I used to hate running. This used to be something that I saw as a personal weakness, a failing that limited me in multiple capacities. It was not that I could not run—I easily could. I just really hated doing it. And as a rather particular child who did not like to test the waters too much on things that irked me, that level of discomfort kept me away from the sports that are a staple of American youth. I hated soccer—I still somewhat continue to due to its lackadaisical pace—and my anxious mother would not even let me near a football helmet. I found my niche in one of the only sports that does not require the act of running: Swimming. I literally stayed in that lane throughout middle school, before abruptly losing my access to the sport early in freshman year of high school, which left me feeling empty. After a pandemic and a graduation, I came into college with a yearning to reconnect with swimming as a sport, and was graciously given the opportunity to walk onto Vassar’s team. But after two seasons of swimming alongside two long years of college, I felt lost again. Combined with a general disconnect from the team, I had also begun to lose enthusiasm for the sport itself.
Through a friend, I discovered rugby. I already knew the stereotypes of the sport, specifically that it was violent and required a level of physical dedication I had never pushed myself to have before. I began to attend practices in the spring of my sophomore year, and though I was just learning and still not fully immersed in the sport yet, I could sense something was there. Plus, the spring season of rugby is in the 7s format, which is much less conducive to stockier guys like myself. So, with a full summer ahead of me, I needed to prepare myself mentally and physically for an entire season of a sport that asked intense things of me. And the best way to do so was to run. A lot.
It was not easy at first. I remember taking a breather and looking at Strava—the app I used to record all my runs—to see embarrassing speeds and subpar distances after already getting winded. It is a tough pill to swallow for a somewhat impatient person like myself, but it really is true what your parents tell you when you whine as a kid: You just have to keep at it. So I did keep at it. I would wake up and, after scrolling on my phone through the bad news that comes free with living in 2025, I would roll out of bed and then out onto the street, where I began to run. Even when my job as a head lifeguard at a state pool began, I kept it up, eventually adding a trip to the gym to get in some strength training before my morning run.
Running, once you have adjusted and tweaked the minor details so it is as comfortable as you can get it to be, is a very multifaceted hobby. If you have ever lived in a walkable or dense area, as I always have, you have most certainly seen people running. The runner is an innately passing subject, literally gone with the wind, often seconds after you notice it. To become a runner is to almost submit yourself to this existence, as a loose object breaking the normalcy of quiet walking on backstreets or coffee-sipping in front of cafes. I learned that running along the street of a large, elderly-care complex usually meant a few purse-clutchings. I saw the daily progress of the demolition of the local school—so ugly, they had to literally blow it up. I got yelled at in various languages from cars and finally benefited from knowing what the word “sharmouta” means. All in all, community is not always the prettiest thing, but the great thing about running it is that you can get away before the cracks are too obvious.
Mentally, it was not always the easiest thing either. There were days that I ran out of an anger I could not sweat out and days I wondered if any of this would matter. The idiom that “you cannot run from all of your problems” is very literally true, even if you listen to very emotional music while running. This is why I always made sure to sit outside my house for a moment after morning runs if I could spare the time, and just breathe. I took in the aches and soreness and let it rest on top of me like a weighted blanket. I knew I would never be the fastest, and these runs were mainly focused on building endurance and short bursts of speed. But what I think I learned most importantly from all that running is that endurance is largely within your head. When I did finally make it to the rugby pitch, I was knocked down hard more times than I could count. But each time I was sweating on the grass of the field down at the farm, or my legs were aching through one of my morning runs, I remembered the emptiness that came whenever I had lost grasp of something before. Running, though often taxing, gave me a level of agency and control that I cannot see myself living without now.
At the end of our season, I asked my coach why, in one of his recaps for our games, he had described me as “like the Energizer Bunny.” I did not fully understand what he meant, or why he had put it in a recap of a game full of explosive plays, where, despite starting and playing through till the end, I had held a minor role outside of what I was asked to do.
“It’s because you got hit and knocked down all those times, but still had so much energy,” he said. “You just never gave up.”
I ran 135 miles over the summer so I could stand there, sore and cold, and believe him.