Sometimes We Quit

I think running and sports are about connection. They have the power to pull people together or (if we let it happen) to push people away. It is when it ends up pushing people away that they see no reason to continue being apart and quit. This is what happened to me and it has taken me decades to find my way back.

My Running Community

My mom used to talk about being a member of the cross country team. She would tell me of how it was a place of acceptance and friendship and of how they would support each other no matter their physical abilities. This sounded like a good place to be so I spoke to the coach before I started my freshman year of high school. I found out that there were no try-outs since (Surprise!) there were not that many people interested in distance running. Which was probably for the best since my whole recommendation up to that point was that “I could run for 30 minutes without stopping”.

Let me be clear, this was my first actual attempt at running just for the sake of running better. I had never run for fun and only personally knew one person that did it without being forced by a gym teacher. That person was my Aunt Babs and at the time I only knew that when she visited our house she would leave super early in the morning in her running clothes and come back after some unknown amount of time. To my mind she was superwoman and probably went like 10 miles everyday. I have since found out that she was just running to run and she didn’t know exactly how far she went. Her best guess at this point was that it was probably between 1-3 miles. As far as I am concerned, she is still superwoman.

Team practices had a “soft start” in late summer and a hard start once school began. I came to the summer practices and still did not feel like I was a real part of the team by the time school started. This is probably more due to the fact that I am an introvert and do not make lasting friendships quickly or easily. Don’t get me wrong, I am friendly and I love people but interacting with a lot of people is not something that gives me energy. I am married to an extrovert and it has more than underlined our differences in how we approach social engagements. I joined the cross country team with the expectation that we would be aware of each others struggles and supportive of their efforts no matter where they landed on the “speed scale”. Yeah, that wasn’t really how it worked out.

Our girls team had a runner that was crazy fast. She was Olympic hopeful fast. The runner herself was a nice girl who didn’t put on airs or anything but the focus of our coach left quite a bit to be desired. If you have been a part of any kind of team you know that the attitude of the coach is most often reflected in the attitude of the team. It seemed that if you were not fast enough to affect the teams score than it was nice that you were there but no one would miss you if you stopped showing up. Spoiler alert, I was not one of the ones affecting our score.

The scoring of cross country is an interesting phenomenon. How do you take a single person sport and come up with a way to “score” for a team? The way they do this is by adding up the place numbers of your top 5 runners. So a team with a runner in 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th and 8th place would actually beat a team that got 1st, 2nd, 5th, 11th and 12th. The 6th and 7th place runners are used as a tie breaker. In my freshman year I was 6th or 7th. About 3/4 of the way through my sophomore year I became 8th. Frankly, I always felt like an afterthought.

By the second half of my sophomore year I felt no connection to the team and had no love of running to help me push through. I was halfway through a race on our home course and decided I didn’t care. My solution was to pretend to fall down and be injured so I didn’t have to finish. No one questioned me or doubted that I was hurt. I saw the sports medicine guy when I got back to the school. He listened and “patched me back up”. Life went on as usual. Thinking back, I am sure he knew I hadn’t actually been hurt but possibly saw that the real struggle was not in my foot but in my head and heart. I know I raced and finished at least once more that season but once it was over I was done. I didn’t run again for 6 years.

I was on an internship in Anchorage Alaska with 11 other people from my major. We had made plans as a group to hang out once we all got off work. When I got off I found out that several of the people had gotten off early and decided to just leave instead of waiting. I was so mad and hurt I couldn’t see straight. This was once again proof that I was not an essential part of the group and I had had it. But where could I go? Who could I vent to? We only had one car and that was spoken for. I was in a different timezone than all MY people. I needed to get OUT so I put on some old shoes and went for a run.

My Alaskan Apartment

That run changed everything. Not because it gave me a of love running or even a like for it but it gave me a realization that I had never had before. I had never realized that I could just listen to my body and do what it needed. So that if I wanted to walk I could walk and if I wanted to run faster I could run faster. It seems simple and kind of like a duh thing but in retrospect it was an important thing for me to learn. I still had a long way to go before finding any kind of community in running but this run gave me a clean slate to work with. And I don’t think there is anything more beautiful or motivating than a clean slate.