Why I Started Running

There’s a brand I love. It’s called On. Training, walking around town, more often than not, it’s On on my feet.

If you ask me why, I can’t really tell you. I could list reasons. The way they feel. The way they look. But that would be me dressing it up after the fact.

The truth is simpler. I just love them.

My family knows this. My friends know it. Former coworkers, former students. Everyone who knows me knows I love this brand. Putting them on lifts something in me.

I want to work with On. Ever since I started posting online, it’s been there.

There’s just one problem. A small one. Or maybe the biggest one of all.

On was born from running. And running is the one thing I’ve always avoided.

The Gun

I started track in elementary school. I followed my older brother into the club.

At first I just tagged along. Watched him train. Ran beside him sometimes, half playing. Back then, running was still fun.

Once I joined for real and started training with everyone, the fun drained out of it.

My brother was fast. My father had been fast. I wasn’t. I was a little chubby, a little slow. Maybe I could have enjoyed it if no one was being compared. But that wasn’t how it went.

I dreaded the races. “On your marks. Set.” Then the gun. Everyone breaking forward in the same instant, the whole thing decided in seconds.

For the fast kids, the ones who loved to compete, I’m sure it was fun. For me it was just hard, and I was bad at it.

The fast brother. The slow younger one. The great father, and a son who wasn’t much.

From elementary school on, that was always somewhere in my head.

The Event I Could Stand

There was one event I didn’t hate. The long jump.

You still run, but not far. And more than anything, there’s no gun. No line of bodies launching at the same second.

You go on your own timing. You decide. It suited me. And one more thing. Neither my brother nor my father had done it.

I chose it the way you choose an exit. Quietly, while no one’s looking. Running, I was bad at. Jumping, I was a little good at. And at some meet too small to count, I won.

I told myself I’d quit in middle school. I didn’t. I told myself I’d quit in high school. I didn’t. I never won anything that mattered, but I still made it to nationals, in middle school and again in high school.

That wasn’t my talent. It was the teammates, the coaches, and the parents I was lucky to have.

I kept going in university too, surrounded by people on a completely different level. A bad back I’d carried since high school finally ended it. I retired without ever leaving a result I was happy with.

The one thing that saved me was that I’d fallen in love with reading. One day I was a track athlete, and the next, like a different person, I simply stopped.

What I Kept Choosing

I’ve written about reading before. It cracked the world open and showed me everything outside of sport.

After I started working as a teacher, I found the gym, too. I fell for it. Same as the long jump, it suited me. My own pace. No winning, no losing. If there is a winner, the only opponent is me.

And there’s one more thing I’d never once touched, one thing I kept a lid on my whole life. Running.

All those years in the sport, with a brother and a father who were far better at it than I ever was, and I never once liked it.

I made it a joke. “I picked long jump because I hate running.” “I did track, but I can’t run.” Always good for a laugh.

But it was never a joke. It was the one wall I never faced. The quest I left unopened.

Quitting track. Leaving teaching. Starting to post online, watching a few people begin to follow. The more seriously I thought about what comes next, the more one thing sat there in the back of my mind.

It’s time to face running.

And this isn’t about health.

Maybe it’s about finally making peace with something I’ve spent years avoiding.

Day One

So I started.

Yesterday. Four kilometers, slow. Really slow. Embarrassingly slow.

I was a sprinter, more or less. Short distances, sharp efforts. Now here I am, running long and slow. No gun. No competitors. No father. No brother. Just me and the road.

Even so, it was hard. I’ll be honest, I walked. More than once. It was just too much.

When I reached the spot I’d decided would be the finish, something cleared. A lightness. I was glad I’d started.

But that wasn’t the whole of it. Under the lightness was frustration. I felt pathetic. This distance. This pace. And here I was, gassed.

The next morning, today, the soreness was brutal. I went out and ran anyway.

Today I didn’t walk. I ran the whole way. A small thing. But I was proud of it. This is how it’s built, I thought. One run at a time.

There’s a long way to go. Still, that sweat running off me, I can’t put it into words. The thing I’d spent so many years avoiding is now moving something in me I don’t have words for.

For Now

So there it is. I’ll keep running. Maybe it’ll lead me to On. Maybe it won’t.

But for the first time in my life, I’m running toward something instead of away from it.

And for now, that’s enough.