Attempting Movement, Part 2: Creating a Sustainable Running Practice

A three-part series on how becoming friends with my body unlocked a lasting love for movement.

This is part two of a three-part series chronicling my attempt at movement. To start at part one, click here.

Delirious after finally hitting a runner’s high.

By the time I entered my running attempt in the fall, my attitude toward the body had shifted dramatically. Showing up on the mat every day to practice yoga had forced me to adopt the habit of checking in with myself and listening, really listening, to how my body was feeling and what it was craving. I learned how to honor whatever feedback I received, to accept my body’s capacity and limitations, even if only to avoid the risk of injury if I pushed further or harder.

Although all of this buoyed me as the desire to try running again returned, I didn’t set out purposefully to choose a more loving approach toward running. Without even giving it much thought, I decided to discard every rule I knew about running and instead tune into my body to find what felt doable. I did it simply because it was what felt most natural after months of listening to my body in yoga. When I tuned in and listened, I found that what felt doable was one mile. One mile, a few times a week, no schedule or training regimen, no goals or timing, and no pressure to increase mileage. Just a mile and me, over and over, whenever I felt like it.

Week one came and went. Then another. The fateful three-week mark passed, and still I kept running.

The day arrived when one mile finally felt easy. Soon I felt like going for another block, so I did. A week later, I added another. A mile became two, became three, and eventually became four. Several months passed, and the depth of winter approached, yet I kept running. Even as the temperature dropped to single digits and dark, icy mornings greeted me with a gasp, I couldn’t stop running.

I felt proud of myself, tender toward the progress, but the more I ran, the more I was pressured to formalize my running to fall in line more with traditional advice. People would offer tips on how to increase my strength or explain why I needed to add hills and speed intervals to improve my pace. They had ideas about how best to train for a race, and also that I should be training for a race—after all, what other reason was there to keep running? I was told to join a running group and create a schedule, that I should be doing supplemental workouts and fueling in a specific way. Everyone, it seemed, thought I should be running differently. Of all the advice that I received, not a single person told me to do the one thing that was working for me: to check in with the body each day, ask what it was capable of, and then do only that.

I knew enough by then to know that if I changed a single thing, I’d stop running.

In the middle of that cold, long winter, I not only kept running beyond three weeks for the first time, but I also finally found joy in the practice. Occasionally, I hit something that felt close to the runner’s high I had always heard about, all without any harsh Bible verses or self-loathing. Instead, what blossomed from that period of running was a continued change in the fundamental way I viewed my body.

Before, I had only ever seen the body as a secondary element. The mind was always more important. So too the soul. Even in my early stages of religious deconstruction, I bypassed the body as no more than a temporary shell, a slowly degrading vessel that housed the more vital elements of the self. I had never given my body much of a choice in anything—I didn’t even know it had anything to say. Carrying the yoga practice of listening to the body into my running attempt showed me just how much my body actually had to say. It was constantly speaking if I could just learn how to pay attention and hear it.

Each morning, I would enter into what I came to refer to as a peaceful negotiation with the body to uncover what was possible that day. Sometimes the body spoke nothing at all, but often it did, and often it differed from what the mind thought we *should* be doing. Occasionally, I compromised, but most days the body won out, and rightly so. I was learning how to treat my body as a friend, and you cannot befriend someone without listening to them and acting according to what you learn from that listening.

Even though I felt like a runner for the first time that winter, it was hard to call myself one. It still is. Four years later, I’m still slow, and I still refuse to follow a set schedule. I don’t have an interest in running with others, running competitively, or running according to a training schedule—all of which frequently cross my screen and conversations as “must-dos” and “shoulds.” To some, it appears that I am without self-discipline, letting the body dictate each day the distance and degree of difficulty for the run. Sometimes I consider all this and feel like a fraud to call myself a runner, but as soon as I try to do it differently, to force something unnatural on my body, the trust I’ve built up with myself disappears, and I lose the drive to run.

Recently, I picked running back up again after taking a few months off to recover from a bout of illness. On my first five-mile run, I really and truly hit a runner’s high. I was so happy, I felt almost delirious. I actually laughed out loud! I had not pushed toward that five-mile mark but let it arrive naturally and slowly over several months. In the wonder of it all, I looked down at my body and felt genuinely proud of it. Gone was the desire to dominate or subdue; I simply felt proud. Against all the religious conditioning of my youth and all the pressure of the running world, I managed to fall in love with the sport by treating my body as a friend. Together, we created a running practice that finally stuck after a decade and a half of trying and failing.

Next week: My current running streak and a continued evolution in my relationship with the body.