Running in 2023

A year of learning not to run alone

This newsletter is my fourth annual reflection on a year in running. Here are my reflections from 2020 (a year of disaster), 2021 (a year of quitting), and 2022 (a year of hit and runs).

Last year was a year of learning not to run alone.

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I began 2023 the way I begin most years: by putting on my shoes and going for a run.

I did not run until after college. Until I was lonely and broke in a new city, where I had no friends and no job. I had a husband. But he worked all day and we only had one car.

My father-in-law at the time suggested I use my free time to learn to run. We’d run a race together, he promised. My father-in-law and I never ran the race together. He was diagnosed with cancer one month before our race and died six months after the diagnosis.

The gift he gave me was running — clomping around the track outside a gym in town, my body aching. I’ve never been athletic. That’s the myth I always tell about myself. The myth my family always told about me — the gangly, uncoordinated nerd.

But it’s not true. I spent my childhood challenging my brother and his friends to races. I spent my high school years biking and walking through the towns I lived in, simply because I wanted to, because I found joy in the movement. I went on training runs with my friends on the cross-country team. I played a lot of volleyball on the beaches of Minnesota lakes. 

When we are young we are handed scripts about ourselves. You are the ugly one, but you are smart. You are the hot one, but you are dumb. You are unathletic. You are athletic and that’s all you’ll ever be. You’re the quiet one. The loud one. These scripts offer so little room for reinvention. It’s a familiar story. I was unattractive, bookish. And that's how I always saw myself, even after years went by and I ran race after race and began lifting weights. It’s so hard to change the narrative. Especially in families that want to see us as static, unchanging entities. The 5-year-old who hates mayo must always hate mayo. The continuity can be a comfort. It can also be a cage.

It’s very hard to learn to become something else; to see ourselves in new ways.

Despite the fact that I’ve been running consistently for 20 years now, I still feel slow and clompy. So I usually run alone. I still struggle to identify as an athlete, and running with “real runners” stresses me out. They’ll be faster. They’ll resent how slow I am. I’ll get left behind. 

It’s a self-protective instinct. If I run alone, I don’t have to see myself fail.

And running has taught me that I can do it alone. That the power inside me is enough to propel me down sidewalks, through disasters. On my worst days, when my anxiety has made me a monster, I put on my sneakers and go. I know that I can quiet my thoughts on a run. I can find peace in the sounds of my music and my feet steadily hitting the pavement.

But this year, I began running with friends.

In June, I and 10 other people (plus three drivers) made the 339-mile trek across the state for Relay Iowa. The group was coordinated through this newsletter. Beau Anderson, an Iowa native who now lives elsewhere, had run the relay before and posted on the Discord community asking if anyone would be interested. I signed up because it sounded absolutely bananapants and I was in. I assume everyone else signed up for similar reasons. 

There are few things more humbling than having a group of people, many of whom are strangers to you, see you at your worst. Like peeing near a graveyard at 2am. Like running in the rain when your legs feel like they won’t work and you have snot on your face. Like snapping at a really nice person because you are so exhausted you cannot moderate your moods. Like taking a massive shit in a port-a-potty at the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa. 

But we did it. We finished at a better time than we anticipated and we raised over $5,000 for One Iowa, a LGBTQ advocacy group that is pushing back against the anti-trans legislation in the state.

And we made better time than we anticipated because everyone in the group thought they were slower than they were. We all thought we were slow and clunky. Not one of us saw ourselves as we actually were — strong, powerful, capable of running across an entire state in one weekend.

We underestimated ourselves individually, but also as a group.That is the thing about running as a group: You have people who motivate you, who cheer for you, who see you come out of that stinking port-a-potty in Dyersville and want you to run the Field of Dreams bases with them.  It sounds corny, but if a bunch of people say, “you can do it, you got this,” you begin to believe them. And then, when you believe them, you do actually do it. You do actually got this.

I began the year running alone, but I ended it running with friends. I now have a running group of friends. We meet occasionally and do a run-walk pace that is accessible for everyone. 

My friend Molly, who also ran Relay Iowa, once told me, “Running both taught me that I can find peace in being alone and joy with others.”

She also shared a quote from Ross Gay’s book, “The way I think of joy — not only does it not exist absent of sorrow, but it actually requires sorrow to exist. The way I think of joy is that it is what is luminous about us when we’re helping each other, when we’re holding each other through our sorrows.”

I made this newsletter because I was fired during one of the worst times of my life. It led to this community that put together a Relay Iowa team, that raised money for a good cause, yes, but more importantly, put together a group of people who regularly say to one another, “You can do this. You got this.” And together we do.

In my non-running life I am very cynical, annoyingly so. But something about huffing and puffing at mile 5 while my glute cramps up and I’m peeing myself a little makes me less of a cynic and more of an open, beating heart. One that just wants to hold someone’s hand. And know that I can do it.

For so long, I’ve used running as a way to build power, strength, and hold myself together. But running has also cracked me open — made me vulnerable, a mass of muscle and body aches. Running these days, at 41, in a world marred by pandemic and loss, I feel how fragile my hold on this world is. Any moment any number of things could happen and this could all end. My body could fall and I could fail. It’s terrifying, but it also makes these moments running with my friends all the more beautiful and vibrant. We run on the edge of sorrow. We run because of our sorrow and our anxieties and our fears, our breakups, our worries. But together, somehow, in those moments we find luminous joy.

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PS I am running Relay Iowa again in 2024. This time, with even more of my new best friends.