A lot of wake up calls happen at the doctor’s offce. All too often we hear about how bad news changed the trajectory of one’s life: death, terminal illness, cautionary test results you name it. This call is ussually followed by a resolve to live healthier lives, likely active but definitely fuller lives. I recently had one such call, except my doctor didn’t deliver bad news, nor did they bring particularly good news, they simply confirmed that everything was fine, there was nothing wrong in any of the standard annual exams.
To an external observer, this was expected, I am afterall an ultra runner. I had my to reason(s) to expect otherwise. Something was not right; few weeks prior I had bailed on a long run and as much as I want to attribute it to Arthritic pain (there was some), my heart was just not it, I had skipped a few strength sessions, work stress was filling my veins with cortisol. I expected at least one of these to be exposed in the test results. Turns out it was all in my head. I may have been perfectly healthy physically but my mental health was dubious.
Something was wrong and it wasn’t that I wasn’t doing enough, it was that I felt that I wasn’t doing enough. See, insecurity around fitness can be a good thing. For a while I’ve relied on it to propel me towards what I thought were my limits and beyond. Like most of us, I started my fitness journey to get healthier, as I reached milestones, the goal post kept moving that I forgot where it all began. Although they are often associated together, fitness is not synonymous to health. It is true that fitness leads to better health but beyond baseline health, the correlation is questionable. You can always condition your body to perform an activity better but it wouldn’t necessarily make you healthier. I may not have been as fit as I wanted but I was healthy and that was the goal all along. So, where was the insecurity coming from?
My tendency towards perfectionism is to blame for half of it but the other half had a lot to do with what I was feeding my brain. The diet wasn’t exactly balanced. Instagram exposed me to runners and influencers who always had something to say about fitness, Strava showed me how much more I could do to keep up with runners in my community. There was no shortage of content on youtube, blogs and podcasts to improve some aspect of fitness. This steady diet bled into most of my conversations which further propelled me to do more (or try, I’m still slow 😄). It didn’t help that everyone has something to say about fitness these days. Looking back, its pretty clear why I was craving balance.
To remedy it, I did what I periodically do to dating apps, I deleted all the apps, well, two apps in particular: Strava and Instagram. I resolved to not talk about running unless I really had to. I said no to group runs and races to make space for unstructured training life. I was honestly curious if I would pull this off considering how so much of my identity is invested in running. Seriously, what else is there to talk about? I wondered if lack of races or peer pressure would make me move less. Months later, I’m happy to report that nothing much has changed. I still run the same mileage, still look forward to my long runs and I absolutely love to run for no good reason at all, except maybe joy with a side of masochism. I don’t know who needs to hear this but you move your body without tracking or attaching any meaning to it.
A side effect of running unhinged for a while is that you stop taking everything seriously. I don’t even know what my pace is anymore, nor do I care, I’m here for the vibes, lol. Running is at the spot I’ve always wanted it to be an escape, a coping mechanism, a playground.
This is the part where I write about my takeaways from this debacle but I’ve been stuck here for at least an hour. There is a lot to unpack here, mostly contrasts. Perfectionism vs joy, Extrinsic vs Instrinsic motivation, structured vs unstructured training .. the list goes on. I guess my takeaway is there is value in all, what’s important is striking the balance that works for you.
