Running and the Power of Weakness 

I first started running in earnest in my late twenties in New York City, where I had been living for several years. I was living near Central Park and thought I’d complement my gym routine with a more cardiovascular, outdoorsy, and social form of fitness. I signed up for a New York Road Runner group training program, which included a couple organized runs per week. I might supplement the NYRR runs with one or two solo runs around Central Park throughout the week. I eventually did a little racing, and became a fairly consistent 20 minute 5K’er. I loved getting outside and the mental release that running provided, but I was immature and inconsistent with my training and kept getting injured: shin splints, severe knee pain, foot fractures. I often popped 200-800 milligrams of ibuprofen before a run just to make the pain bearable. After a year or two of on-again, off-again running, I decided the sport’s risk-reward ratio sucked. Around late 2006, I stashed my shoes and resolved that running was not for me. I looked and felt good enough walking and going to the gym a few times a week. I didn’t need the pain.  

In 2017, I was experiencing a different type of pain stemming from a harrowing divorce process. My ex-wife and my lawyers were bleeding us dry, causing a litigation maelstrom that was rapidly depleting our limited sanity and wealth. One spring day, I was sitting at my kitchen table and I got one of countless expensive emails from my lawyer—about pickup time coordination, about who’s going to pay for school lunches…there was no issue too trivial for the lawyers to collect fees on. I was so stressed out that I felt like jumping out of my skin. I needed relief, but lifting heavy weights, going for a long walk, or talking or writing —my primary stress relievers —didn’t seem potent enough. I saw three alternatives for relief:  

1. Commit suicide. While this approach might prove effective, I loved (and love) life on balance, and had no interest in ending it prematurely. 
2. Try heroin. I was sober from alcohol and other substances stronger than caffeine for 18 years at this point, and most chemical options were off my list of stress relievers. But I never tried heroin, which, from what I heard, is a very effective stress reliever. However, it also seemed to invariably lead to substantial mental and physical health issues for everyone I knew who used it. 
3. Dust off my Brooks Pure Flows and run as hard and fast as I could. I realized this option might lead to injury, but that potential seemed manageable in light of options one and two.    

Suffice to say, I chose option three. I got out the door, ran around and through nearby Prospect Park like the madman I was. When I returned to my apartment, the email was still in my inbox. The divorce was still proceeding. There were still forms to fill out, court appearances to make, and legal fees mounting. The world was still a mess, but I felt fine. 

Since I started running again in 2017, many things have happened in my world and in the world that have made me feel incomprehensibly stressed, weak, and powerless. Things that should have killed me. Things that I’ve seen kill others. By some miracle, I’ve kept running through them all. Sometimes, my daily run was the only bright spot in my day, giving me a chance to breathe, to be in nature, to be focused on one thing versus everything, to exercise my strength, which, depending on the day and season, might not have been much. When the opportunity was available, I ran with others —sharing stories while the minutes, miles, and scenery passed by.      

I don’t think it’s a controversial statement to say the world and its myriad lifeforms  are very sick right now. As someone who loves life, it pains me to see so much suffering. And my various, grand schemes to heal the world, to make things better, to relieve suffering, often seem dismissed or outright blocked by dark forces. It’s easy to lose hope and succumb to my sense of weakness and powerlessness to make things better.   

Which leads me to today and The Run Home. I’m becoming open to the idea that transformation need not, nor does it involve grand schemes —no regime change, no societal overhauls, no great awakenings. Perhaps there’s nothing we can better do to heal the world than share a run, to give ourselves the opportunity to utilize what little power we do have in this moment, to breathe deep and hard and regularly, to find physical and emotional balance, to take in the grandeur of nature, and to divert our gazes from tiny screens broadcasting infinite crises towards a singular, healthy path ahead of us. The Run Home is a place to share and celebrate this simple, but profound act of going for a run.