the 77th run

coming in 18,967th place out of 23,599 in my first half marathon

The night before my first half marathon, I tallied up how many miles I ran to train for it. I started running in December, and in six months, I ran 298 miles over 76 runs. There was something incredible and inevitable about seeing those numbers. This was the first time I had trained for something athletic. I had literally run into a new identity and had so much fun doing it.

There was an easeful confidence knowing I had to run 13.1 miles from Prospect Park to Coney Island the next morning. I was almost looking forward to it. It took me back to 7th grade, when I would spend countless hours hunched over my guitar, in front of the stereo, trying to nail the intro to Dave Matthews Band’s “So Much to Say.” While my friends spent afternoons practicing for basketball or volleyball tournaments, I entered myself into my own musical tournament. I practiced until I learned how to play each of songs, winning album by album, until I championed DMB’s discography. In college, I started to write my own songs and play them on stage, even touring for a month during my sophomore-to-junior-year summer. And the night before a show, I’d be nervous, but feel that same easeful confidence. But I had so much fun on stage the next night, and there was a joy that was infectious to everyone there.

Ever since then, I’ve continued to enjoy the musical abilities I developed in my youth. I can play most popular songs on the guitar, and I’m decent on the drums, bass, and piano. A great song moves me in a way I imagine a basketball player feels when he sees a great game—we both know what it takes to do such a thing¹. But devoting that much time to being a musician meant I didn’t spend time becoming an athlete. All the musicianship I enjoy came at the cost of proper body mechanics, a fit body, and overall physical confidence—something I’ve always been terribly insecure about.

Some of my earliest memories of rejection and bullying came from playing sports. I was usually picked last to be on a team and was made fun of when I was trying my best to help us win. An instrument made more sense to me than a ball, so I dove into music because I was good at it, and people applauded when I played for them.

So when I started training in December, I began with a six-week couch to 5K program, and on the first day, I had to run for 5 minutes, take a minute break, then do it again two more times. I knew I could either bully or heal that insecure 12-year-old boy. I decided to give that tender, pudgier part of me the words of encouragement I always wanted to hear. Hey, it’s ok you’re running slow, because look! You ran for 5 straight minutes! Wow, good job buddy! You did it! We held hands and ran around the race track at McCarren Park, under the RFK bridge in Astoria, and looped around my neighborhood until we healed from the stories and experiences that held us back.

These stories were part of a larger arc of narratives I was told during my most impressionable years. Fundamental stories I internalized about the world, about God, and what it meant to be a good person. The way I learned to thrive was to shame away parts of myself that didn’t fit within those stories.

Therapy, books, and lectures have been helpful in unlearning those stories, but having hated running to running a 5K that early winter showed me it’s less about unlearning and more about undoing our stories into newer, better ones. Every run became an embodied rewriting of what it meant to be in integrity with myself, where I did what I really wanted to do. I started trusting myself more. Every mile I ran widened those myopic stories, taking me farther away from the toxic shame that constricted my life.

What training gave me was momentum towards becoming more of myself. A friend recently told me that in Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS, talks about the 8 qualities of the Self (calm, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, connectedness and creativity) in his book “No Bad Parts,” and how focusing on bringing out a few of them in your life creates momentum for the other qualities to show up and heal our internal system. Running helped me uncover and develop in me confidence, clarity, and courage, and that has started the cascading effects of those other qualities. Running and training taught me that momentum is the most powerful thing I can create for myself. It’s the thing that makes you do things that feel incredible and inevitable.

I’ll be honest, I feel sheepish writing thoughts on running when there’s someone like Murakami who, in my opinion, wrote the definitive book about running and a creative life. But one thing that puzzled me in reading “What I Talk about When I Talk about Running” was how effortlessly it seemed Murakami created momentum for himself. He’s run over 20 marathons and runs around 6 miles every day. He shares a story about having a sudden realization at a baseball game he could write a novel and just started doing it. It seemed like he had an internal switch he can turn on and magically create momentum for himself.

I remember thinking, yeah, must be nice to be able to do that and write books and live an amazing life. But truth is, that night before the race, I realized I did do that in my own way. So if this piece is anything, it’s to tell you there’s no switch that turns on momentum. The switch isn’t a switch at all but just the reality of who we are, and the work is to uncover and allow ourselves to unfold and move towards a direction that makes us feel alive.

My 12-year-old part and I finished the marathon in 2.5 hours the next day, coming in at 18,967th place out of 23,599 runners. The NYC marathon was last week, and I was reminded again just how much New Yorkers show up for each other. God, I love this city. People were cheering, blasting music, and giving high fives throughout the length of the race. I remember feeling and energy and this pudgy part of me felt it too.

The adrenaline and energy of the race made me run 30 seconds faster than my usual pace, and I ended up straining a tendon in my left knee. When I tried running a few weeks after the race, I couldn’t run more than 2 miles before my knee started to ache. I took it as an opportunity to start from scratch and learn it the proper way before the bad habits and mechanics became too calcified. I started working with a coach to fix my poor running form and build up my strength from the ground up. That’s what I’ve been doing this summer, but my feet are set on running the same race again next year, and hopefully the marathon soon after that.

1. My recent obsession is everything by Sault.