Running Toward my Problems
I ran my first half-marathon last December. It was something I never envisioned myself being able to do, even a month or so before signing up. A culmination of a lot of little things helped me cross that finish line after running for over two hours: support from my family and friends, the Nike Running Club app (that made running as a hobby feel accessible to someone who hated it), finishing intimidatingly long runs, the inspiring women I met in the running club I joined last fall…. But I’m convinced there is one lifestyle change I made that made all the difference: eating enough.
Eating and athletics are a fraught combination. I should know. Those two words together trigger - in my mind at least - thoughts of restriction, rules, cutting things out, and weight loss, all in the name of athletic improvement. For most of my life, I was convinced that my body was the reason I wasn’t excelling at my sport to the extent I thought I could. So I cut things out. I didn’t get militant about it until my junior year of college. I convinced myself I was lactose intolerant (I’m not), made rules around eating (or not eating) things I loved like bread, desserts, even peanut butter, and kept a strict food journal where I tallied “good” foods and wrote myself mean “motivational” notes when I slipped up. Paired with this restrictive diet were intense weight lifting sessions and sprint workouts, in addition to my team’s already demanding practice schedule. I thought to myself, “Damn, I’m so dedicated. I’m putting my body through it for this sport I love!” I loved feeling hungry, I was happy when I was first able to see my hip bones poke through my leggings. It was working.
But of course, it wasn’t. I was starving myself. I didn’t know it, but I was struggling with anorexia and body dysmorphia. My body was crying out for help and I wasn’t listening. I hadn’t had my period in two years - I thought, “it’s such a nuisance, lucky me!” My hair wasn’t growing either. In fact, it was falling out. And maybe the eeriest warning sign of them all was that my resting heart rate had dropped to roughly 44 beats per minute. That’s the one that did it for me. I broke down at the doctor’s office when the physician asked if I’d had experience with an eating disorder. I think I knew I did, but hearing another person articulate it woke me up.
Despite this interaction, fueled by the urge to prove myself in my sport, I spent the summer after I graduated restricting myself the most I’d ever done, and losing a considerable amount of weight. I liked the way my team’s jersey looked on my more angular body. But things came crumbling down around me in the fall, with a season-ending injury. My mental health was at one of the lowest points I’d ever experienced, so I called a treatment center for eating disorders to schedule an appointment with both a therapist and a dietitian. I cried throughout the whole phone call. The woman on the other line was very kind. October 24, 2018 was the date of my first appointment.
I learned how dangerous food rules are and that, when we restrict, our bodies tell our brains that we are in scarcity-survival mode which causes people to binge the very foods we try to avoid. I learned that my eating disorder was a way to try to control things around me, to give myself structure. I learned that I had to separate my own thoughts from my eating disorder’s thoughts; this helped me identify my disordered, unhealthy behaviors, and the lies I’d been telling myself.
I’ve since moved to a new state and have been seeing a new therapist to treat my eating disorder as well as the anxiety that accompanies it (a real winning combination!). The improvements I’ve made are tremendous. Looking back, there were so many instances in which my brain couldn’t have imagined what a life without food rules and restrictions would look like. I was so scared and felt very alone. I think the advice that has helped me most in my recovery was this: “whatever the eating disorder tells you to do, do the opposite.” I had to break the rules that scared me the most, like eating more than one spoonful of peanut butter in a day. I started with the easier stuff, like that. At the time though, it felt impossible. Missing a workout was even harder. Missing a workout and eating dessert on the same day made me cry sometimes. It doesn’t anymore.
Early fall 2020 was a pivotal moment for me. Several months into the Pandemic, I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with and team sports weren't really a thing. I started baking sourdough bread and around the same time I started running. But I wasn’t running like I used to, when it was mostly about burning calories. I hated it then. Instead, I was running slowly and with curiosity as my motivation. “What could this sport look like for me if it was just for me?” And I was just eating so much bread. If you’ve ever had a slice of freshly baked sourdough, you know how hard it is to not have one, two, or three more slices. Plus, I was proud of my bread. I started baking on a whim and was immediately won over by the process of creation and the wonderful tastes and textures of each loaf.
I began running distances I never thought I’d ever enjoy running. And simultaneously, I was facing my fears and eating more things that previously scared me, in quantities that also scared me. I began working at a bakery and I was surrounded by things that made me anxious, but also excited me. So I did the opposite of what my eating disorder told me to do. I ate the almond croissant, and I ate the beautiful bread slathered in butter and jam that my coworker offered me for breakfast, and I brought home brownies for me and my roommates to eat for dessert after we finished eating pizza from our favorite restaurant. And I ran, and ran, and ran.
I’d never felt so good running or so good in my body. I never collapsed in exhaustion after a run, I rarely got cramps or stitches, and my previously strain-inclined hamstrings still have yet to bother me the way they did in college. My body was saying thank you. I was finally listening to it. It soon became easier to miss a run here and there, to decide that I just wasn’t feeling it that day. I still have a tiny voice in my head every now and then, trying to scare myself into running when I don’t feel up to it. But it’s so small now that it rarely wins.
I’m not completely “healed,” whatever that looks like. I’m in recovery and healing more with every disobedient action I take. I still find myself struggling to keep my eating disorder far away from my relationship to running, as it is all too easy to over-analyze bodies in sports. But I’m in tune with my body in the healthiest way I’ve ever been, and the feedback that I’m doing the right thing by eating what I want to eat is evident in the miles I run and the joy I experience while running them.
I try not to focus too much on the past because it makes me sad and I can’t change it, but at times I wonder how much more joyful my college sports years could have been if I was eating enough. What heights, physically and emotionally, could I have reached? Athletes put themselves under tremendous pressure to perform, and a lot of the conversations around eating and athletics are disordered. I wish I knew that back then. Bodies are not machines, each one is a unique, ever changing, living, breathing vessel that we cannot control. If it is telling you it needs something, you should listen. I suppose I hope that if someone who is in the same situation I was in reads this, they might be able to make the change earlier and find that joy sooner.
I’m now gearing up to train for my second half marathon which I’ll run over the summer. I recently ran 8 miles at the best time I’ve ever run, and I spent a lot of the run thinking about how to write what you just read, smiling to myself, thinking about how far I’ve come. I was also thinking about the kimchi mac and cheese I’d eaten hours before for breakfast and the freshly baked sourdough loaf I was going to decimate when I got home. That made me smile too.