Ready to Run Again
20 years ago, I was really into running with my little sister. It wasn’t something I was trying to do to be competitive but wanted to use it to build my overall health. Eventually, it was something I learned to enjoy. About a year into running, my little sister and I completed our first (and for me, last) half marathon.
After that half marathon, I continued trying to push myself in running. After a while, my right knee began to hurt. I thought that was normal, so I just kept going. Before long, the nagging pain became a sharp pain that was no longer just in my knee but now radiated throughout the outer side of my thigh. I finally admitted something was wrong. I saw a physical therapist and we discovered that the pain was because my IT band was too tight and was beginning to tear. For the next several months, I had to tamper down my running while I worked with the therapist to heal. He told me I had done too much too fast and my body couldn’t keep up.
This wasn’t the only time I ran too hard and too fast. I’ve done it time and again with school, with work, with hobbies, with family responsibilities, and more. I used to chalk it up to impatience. Impatience is certainly part of it, but it was also fueled by my desire to achieve. I’ve too often valued speed in accomplishing things as a way to validate the prestige of that accomplishment. However, consistently running faster than I was able led to a burnout so intense that I lost a lot of my capability to do even mundane everyday tasks – let alone the prestigious ones.
When my burnout was bad enough that I finally had to admit I was dealing with it, I chose to treat it like I would a physical injury. This was so that one, I could remove the judgment and shame that I might be tempted to lay on myself for my mental health capacity, and two so that I would be regimented in how I chose to care for it. Just like a physical therapist would give me treatments, exercises, ice, and other things, I wanted to create a care plan for my mental health healing. I found a therapist and we put together a plan for recovery. I also chose to focus my classes on learning as much as I could about stress, burnout, and wellbeing. Even then, I was bothered by how slow everything seemed to be taking. My healing was taking much longer than I wanted it to.
Even with consistent daily practices, it was 14 months before I felt the darkness of depression begin to lift. Also, my healing and recovery didn’t move in a straight line. There were plenty of setbacks along the way (including panic attacks that I had never dealt with before). I had tried a few times to believe that I was healed enough to start extending into my achieving ways again and would find myself exhausted for days afterward. It was much like when I tried running on my IT band before it was fully healed and I re-injured it.
There were many times that I prayed to God to let me feel capable again. I received the answer “you need to heal more” far more than I wanted to. The discomfort of the speed of healing was driven by the incessant thought that I wanted to know what was next and when it would be over. For 20 months, I had to actively teach and reteach myself that healing is a valuable use of my time and that I wasn’t in control of the speed. It went long enough that I began to wonder if I had permanently reduced my capacity to achieve but then, a couple of weeks ago, something shifted.
I was out for my daily walk (one of those healing behaviors I’ve been committed to consistently doing) and I felt a desire to run. For someone who has been consumed with feeling too tired for too many years, this motivation surprised me. I realized that this feeling to run was both literal and figurative. After 20 months of consistently trying to feel whole, I think God was telling me that I was ready to move from healing to thriving again.
In the past, I would have dusted off my hands and then started running at full speed ahead without looking back. However, if I’ve learned anything in the last while it is that I still need to honor the pace of my growth and that my body will not allow me to abuse it again like I did before. I will continue to do those daily healing practices that nourish my mind, body and spirit. I’ll also begin adding in more thriving activities and will listen as I go so that I don’t tip into over-achieving burnout again.
Since my epiphany, I’ve ran 5 times. They weren’t very long runs, and they were dotted with periods of walking, but I have started running again. I’m respecting a slow ramp up so that I don’t injure myself again. I’m also keeping my expectations reasonable. Do I want to run a marathon? Nope. (I’ll leave those to my little sister). Am I loving the fact that I’m feeling myself begin to stretch my wings again while respecting what my body is capable of right now? Absolutely.
Thanks for reading with me today. I hope you have some time to safely spread your wings this week.