Heather has written here about retiring from competitive running, and reading it got me thinking about why these stories are worth telling. Most of us came to running, or to whatever else ended up taking that much room in our lives, because something about it caught hold of us, and as Heather describes it, we fell in love. But things change, and what you loved at thirteen isn’t necessarily what’s in front of you thirty years later. It seems worth being honest about where you actually stand, because if what you fell in love with has changed, then your relationship to it probably has to change too. Heather’s piece speaks to that perfectly.
I’m only slightly exaggerating when I describe running as my first love.
As a kid, I counted down to track and field day so I could run the three loops of the playground
faster than the other kids in my grade. It didn’t matter to me that I was categorically terrible at
almost every other event, those loops made me feel alive in a way my kid-brain couldn’t
articulate. As I got older, I would jog with my dad around our neighborhood. I felt so adult
running alongside him, wearing my Levi’s jeans and Reebok Pump high tops (oh, the 80s!). At
13 he signed me up with our local track club, and 6 months later I was invited to train with a
group of 13–18-year-olds who were competing at the provincial, national, and international level
in middle distance track and cross-country races. I didn’t care that I was one of the slowest, one
of the youngest, one of the least coordinated, and one of the least talented. Where I generally
experienced my new and unwieldy six-foot-tall frame as a humiliating burden, running made my
body feel orderly and useful. I never skipped a workout or a training run, and trained six days a
week, for between two and three hours a day, for years. I was in LOVE. Like all first loves, it
was all consuming and slightly dysfunctional.
Let me explain
My adolescence coincided with the dominant logic that a runner’s body should look like a
skeleton covered with a condom (oh, the 90s!). Falling in love with running before the “me too”
era meant staying quiet when coaches took liberties with my body that make my stomach turn to
remember. I felt a deep humiliation when menstruation meant a poor workout, a slow race, or
stained shorts. It never occurred to me to ask for a less revealing uniform when my track club’s
standard issue bun huggers and bra top gave rise to the all-consuming kind of embarrassment
only felt by awkward teenage girls. Like many female runners, I was caught in the impossible
tension between feeling empowered when I ran and feeling utterly terrible when the grown men
around me used running to cut young women down to size. In my head, the gift of running came
with the condition of silence.
From the vantage point of adulthood, I can see that speaking up and running are not mutually
exclusive. And after over 30 years of running, the benefits far outweigh any drawbacks: fitness,
mental wellness, the elation of meeting a big goal, learning to fail and pick myself back up, and
that feeling of freedom I first felt as a kid. Some of my oldest and dearest friends are runners,
and we run together to this day. I wrote large portions of my dissertation and postdoc project in
my head while running and have become particularly skilled at sticking with something that I
suck at because I enjoy it. Thanks to running, I’m disciplined enough to run before sunrise, and
have the fitness to run a 25km trail race on minimal training because the post-race party looks
especially fun.
I joke that I’m retired from running even though I still run almost daily. In retirement, I rarely
race, I lift weights infrequently, I no longer own track spikes or racing shoes. I’ve never tried on
carbon plated shoes or used bicarb (ew). When Jacob and I first started talking about retirement,
it struck me that retiring wasn’t an active decision for me the way it is for him. I have not accomplished most of my goals, nor have I hit a major milestone. In truth, I didn’t think there
wasn’t anything for me to really retire from. At my peak, I was a middle of the pack runner at
any national championship meet qualified for. There were several occasions when I didn’t race at
a national meet because flying across the country to be in the middle of the pack didn’t make
financial sense. I was the kind of runner whose shuffling gait brought the leaders’ talent into
sharp relief. Like other retired runners, I have unmet goals (the elusive sub 1:20 half marathon,
top 20 at the national cross-country championships, and a sub 17:30 5km, for example), but
retirement hasn’t had a significant impact on my daily life.
For me, retirement is an identity shift, akin to an amicable breakup after love has faded away.
Like admitting you’ve fallen out of love, it took me a while to accept my feelings had changed. I
don’t have any competitive fire, I don’t give a fart what my current 5km time is, and when I do
race, I often forget to look at the results. At the ripe old age of 44, chasing goals that I don’t care
about isn’t how I want to spend my free time.
The identity shift of retirement has meant working with a counsellor to sort through the scars left
by male coaches, and accepting that my body should not, in fact, look like a prophylactic-
wearing skeleton even though that mental image is objectively hilarious. Retiring means
donating clothes from a time when I was 25lbs lighter and trying to see that weight gain as a
good thing. It means throwing out my old rule that anything less than a 45-minute run, unless it’s
a morning double, is a waste of time. Ultimately, retiring is something I’ll probably negotiate for
a while because of the dysfunction inherent to my first love. I’m happy to report that I’m
developing a healthier relationship with running. My friends know I’m always up for 400m
repeats at the track or a good long tempo run. While I run these far slower now, I do them with
just as much enthusiasm. Like any love, the good bits become a part of you.
