My “Why”

I get asked a lot of questions about when I started running, how I started, why I started. The truth is, I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t run. I do remember the time when I couldn’t run and when it was taken away from me though. Taken away from me because of my eating disorder. A lot of things in my life were taken away from me because of my eating disorder, and I didn’t realize until years later of being broken from under it how much it had inhabited me from the life I had once known. 

Now… back to the when. I truly started running long distances because my friend Colleen joined the cross-country team. Whatever Colleen did, I wanted to do too. Then, I ran in high school, basically to skip school and hang out with friends at cross-country meets, until my last year when something flipped in me. I gave it more effort, and I wasn’t half bad. I started really training, overtraining really, and this is how my complicated relationship with running and food began. 

Once I graduated, I kept racing on my own and I loved it. It got to a point though where the eating disorder completely took over my ability to do anything else and before long, I was alone, away from my family and friends at university and so scared. Maybe I ran to cope with those feelings. Maybe I still run to cope with feelings. But I was controlling what I ate, or didn’t eat, while I pounded the pavement day in and day out. Soon I became so exhausted that I couldn’t get out of bed, and I knew I needed help to get back to my life. 

The day I was admitted as an inpatient, I hung some of my race bibs up on the wall. I wanted to remind myself of my “why”. Why I wanted to get better, why I wanted to live a normal life again, why I wanted to be healthy. One of my nurses came into my room and asked me why I was hanging them up and told me it probably wasn’t a good idea. That I would most likely never run again. That only fueled my fire. 

While I didn’t return to running right away, to make sure I was truly ready to separate the eating disorder from the sport to do it in a healthy way, I did come back. And boy, it was worth it. After so many years of being back, this past one I finally decided to tackle my first marathon. I’ve now done three.

This last one I was seeing people talk about their “why” for doing the race. I kept thinking back to that day in the hospital hanging race bibs on the wall, after having to defer my second term of university to fight the hardest fight I have ever fought. My why is simple. I will always run and race – as long as my body lets me. It is a privilege to be able to do the thing that I love, in a healthy way, because there was a time that I couldn’t. So, when I lace up my shoes, and I heel at that start line, I am emotional and so grateful that I am still able to come back to running to get out of my head and into my body. 

For so long, I thought there was shame around how much I ran and trained, but I’ve realized that my body is capable of so many things -- that same body that I used to hate so desperately and tried to change. That those race bibs I hung on the wall and yearned to pin back on a shirt one day, those days are back, they are so back. 

That that eating disorder voice is silenced and I GET to run now…I don’t HAVE to run anymore.