Running fast and thinking slow 🧠
And challenging the stories we tell ourselves
Last week, my husband disputed the years I thought we had a gym membership. I insisted it was 2012, he claimed the gym wasn’t open until we moved into our current house in 2014. Our email inboxes confirmed both of us were wrong—2013 is the year we joined, leaving me wondering:
If I wasn’t using the elliptical during the six months I was in-between jobs, what on earth was I doing for my workouts?
Turns out I was running—and I had completely forgotten about it.
I have always despised running. In 2009, my dad and brother started running half marathons and would occasionally rope me into joining their practice runs—I sputtered and coughed through most of them. A year later, I made a goal to run a 5k with my best friend, got too caught up in writing my master’s thesis to properly train, and got winded by the first (very hilly) mile.
After eating my weight in paté on my honeymoon in 2011, I came home and sought a personal trainer who was a runner. When the weather was nice, we would do our sessions at a nearby park, where the trees are a century year old and the trails are so steep, the middle school cross-country team she coaches dubbed one of them Suicide Hill—I quickly learned to run up, but walk down, lest I wanted to bury my face in the dirt.
You rarely invest time in learning something that you loathe—so maybe, somewhere buried in my subconscious, there was a deep desire to love.
Yet despite those experiences, I never considered myself a runner. Last year, I asked a mom friend/running coach for advice, who shrugged and said she has “always loved running.” Then I combed through Haruki Murakami’s memoir on running for inspiration, only to be intimidated by the amount of marathons this man has run (and the amount of pain he endured to finish them).
What exactly was it going to take to get past my self-perception of
being a terrible athlete?
Based on my goal for 2025, it didn’t look like I have any choice in matter. Last weekend marked the first time I went running in over a decade—I expected jabbing pain in my side, shortness of breath, and overall humiliation of getting passed by others. To my surprise, none of these things happened. Occasionally I veer to the left of the man who is walking when I’m sprinting for 90 seconds, and the guy who’s been at the track since before I arrived doesn’t spare a second glance when he passes me during a rest lap.
When the finishing timer dings, I’m disappointed—and don’t realize how exhausted I am when I sit down later to write. Nevertheless, I churn out 500 words, knowing that I’ll maybe get one decent fragment of an idea in that, and overhaul the entire thing to revolve around that one idea.
Finally, I realize that much like running, my best performance comes out in short bursts. That the most provocative ideas only emerge when I put time constraints on my efforts, aiming for intensity over endurance. That you don’t have to have dozens of medals on display to call yourself a runner, or publications to your name to call yourself a writer.
Maybe I’ve been a runner this entire time—and have just waiting for my heart to catch up with my head.
Now over to you 💬
Do you love or loathe running? Do you prefer to run or write in short bursts, or long, sustained periods of time? Have you ever believed something about yourself that turned to be false?
Leave me a comment and let me know.
Previously on The Write-Life Balance ⏪
I recently saw an email about Quitter’s Day, celebrating the time people throw the towel in for their New Year’s Resolutions 😬 Tomorrow is Lunar New Year, so I say there is still definitely time to nail down or (re)start your 2025 goals. Here is mine.
Links for January 🔗
🧧 So excited to build these red envelopes for with my daughter’s classmates this afternoon.
🛍️ The world’s most perfect track jacket—and trust me, I’ve owned a lot of mediocre ones.
🤐 Sorry not sorry for all the social invites I will probably turn down this year.
🏃🏻♀️ Went down the running bpm rabbit hole and made playlists to fit my mood while maintaining my pace. Send me your recs!
🐃 I’m most impressed that he found a water buffalo for the shot.
Chúc mừng năm mới,
Sophia :)