I Ran

Growing up, it seemed like everyone in my family was an athlete: softball, basketball, soccer - every week there was someone’s game to go to, every family gathering an excuse for pickup hoops or baseball. Fun for all the ball players in my family; not so great, though, for the gawky bookworm who was always picked next-to-last in gym class, who lacked any kind of eye/hand coordination, who couldn’t hit a softball to save her life.

The only thing vaguely athletic that I could do, then or now, was run.

Looking back, it’s incredible to realize how much running has meant to me, or how greatly it’s shaped my life. I first joined track in eighth grade as an attempt to prove to myself that I wasn’t “just a nerd” - that, although I couldn’t throw or catch or hit, I could be athletic. To my surprise, I was pretty good - I ran varsity from my freshman year on, and improved my times from year-to-year, eventually garnering all-county my senior year. Track gave me incredible friends, a year-round activity to throw myself into, and perhaps most importantly, confidence in my abilities and a sense of myself as someone who had more talent than just being smart. It helped me leave high school feeling like I had done everything there I wanted - something for which I still feel so fortunate.

Running also gave me what, to this day, is the accomplishment I’m most proud of - the fact that I, this terrified-of-rejection 18 year old, somehow found enough gumption to ask the track coach at my college if I could join the team, and then, despite being far slower than all the recruited athletes, managed to run track for all four years. My final race at college, when I finally broke a long-elusive time in the 400, remains one of my fondest memories. My collegiate track career, scrub as it was, ended on the perfect note.

But, still, it ended - which added another dimension to the post-college identity crisis many of us face: after eight years of being Kristin the 400 m runner, what would I be? I certainly wasn’t good enough to go on to elite competitions, and there aren’t many random sprint races for post-collegiate runners. So, of necessity, I started to run longer. My second year out of college, I ran my first marathon in NY, an incredible, incredible experience that I repeated in 2000. I spent weekend mornings tracing the reservoir of Central Park, or the greens of Battery Park. I entered random road races, no longer competing for anything more than the satisfaction of a strong finish.

As my job became more demanding, though, those runs began to fade away. I almost never got home before dark, and ended up spending too many weekends in the office. I’d still identify myself as a runner (“Oh, yeah, I’ve run a couple of marathons…”), but more and more, it felt like a role I’d once had, a part of my past I’d sadly outgrown. I tried to convince myself that this was inevitable, but found it hard to accept that running would not be a regular part of my life.

Which is when I had this epiphany: running meant more than winning, than setting personal records, than racking up marathons or placing in 5Ks. I did not run to prove I was an athlete, but for all that it gave me: the chance to be active, to clear my mind, to shed the stress from job and life. And giving all that up was far too great a sacrifice.

So now, when the sun’s out, and the sky’s a gorgeous blue, you’re likely to find me in the same place you would five, ten, fifteen years ago: Nikes on my feet, eyes trained on the horizon, out for a run.

-kris97