I was reflecting today on my decision to give up pause running and the overwhelming feeling was that a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. A relief to not be fighting the losing battle that I’d been in since August time last year. Set back after set back…. injury, illness, illness, injury, rinse and repeat… pushing me back even further and to be perfectly honest I just didn’t have it in me any more to experience another set back. If doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome is the definition of madness then I’d been driven crazy by running.
I thought I’d be itching to get back out, craving the sensations that running gives me, desperate to put my trainers back on but instead the urge just hasn’t been there. I thought I’d have felt more disappointment at seeing social media posts of people out running but I felt nothing other than a ‘well done them’ reaction.
Maybe running had become a burden. It is my job as a physio to treat broken runners. My research project is about how to prevent broken runners. My social media is connected to running and my social media feeds are heavily about running. I had placed weight of expectation on myself regarding running in my life in more ways than one. But who was there to pick me up when running was ruining me? Me. I had to make the decision to step back and I believe it’s the healthiest thing I could have done.
I’ve actually got a bit tired of it all on social media and how it was making me feel: running posts about distances run in a month, pace, calories burnt, numbers of races and numbers of kudos and followers, screenshots of Strava stats, Twitter trolls with anonymous accounts pulling other people down for their lack of speed or for what they choose to wear. I found myself resenting it all and feeling angry. None of us are fucking Olympians so what the fuck are we doing and why are we so intent on watching each other and telling each other how we should be running? Why does every run have to have some inspirational message or intention? Why has running become so weighted and heavy for me? I know that running has to be physically hard occasionally and I have no fear of physically hard training, in fact I embrace that feeling, I quite like it, but it had become ‘hard’ in a different way. This week I was reminded of a quote from one of the focus groups I did with physios for my project and it really stuck with me:
‘…there’s not that many people out there for kind of the love of running and just getting out to move across the landscape…it’s all very competitive and timed and focus driven rather than listening to what your body says on a particular day…’
I’ve always said that I run for the love of running and I feel like I lost sight of that in recent months. I’d also stopped listening to what my body was telling me and my body has been screaming at me for months that running just wasn’t working for me. Pressure to appear to be posting about running or to be part of an online community, to fit in and ‘be liked’ and be part of social media conversations took over and that’s just not me. I want to be able to run and find the void again. I want to run and fall into a trance and wake up having run for miles without realising how far I’ve come. I want to run and it feel so effortless that it feels like my soul has left my body and is floating up in the clouds, the way it felt over a year ago. But right now when I run my heart feels heavy with the weight of my own crushing expectations and the frustration that I keep hitting an invisible barrier that I just can’t seem to break through.
I said to my husband today that I think I’ve given up running and he just laughed and said ‘no you haven’t you’ve just stopped for a bit’. And I think that is the answer to this madness I’ve made for myself. To stop for a bit, to do something different, remove the burden, let myself get through the twilight months of my PhD and eventually come back to running and discover the love for it again.
Maybe. Possibly. Never say never.
Run My Own Way 