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Last winter when my sister and I were driving back to Boston from a Christmas spent in Indiana, I posted an Ask Us Anything on my Instagram stories. Most of the questions from friends were fun, easy answers (go-to coffee order, fav children’s book, biggest pet peeve). But somewhere around hour 11, an old high school teammate who’s kept up with my running career for the last decade asked about my current relationship with running.
I typed up an answer about how my relationship to running is evolving and that I’m prioritizing recovery and “bringing running along for the ride.” That’s all technically true, but privately, I have always framed my return to running in simpler, grander terms: as a comeback story.
The world loves a comeback story. It doesn’t matter that it’s cliched and overdone because it’s so satisfying when someone achieves what they are “meant” to achieve after a setback. Order is restored when “the deserving” arrive. The comeback story is the fulfillment of destiny within a capitalist framework. It upholds the myth of meritocracy: if you work hard enough, no matter your obstacles, no matter where you come from, you will succeed in the end. It plays into the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps American ideal that any challenge is surmountable. From a young age, we’re socialized to pursue the comeback story, to mold our lives to it.
Of course, the comeback story presupposes that our relationship with the activity will continue. When I took a semi-voluntary break from running a little over a year ago, it was tolerable because I knew—I fucking knew—I’d come back to it. I have said before that I cannot imagine my life without running, and that’s because it has been my foundation for so long. I’ve built my life around my training and allowed running to dictate the architecture of my days. Running has dictated what and when and how I eat. My bedtime. My social life. I’ve met the majority of my friends through running. I have dated more runners than I’d care to admit. “Runner” has long been my primary identifier.
The arc of the comeback has kept me going through the frustrating months of rebuilding lost fitness, rehabbing old injuries and new flare ups, adjusting to the feeling of running in a bigger body. It is constantly discouraging to feel like I am starting from scratch, to know how far I am from how fast I could run two years ago, and that’s why the comeback story is powerful: it promises that everything will be “worth it” once I succeed.
The little comeback graph I drew above illustrates the best-case scenario. Most paths don’t look that neat and people don’t always make it to the summit of the comeback.
People stop all the time and for good reasons. For over thirteen years of running, I was able to keep going while people around me stopped. I saw teammates limp through chronic injuries before they finally quit. Friends suffered from eating disorders but weren’t supported or offered resources or help and so got left behind. Runners in the post-collegiate club scene never found the right community, so ran alone, then not at all. People just got tired. This sport chews people up and spits them out. It never really bothered me that people got left behind until I was one of the people getting left behind.
And here again, I’ve chosen to frame stopping/quitting/doing less as a loss, when in some cases, there might be more to gain from letting go. The comeback story does not make room for the calculation of all the costs of returning to a high level of commitment and deciding that these costs are too high. That they are not worth it.
Recently, I’ve been wondering if I want to take a step back. I haven’t made a secret of the fact that I’ve been struggling with my relationship to running, and I’ve alluded to it in a number of recent essays (asking myself how serious I want to be, contemplating the time I devoted to running in college that could have gone to other pursuits, imagining my future self as my fastest self, both wanting to hold onto and let go of high school running memorabilia).
Running asks for so much. I have spent years pouring and pouring my whole damn self into it, and when it works out, when I run my fastest or have a breakthrough, the feeling is unparalleled. But when I’m stuck in a loop of comparing myself to my old times, feeling joyless and downtrodden every run, in physical pain because my chronic foot injuries still haven’t healed, it’s hard to justify pouring that much into something that isn’t giving me life. The vision of the comeback can only sustain me for so long.
When I was feeling particularly discouraged this past weekend after a run where I forced myself to go faster and longer than I wanted to and then cried about how bad it felt (laughing at myself now), two friends gave me some excellent advice.
One friend reminded me that I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Even myself.
A huge dimension of the comeback story I’ve invented is about proving a point. I want to show to the world that I can be just as fast as I had been, but now recovered—doing it the right way. But more importantly, I have long long made the calculation for myself that recovery will only be “worth it” if I can be as fast as I want to be. That particular comeback story reeks of disordered thinking, and allows me to compromise on happiness and general health in the name of running fast (a pretty narrow vision of what recovery could look like).
Which is where my other friend’s advice comes in: that I may still have a comeback story, just not on the timeline or in the way I might expect. This friend suggested that the real comeback is getting to a starting line happy and healthy. Or just being happy and healthy, maybe even without the starting line.
The word “comeback” implies a return to a starting place. And that’s not what I want either. Since I’ve started running again, I’ve had it in my head that I need to find a different approach to the sport. I’ve been looking for this alternative approach like it’s some big secret, but I think it’s as simple as configuring my life so that running is not the foundation. This is not actually simple, given that I’ve never done it before, but I’m starting to gain a better sense of what that life could look like.
This summer, I’m moving to California to start a graduate program in journalism at UC Berkeley (more thoughts on this soon!). I don’t think I need to move across the country in order to reconfigure my life, but it certainly does provide an opportunity to begin again. In 2018, I moved to Boston for a job, but I still felt like running was my main thing; I haven’t loved any of my jobs in this city, so it was natural to focus my life elsewhere. But now I’m moving to pursue a career I really believe in. And I don’t want running to be my main thing. I want it to be a fun thing. A back pocket thing. A thing that doesn’t prevent me from being fully present in my life (and boy has running prevented me from being fully present in the past).
Is this whole thing a long-winded attempt to convince myself to quit competitive running? I don’t think so. More to remind myself that I’m going on an adventure. That running will always be there, but (for me at least) it was never a solid foundation for a life, much less a full one.
Fortnightly Faves
I’ve never been to Angel’s Share (and now I won’t have the chance), but I loved these two tributes written after the bar’s closing—one by Helena Fitzgerald who writes Griefbacon, and one by Stella Cabot Wilson for Catapult.
In honor of Bitch Media’s 25 years of feminist writing that are sadly coming to a close, I’m recommending this interview from last May with Moya Bailey about her book Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance.
I went to a Perfume Genius concert in Boston last week and it was one of the best shows I've ever seen in my life. If you ever have the opportunity to see him live, go. Inspired by that performance, here’s an always-favorite:
This thought-provoking perspective on the “fairness” of standardized testing by Kathryn Paige Harden for The Atlantic.
This poem (in honor of NaPoWriMo) that I can’t stop thinking about:
The Wrong Horses i bet on the wrong horses—forlorn and blue the way horses go blue when, after living a life running through the river, the river, suddenly, is taken away, turned to steam. dollars, my coins, every future poured into lead-colored, light-colored equarian boys, broken now, though not useless, for i can still point and say, You see, don't you? I have to build a new life. I must make myself indecent. I must fashion a gown to wear atop the animal I have yet to meet, learn to ride, conquer its muscle, its will. this will work by the end of it. a soul will stand up inside me, eventually, like a bone. Bernard Ferguson (2022)
So good. Running is a great metaphor for life in so many ways. Can’t wait to hear about your grad school journey!!
It’s interesting to see how our relationship with what defines us changes. And then who are we when we can’t return to that former glory?! Great piece and so relatable. Good luck on the move and grad school!