Hello there. It’s been too long since I sent out an edition of ye olde Run the Shoes newsletter; I think just over a month! This was a strange month of doing both everything and nothing. I’ve been running, but not very much or very hard, as my body needed a lot of TLC after the Boston Marathon. I’ve also been mentally decompressing from my time at my former company, where I worked for 4.5 years until two months ago.
I was handling the latter well until I listened to 10 minutes of an interview Kara Swisher conducted with the CEO of my former employer, Condé Nast, on her New York Times podcast, Sway. It put a bee in my bonnet and I had to stop listening, but you can read the transcript here. She gave him a good dose of sass and I love her for that.
As she alludes to, the culture at Condé Nast is something to behold. It’s a great place to work early in your career if, like me, you were told from a young age that you needed to grow a thicker skin. It took a year and a half for my skin to become truly calloused. I worked in a particularly grueling sub-culture of the company at the beginning of my tenure in 2018, one that has been documented and scrutinized in major news outlets. I should note that I never felt subject to any racism or bigotry that hindered my career. I mostly just found that my co-workers were so concerned with being perceived as cool by each other and the Instagram masses that they neglected to practice basic social graces with people they felt had no standing. I had one of the “least cool” jobs at Condé Nast at the time, so you can imagine where I fell on that ladder.
Spending my day with people who were selectively rude was quite bad for morale, and I began to dread going to work very soon after I started. I recognized that I needed an external goal to rally my emotions. I ran my first marathon at a decent pace a year before I entered that fashionable den of snakes, so I decided to start my journey of qualifying for the Boston Marathon to stay sane.
The more I dreaded going to work, the harder I trained. When I look at my training log from 2018, I can tell which weeks really sucked. In July, for example, I did 4x1 mile repeats on a Wednesday morning, the day I gave a presentation at a meeting that remains the worst of my life. The next day, fired up on #officerage, I ran 11 miles before work. The day after that, I ran 4 miles at my half-marathon pace. I took Saturday off and then on Sunday, horrified that I must suffer that social inferno yet again, I ran 13 miles at my race pace. This is not smart training, by the way. But it made me calloused!
I didn’t qualify for Boston then. I had a horrible marathon that fall and bonked so hard that I had to stop and listen to “Shallow” from A Star Is Born at mile 24 to regroup. Forgive me for being a cliché, but it was the journey that mattered. I still practice the lessons I learned during that training cycle, like the best time to do a hard workout is the morning of a stressful day. You’ll be more relaxed at work, and no matter how bad the day is, you’ll still have gotten a kick-ass workout in.
Stay hard my sensitive friends,
Elaheh