Tomorrow, I am running 18 miles. This is huge for me because I haven’t run that far since the Chicago Marathon in 2015, and there are a few things stacked against me. Because it’s in the middle of the week (I had to reschedule my long run because of work and travel this weekend), I will be on my own for most of it, it will be hot, and I’ve been experiencing some flared pain in my surgery hip.
Even though I am nervous, and I know it will be hard, I am excited to see what my body can do and how this will feel. I am planning to keep this at a slower pace, specifically because of the hip, and have given myself permission to end the run if there is a lot of pain. Also, I am eager to practice my mental game, which tends to falter when I am on my own. I want to practice going through the dark mental tunnels so that I know what to do in those hard miles on race day.
One of the things that has always motivated is Nike commercials. Nike has been under fire lately for how they treat their female athletes when they get pregnant, which I think is wrong and their policies not only need to change but must become more supportive than tolerant, but they sure know how to do marketing. Often, when I need inspiration or reassurance that I can do a hard physical task, I watch Nike commercials. Sure, they are meant to sell products, but they also give you hope that you can do that crazy thing.
Today is a rest day for me as I get ready for tomorrow’s long run and give my hip a break, but I am going to be watching some of my favorite videos in order to mentally prepare myself for the run and be excited to get out the door at dawn. Enjoy some of my all-time favorite Nike commercials.
When I moved to Chicago five years ago, I knew just two people, and while those turned into good friends, I was quite lonely my first summer in the city. It isn’t easy finding friends in a new place, especially when you are out of school. To find my people, I had to put myself out there a lot — joining recreation leagues, going to Meet Ups, asking friends in other places to connect me with their friends, and accepting invitations to every dinner, open mic, and quirky event.
I met many people that first year, but then I started dating the man that would eventually become my husband. Also, at the same time, one of my closest friends moved to Chicago. With the two of them in my daily life, I no longer needed to find any willing and free person to do things with; I always had a date. Those loose friendships dissipated, and as the years passed, so did some of the stronger ones. Friends moved on to different jobs and states, had babies, and schedules filled up. This ebb and flow of friendships left me insecure about my relationships, and I wanted to find a way to bring new people into my life while also investing in those that I care about most.
With school and my part-time job, I don’t have a lot of social time, making it hard to build new relationships. I knew that if I wanted to dip into new communities, I would have to use already what I was doing as way to connect with others.
Like running.
I’ve always been a self-proclaimed solo runner. Running is my me time, my escape from the world, and it’s when I can be more my most authentic, which is hard to do when others are around. Too often, I become competitive with whomever I am running with, and that builds a wall that doesn’t allow for camaraderie.
When I was training for the Chicago 2015 marathon, I did run with a group and met some people, but those relationships didn’t extend beyond that event. There was one woman who I really liked, but I always found reasons to bail on her when she invited me to things. I couldn’t explain why.
This winter, I started running more and more, exclusively alone. Most times, I ran at 10 a.m., after most people had gone to work, but because I had always run by myself, I didn’t see much need to venture out.
Then I got really lonely. My husband and I experienced a setback in life, and that combined with the stress of graduate school, I was breaking down. Running was helping, so I signed up for a bunch of races to keep me motivated. As I slogged through training miles, I realized that it would be nice to have some running friends. I thought about the friends I already had, and a few were runners, but we ran at different paces and distances. To find friends I could run with, I would need to cast a wider net.
Stretching after CES’ Sunday Run
There are tons of running groups in Chicago, and the most sensible place to make runner friends was to start there. However, most of them met at times when I was either at school or working my part-time job at a bakery. In fact, the bakery gig was preventing me from attending a lot of running events and forcing me to run at times when most other people are working, or often, sleeping.
Then, one day, I found a blog for a woman from my home state. She did several group runs with her local running store, which also seemed like a good way to meet people, but again not easy to do with my schedule. I was really started to dislike that bakery job, and now it seemed to be getting in the way of my goal of making running friends.
One of the classes I was in at the time was a career class, and we had to practice counseling each other about career problems. I explained to my practice therapist how I didn’t like my part-time job anymore, and she asked what could be a solution. Without thinking about it, I blurted out “Quit my job and get one at a local running store.” I hadn’t said that before, but after I couldn’t stop saying it, and that’s what I eventually did. I wanted to become part of a community and make more runner friends, and the running store was a great place to start.
Old friends, but first time running together at this year’s Shamrock Shuffle!
From there, I was able to join one of the large marathon training groups in the city and receive coaching and a schedule for my fall marathon. I do my long runs with them every Sunday. Plus, there was all my new coworkers, people who I may not run with but I could certainly talk to about running.
With a more flexible schedule, I was finally able to start running with my neighborhood group. They had meeting for sometime, but it never worked out for me when I worked at the bakery. Now, I join them for their track workouts and meet up with some members of the group to do other runs throughout the week.
Now, I run half of my week’s workouts with people. I find that I am faster and more relaxed in my runs when I am with people, but then I still have those solo runs to unwind. I like having more runners in my life, and it gives me a chance to connect with other people who get the ups and downs of the sport in a way that my husband and non-running friends don’t.
