I run. I run a lot. Less than some but more than others. And while I’ve accumulated my share of race bibs on our garage wall over the years, I’m by no means an elite runner. I’m just a soccer mom who’s grown to love everything about the sport.
Why do I run? Well that’s an easy one. I run because I never could and now I can. It’s simple, really. Growing up, I played plenty of school sports and ran my share of suicide drills on the soccer field, but I could never just get out and run—just didn’t have the endurance for it. Or so I thought.
See, I used to envy people I saw running. I envied the solitude and the strength and the peace of it. I wanted so badly to be a runner but had zero stamina. Plus, I was completely clueless about how to become one. But as I often say to my kids when they’re trying something new, We’re not all born knowing how to do everything. We’ve got to start from scratch and work our way up. Which is exactly what I did. I just got up one day, somewhere in my mid-twenties, and said I was going for a run. Which, of course, led to more runs. And even more runs.
Eventually, I trained for and ran my first road race. It was a 10K, so it was a little north of six miles. And yes, I finished, but the only thing behind me was the ambulance and some woman pushing 60 (I smoked her at the finish). But that didn’t matter. Next to childbirth, it was the most brutal and exhilarating thing I had ever done. And I immediately loved everything about it.
Then I stopped. For almost a decade. With two young kids to raise, I guess you could say life just got in the way. (No excuse, I’ve learned, but that’s how it happened.) Then, very spontaneously, almost 10 years after my first road race, on a family holiday to Florida, I went out for a walk that morphed into a run. And I haven’t stopped since.
Now I honestly can’t say why I started running again on that particular day, I just did. I suppose it was because I couldn’t sit there another minute watching people all around me do it anymore. And, because I realized that there was no good reason why it wasn’t still part of my life.
Look, I know a lot of us wait for the stars to align before we commit to change. Like we wait to start our diet until we can find a month on the calendar that starts on a Monday. Or we say we’ll reorganize our financial records as soon as we physically can’t fit another bank statement into the file folder. Or we promise ourselves we’ll update our resume just as soon as we lose our job. But that’s not how change has to work. We have the power to decide when and how we commit to something and it’s really not as tough as we make it out to be in our heads.
The truth is, we’re only ever one meal or one run or one bin of shredded bills away from being on track. Because as it turns out, it wasn’t that tough for me to put one foot in front of the other every day. Then again the next day. And the next.
And as the years and miles have passed, sure, I’ve gotten faster and stronger; but I don’t run for speed—I run for clarity. I mean, of course I run for the obvious reasons like good cardio, to keep my weight in check, and to stay fit, but mostly I run for my mental health.
Funnily enough, the more I run, the clearer things get. Actually, it’s pretty amazing what our mind conjures up when we’re alone in our own head for any real length of time. Even though life is moving all around us, we’re completely alone. It’s like we’re in some wacked-out version of solitary confinement that moves.
But I actually do much more than just run when I’m out there. I solve problems, make decisions, plan out my day, mediate fights between my kids—I pretty much run the gamut (no pun, I swear). I’m usually so engrossed in whatever I’m thinking about that it’s like I’m somewhere else altogether. It’s amazing I haven’t fallen on my face. Yet.
And what I’ve realized is that, for me, running is a metaphor for my life. (Of course I figured all this out while I was running.) We’re alone when we run, yet we’re surrounded by people most of the time. But they can’t run the run for us. No matter how much support we have, we have to do it on our own.
And there’s no perfect run, either. Like there’s no perfect life. My runs mimic my days—they’re never exactly perfect but some are as close as they can get. Some runs are epic, just like some days, and those are the ones we live for.
I run races I know I could never win, but I do it to challenge myself. Just like I’m trying (yes, still trying) to learn to play the guitar. And I’m not doing any of it to be Joni Mitchell or Joan Benoit; I’m just doing it to improve the quality of my days. Because whenever we’re pushed by things that challenge us, we usually respond by pushing back. And I think pushing back is exactly what helps us to keep moving forward.
Lisa Sugarman lives just north of Boston. She’s the mom of two daughters, the author of the nationally syndicated humor column It Is What It Is, and the author of LIFE: It Is What It Is and Untying Parent Anxiety: 18 Myths That Have You in Knots—And How to Get Free.
To read and discuss all her columns or get the skinny on all her books, visit her website at www.lisasugarman.com.
