on running

& choosing to be excited in the face of uncertainty

content note: eating disorders

Two days ago I went for a run. The last time my running app logged a run was on July 17, 2023. When I opened the app, I was worried I wouldn’t remember my password, but luckily we live in the future and my face got me in. Perhaps Face ID could sense my desperation—I was eager to finally use up the type of energy that can only be expended with a run, and I’d finally worked up the courage to try again.

July 17 is an important day for me. For starters, I saw Justin Bieber on July 17, 2013—a whole decade before my last run—and if you knew me as a tweenager, you’d know why I’ll never forget this date. I see the number 717 everywhere—on digital clocks, timers, in license plates, at the bottom of receipts. One time when I was at a regatta in high school, a teammate of mine called me when she saw 717 carved into the trunk of a tree. We had just been talking about how we each see 717 on a regular basis. 

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Like most people who were looking for a way to escape, running was what allowed me to show myself what my body was capable of during the first stages of lockdown in 2020. I’d set out on a run in the afternoon once my online classes ended. I’d run to the park I played in as a kid and finish it off by running circles around my backyard. My neighbors probably thought I was insane, running laps around the garage and then back behind the pool. Running, along with baking projects and dinner recipes, were proof that I could use my time productively during a period when I thought life as I knew it was over. A deadly disease had forced me out of New York, a place where I thought I was going to be forever. But I was back to calling my childhood bedroom—the one with dark purple walls and a working fireplace—home. It was everything I didn’t want at the time, but it also wasn’t the end of the world.

In 2020 and 2021 I felt like I couldn’t do anything. A cloud of impossibility loomed over me each day. I was missing out on the years that were supposed to be even better than high school (god I hoped they were going to be), but I was back home sleeping in the very bed I slept in every other year of my life. I was also in the midst of learning that I had lived the past four years as a person with an eating disorder. It was shocking at the time because I loved food. The views I had on my physical appearance were horrible—textbook body dysmorphia that kept me up at night. I forced myself to wear jeans each day, even though they were uncomfortable, because wearing jeans made me feel like I was doing productive work even though I was studying places in New York City that had influenced great poets all from the comfort of my childhood home. But the jeans hurt. And they hurt mainly because I had grown out of them, but they also hurt because they reminded me of everything I was not but wanted to be: I wanted to be this size, but in reality I was another. I wanted to be the girl who bought these jeans when she lived in New York and could walk to flagship stores on Broadway (what a silly desire). I wanted to be someone who still worked at a cool restaurant. I just wanted to be anywhere other than where my feet were. 

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“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional,” writes Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I have never read this book, but Murakami is a writer I mean to read all the time. I came across this quote the afternoon before my run the other day in Jenny Rosenstrach’s Dinner: A Love Story, but I wish I knew it back when I began running for fun during the pandemic. It contains so much, but it’s so simple. Pain is a universal experience, but how we react to it is what sets us apart from the person next to us. 

I chose running as a way to escape the pain I was feeling when I was cooped up in my childhood home when I was meant to be exploring the world and finding myself in the midst of it. But inevitably, running was painful. Whether I had stretched enough or not, I’d always come home with a crick in my neck or tightness in my hips. The same thing happened the other day, and I woke up and immediately remembered that I had gone for a run the day before. On those earliest “fun runs,” as I called them, I had to remind myself that it was as easy as putting one foot in front of the other. I did not run to make certain time like I had when I was training for crew run tests. I ran because it allowed me to be somewhere where my feet were not. When I was running, I forgot what size the jeans I so desperately wanted to fit in were. I didn’t think about whether my lunch was “good” or “bad”—I just wondered if it was enough to get me through the next mile. And at the end of my run, I triumphed in what my body was capable of—running for fun and wanting to do it all over again the next day. Something I never thought I would want to do. I chose not to suffer through it, and instead I was able to overcome a lot more than the general aches and pains of the sport.

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Like running, cooking is full of human truths. You can either do it or not, and most people can do both of these things once they accept that it won’t be perfect each time. In addition to proving to yourself that you can in fact do it, with both running and cooking, you must accept whether you love or hate these things. Putting meals together, picking out a restaurant for a special occasion used to cause me so much pain when I was gripped by the behaviors of my eating disorder, but once I accepted that no way of eating was ever going to be “perfect,” food became a way to express myself. Cooking was a way to use my hands and not be glued to my phone. I was doing something good with them, and in a similar way, I was using my legs for good too—escaping my thoughts and the things I was convinced my body could not be—healthy, beautiful, inspiring, capable. In place of suffering I chose to flourish instead. 

I got back into the kitchen and taught myself how to do all kinds of things—things that seem so rudimentary to me now, but back then they were skills I was proud of. Cooking salmon, cooking chicken. Roasting and baking. Making super flaky biscuits and pillowy tart dough. Placing squash, zucchini, and tomatoes in just the right order to make the ratatouille from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It was exciting, it was the thing that lit me up, and at one point I felt like my horrible relationship with food had caught on fire and burnt to the ground.

A goal I have for this twenty-fifth year of life I find myself in is working on being more excited. When I think of how to accomplish this goal, it’s simple. Simply choosing to be excited. Choosing to not suffer through whatever is causing me “pain”—hunting for a job that I’m passionate about, keeping house with another person, figuring out where to park on street cleaning day (my car got towed this week). It can all be so exciting if we want it to be.

Maybe it’s because my boyfriend is a teacher, but September often feels like the start of the new year. It’s a good time to reflect on what you have accomplished in the past nine months before January rolls along and asks you to consider all that you did or did not do in the preceding year. There are many personal and professional goals I wish to see completed by the start of 2025, and the overarching theme is excitement. Instead of being paralyzed by having no concrete plan for the next chapter of my life, I’m choosing to be excited by it and all the opportunities that it brings and choosing to just run with it.

Hi everyone! This is a little different than what you’re used to getting here, but I’m challenging myself to write more and to write about topics other than food. I hope you’ll still enjoy! If you liked this piece please feel free to share it with a friend! xoxo!