My making running friends journey isn’t over yet, but I feel good about the progress I’ve made. I’ve had to be more vulnerable and put myself out there, but I feel like a member of the running community and that’s what I wanted.
A few months ago, I went on a social media cleanse. After a particularly tough day, I deactivated my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. I needed a break from everyone’s highlight reels and comparing my worsts to their bests. I kept Snapchat for cute videos of my nieces and nephews, LinkedIn account because it’s not as a threat to my mental health like the others, and Strava to track my workouts.
I created a Strava profile a few years ago, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that I became more of an active user. If you have never used Strava before, it’s like Instagram for your workouts. You can use the app to record a workout or sync your GPS watch and it captures numbers that describe your run. It’s incredibly satisfying, at the end of a run, to see that freshly published workout with all the data of pace and heart rate as well as the map of your route. Then, you get to sit back and watch the kudos, or likes, come in.
Not many of my friends use the social media platform, so a few months ago, I tried to find as many runners in the Chicago area as I could. I also found people’s whose blogs I’ve read for years and some of my favorite celebrity runners. I didn’t know most of the people I was following, but I loved watching their runs and learning about what kind of workouts they were doing. Strava also keeps tracks of how many miles you do each week, month, and year, and it’s a great confident-booster to see that number climb each day.
One of my favorite parts of Strava is seeing where people are running. In Chicago, the most common place to run is the Lake Shore Path, but I live a few miles from the trail, so I usually only go there when I am doing longer runs. For my daily runs, I do the same out and back along a pretty busy road, and it can get tedious. But, through Strava, I’ve been able to find alternative running paths, including trails and parks that I would have never thought to check out. My go-to place for tempo runs and hills is a park I discovered through someone I follow on Strava.
Through my training group and working part-time at a running store, I’ve started to meet many of the people I follow on Strava in real life in addition to making new friends and then finding them on Strava. The app even knows if you are running with someone and will automatically sync your posts, which is kind of fun when you are in a group run and don’t necessarily know everyone yet. I feel like I have a little community of fellow runners cheering me on after every run.
However, Strava is still a social media, and it comes with some of the same nasty side effects as Instagram and Facebook.
While it was fun to find more of my real friends on Strava, the beauty of following and being followed by mostly strangers is that I didn’t care what they thought of my runs. However, I am now more conscious of what my pace will record on the app and who will see it. Maybe it’s a friend who is a lot faster than me and he’ll think I am quite slow and “not a real runner.” Or, a friend I’ve been running with who is pushing me and she sees that my pace is slower than what we’ve been doing together. Will she be disappointed?
On some runs, when I am not in a good place, I will think mostly about how the numbers will look on the app and completely disregard how I am feeling. I put the post and how it will be perceived ahead of my fitness and health.
Also, while I enjoy seeing distances and paces, Strava was practically built for runners to compare themselves to others. We runners already do that, but it is more accentuated on the app. I am constantly scrolling through friends’ activity logs to see how they did in a specific race, what their typical heart rate is, and how many miles they’ve done this year. And, that’s when I sink into the comparison despair.
I am not fast enough.
My heart rate is too high.
I am not going far enough.
The other day, I had just finished a long run and was feeling fairly good about it. I logged my workout to Strava, and then came back to the app a few hours later to see my kudos and what other people had done that day. One post was from a woman who I have never met but are connected through mutual acquaintances. We are running the same marathon in October and our paces are fairly similar. Her long run that day was several miles more than mine, as was her weekly mileage. I started to panic that I wasn’t doing enough and that my training was maybe too easy.
This self-doubt lingered for a few hours, and this is why I have a troubled relationship with Strava. If it wasn’t for the app, I wouldn’t know anything about her training, nor would I have any reason to compare it to my own. I have lots of friends who are faster and run further than me, and their harder workouts don’t seem to bother me, but when someone is right at my level I automatically stack her against myself. It’s practically habit.
Training for a marathon by judging yourself next to someone else’s paces and mileage is a really crappy way to train for a marathon. Someone else’s running is not my running, and if I continue to fixate on where I am compared to others, I will burnout or, worse, end up injured. Running will lose its joy, and I will be chasing numbers, which again is a really terrible way to train.
Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that numbers are just half the story. The other day, I had a great run in which my pace was dropping each mile, but two different times I forgot to pause my watch when I stopped for water and at a red light. My overall pace was slower because of the elapsed time, however it wasn’t reflective of how hard I worked. We can go ahead and publish our run data to Strava or Instagram, but we are the only ones that know what that felt like. And that goes with others. Just because someone ran seven miles at 6:30 pace doesn’t mean it was a great run.
Because I do really like Strava, I am not reading to give up on it. Yes, scrolling through on a Sunday morning can cause me to question my own training and abilities, but that is on me. I can still be on Strava but put up boundaries to not let it define me as a runner. That will take some self-esteem work on my part and a remember that numbers are just numbers and progress can also be felt. In the end, what matters more than the data posted is that I keep showing up day after day.
The Running Therapist 