of. Team sports, I found, will do that.
That said, I hated the running part. I thought it was boring and I’d always get cramps, probably because I drank a Slurpee before practice most days. I thought the girls who were fast were too perky and skinny and just annoying as fuck. Also, my coaches were not very inspiring, to put it kindly. One of them would always ask me what Ahmadinejad, the then-president of Iran, thought of things, and once told me I was on “Baghdad time.” I think it was an attempted joke about me being slow because I’m Middle Eastern (?) but the logic still doesn’t add up. I wasn’t actually bad at running, I just didn’t care enough about sports to try harder and I hated feeling physically uncomfortable. My fastest time was around 24 minutes for a 5k, which seems decent for a high schooler, but was an unremarkable result on a team as large as mine.
Despite generally hating the sport, I stuck with cross-country for all four years of high school. I made friends who also hated running, and we’d always find ways to shorten the workouts and leave early. Most importantly, I had a crush who was on the boys team, and the promise of seeing him was enough to motivate me to go to practice every day. I never once spoke to him and didn’t even think he knew my name, then one day he cheered for me during a race and said “ella-hey” perfectly and I died a million times over.
I was happy to leave running behind when I went to college, but I got back into it my junior year, when I spent the year abroad in France. I don’t exactly recall the impetus (it may have had something to do with my twice-daily pastry habit), but I signed up for the Paris Half Marathon that spring. My homestay was near the Eiffel Tower and I would run around the Champ de Mars during the week, then plan a long run through the city over the weekend.
I first started to enjoy the ritual of running on those long runs. I didn’t have a watch or smartphone, so I’d go by feel and walk when I felt like it. I’d zone out to Adele, Taylor Swift, and David Guetta on my iPod (it was 2011) and run through neighborhoods I hadn’t explored before, then get a pastry and take the metro back home. I broke my elbow the day before the race so I didn’t actually run it, but it’s the journey that counts. I don’t think I lost weight either.
I started running somewhat regularly when I got home from France, mostly because I saw it as a time to unwind and let my thoughts wander. It no longer felt like a chore! I remember running a lot when I was writing my college thesis and needed a mental break from the hours I spent at the computer, but I didn’t start a consistent routine until I graduated college, moved to New York City, and got a job that I absolutely hated.
My hatred for my job seeped into my bones and became my personality. I dreaded weekdays because it meant going to work, so I started to wake up early and run. My morning run gave me structure and purpose and made me feel like my days weren’t consumed by work. No matter how shitty the day turned out to be, I had already done something for myself by going on a run, and that felt pretty powerful.
I didn’t stay at that job for very long and though I liked my next one enough, I still found running to be the antidote to my career dissatisfaction. All I wanted was to be an editor at a magazine, and as I worked tirelessly to achieve that goal, I continued to run. Through the layoffs, contractor work, edit tests, and so many rejections, running was there, reminding me that my self-worth wasn’t tied to my career. Eventually, I made it to the masthead of a magazine at Condé Nast. And it was hell! It made me miss my first job, where at least the people were nice and didn’t take themselves so seriously.
By then, I had already run a few half-marathons and one marathon, though never for time. I was aware of my pace but I didn’t do speed work or anything deliberate to get faster; I was always just running for completion. But this job, you guys, made me miserable. I liked the work but my co-workers just lacked all sense of common decency, and I didn’t have a thick enough skin at the time to laugh it off. Simply going on a run before work wasn’t enough to power me through the work day—I needed to physically push myself and get stronger. That’s when I got serious about getting faster.
I signed up for a marathon with the goal of qualifying for Boston, which seemed hard but achievable given that I ran my first marathon about 15 minutes slower than the cut-off time. I went to track workouts with a run club and did speed intervals on my own in Central Park, and after a few tries, a stress fracture, and Covid race cancellations, I qualified and made it to Boston.
That’s not where the story ends but it is where it slows down. The thing about hitting a goal is that whenever you do, a new one emerges. Once I qualified for Boston, I wanted to break a specific time, and when I did that, I made a new goal to run my next marathon a little faster. And that’s pretty much where I am now: trying to take a few minutes off my marathon time with each race, even though they’re far and few between because I’ve had two babies in the last two years.
So that’s how I got into, and stuck, with running over the course of 20 years and counting. It was gradual and has ebbed and flowed, but I’ve never completely tired of it, and that’s what matters.
What got you into running and keeps you going, friends? It’s June—go enjoy it!
Baked Good of the Month
I have been absolutely pounding BGs the last month, some better than others (that said, the cinnamon roll from Panera is better than expected.) Worth sharing are the scones from Mary O’s Scone Shop in the East Village, where I have a hookup because my mom helps out in the kitchen (long story).
See you next month,
Elaheh
I might start throwing out, "Are you on Baghdad time?!?" at completely nonsensical moments. For a laugh.
Ahh and to think I knew you way back when....I need to know who the crush was!