How running saved me
It’s impossible to excel at any physical activity while slowly and deliberately killing yourself.
I’ve been a runner for as long as I can remember, always savoring the time I can disappear in rhythm and oxygen and sometimes pain that exists in a place separate from other experiences. Physical activity is how I deal with things; often I run because I want to run away.
I still ran while eating and purging less than 1,000 calories a day. For a long time, my daily workout schedule included six to eight miles of running and an hour of yoga. If I couldn’t get a run in before or after work, I ran to happy hours and going away parties, baseball games and brunch. Workout clothes became the dress code friends expected, and I built a wardrobe of spandex that could pass for presentable (by San Francisco standards) in cocktail bars.
If a day went by that I didn’t run, I didn’t eat. My heart beat too fast, and my skin buzzed, desperate for activity. The next day, I would run six to eight miles, twice.
There was no point to me running so much, beyond my belief that if I didn’t, I had failed. Hours spent exercising were good for me, I thought, and I needed to be good at something. But you can’t become faster or stronger when you prevent nutrients from entering your body, and don’t give it time to strengthen itself.
When I started therapy (which I still run to each week), my therapist asked what I liked about myself. “My hair and running,” I said. It took four months before I understood the thing I loved was hurting me.
My predisposition to perfection is fuel for my eating disorder and exercise addiction, and I can’t divorce myself from that craving and the passions and behaviors that I’ve relied on like a crutch for mental and physical reassurance that everything will be OK.
Instead, once the problem surfaced, I used it as an opportunity to test myself and my willingness to recover.
Running requires fuel—food is fuel. I don’t have a particularly healthy relationship with food, and setting a running goal was a way I could strengthen that relationship, and find balance in exercise.
In January, I signed up for the San Francisco Half Marathon. I set a training plan that included rest days, even though the race was seven months away. The training wasn’t for the race; I could have easily ran 13.1 miles when I signed up. I trained for my body and my brain and my heart.
I understand a training plan when it tells me not to run, because it is written by someone who knows more about the human body than I do.
Eventually, I listened to it, though I don’t technically take “rest days,” since I still do interval yoga every day. But I am faster, I feel stronger, and I can eat more without fear. The buzzy feeling that results from skipping a run isn’t as frequent.
I am on a long path to recovery; my training plan helped my addiction to exercise, but my relationship with food (and myself) is still rather tumultuous. I’m writing this before my half so no matter what time I cross the finish line, my own words can remind me that speed isn’t everything.
On Sunday, I will be 13.1 miles closer to recovery.
