There’s a slow tension, a strain that builds and builds and builds and threatens to snap. It dwells in the nape of my neck, in my wrist when I write, in the rubber-band recoil of my achilles when I forget to stretch. And though I am far from geriatric, I feel the pressure cooker of time on my body.
I stopped running recently. Not by choice. But as a result of a string of injuries, lung complications, and, finally, the growth of a bunion on my big right toe.
Sheer optimism (or simply denial) kept me moving for a while. I’ve been told by my first podiatrist that shouldn’t run, after he observed my utter lack of arch and declared my ambulatory ambitions a lost cause. But that was years ago, in high school, when the pain was present, insistent yes, but largely forgettable.
So when I grew to like running in college, it was rebellion. Proof that I could overcome my genetic predispositions, that I had control over my body, that consistency and a genuine love would fuel any goal I’d set. That I could take something that once felt like punishment (à la the dreaded middle school P.E. mile) and turn it into something almost sacred. Something I chose. It’s funny how we think ourselves invincible, the exceptions to the rule.
Running didn’t come naturally to me (a nicer way of saying, I was slow). I never had delusions of grandeur for an illustrious running career. It was simply something I started doing during those lockdown years, enjoyed doing, and continued henceforth. Running became more philosophy than sport, more mental than the act itself.
Running stripped me bear, of all my presumptions of what I could do, of how far I could go. That I am allowed to be bad at something, to focus on effort, to come back into my body, to feel the ground, the soft patter of my feet on concrete, the stretching of my calves and knees and the slight rotation of my torso to match, my arms swinging rhythmically, my heart, growing, beating, proving to myself that I am alive.
And then… I stopped. Not because I wanted to, but because my body decided otherwise.
I don’t know if I’ve grieved. I watched friends run the race I never finished training for. I’m still signed up for a race in December. Perhaps I am still holding on.
What happens when a runner stops running? When the space, the activity you found once found liberating can no longer be accessed, in spite of will, in spite of desire?
I keep returning to the myth of the marathon— Pheidippides sprinting from Marathon to Athens, carrying news of victory over the Persians, only to collapse into death the moment the words left his lips. Not because I have a death wish at mile 26.2, but because the story distills something unbearably human: the compulsion to challenge the seemingly impossible. To take “no’s” as “not yet’s.” To press against the edges of our own capacity, to go higher, faster, longer. Is that not the essence of hope? The pulse of running?
There are few things that force us to acknowledge the limits of our biology. I see it most in the slow severance between the will and body—the slow fade of ability, not from neglect, but from loving movement too much. Perhaps our bodies exact a toll for our own exuberance. Our youth, a fire that warms, that consumes itself. And the body, a cup that can no longer bear the demands of play.
I’m beginning to understand that the body has a mind of its own. That it is already much older than me. It thinks in eons, interpreted through genes as old as time, the modern mind only a recent invention.
I cannot be mad at my body. It only knows how to protect, how to adapt. It is the mind that insists that it is not so. So I am humbled by this little bunion, this growth, that has allowed me to still walk when I might have pushed myself into real injury. It formed in spite of my neglect, or rather, my loving too much.
I’m still hopeful I will run long again. Or still delusional. That I will find a way to work with my body. To adapt as it ages. To learn about it, to pace myself, with gentleness as I grow into myself, again and again and again.
bunion buddies