I Can Finally Call Myself a Runner
It’s not about looking pretty
Sometime around last October or November, I went to the doctor. I’m in my early thirties and generally pretty healthy, but I had regularly been falling asleep in my office after teaching, sometimes for up to an hour. I’d still want to go to bed at 8:30pm. I’d gained a significant amount of weight in a month, too, and my face was weirdly breaking out.
After scouring the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic websites, I diagnosed myself with anemia or hypothyroidism, or possibly both. And I was ready for some bloodwork.
My doctor did order some labs, but I didn’t have anemia or thyroid issues. My iron levels were on the low side, but they had always been low.
I reluctantly ended several years of vegetarian eating and reintroduced some meat in my diet to see if that would help. It didn’t.
Then someone lent me Running by Lindsey A. Freeman.
This colleague was training for the same race that I had run in spring 2023 — the Publix Gasparilla Distance Classic 15k — when he passed me this book, a running handbook written by a queer academic writer and…
