I hate running. It’s painful. It’s boring. It’s stupid. To run intentionally is to purposely induce a state of pure, unrefined uncomfortableness in the body — and then to cultivate that feeling for as long as possible. It completely sucks.
In this essay I will explain why I love it.
Some people say they enjoy running. They’re lying to you. What people actually enjoy about running has nothing to do with the physical act of striding forward at a slightly unnatural pace. That’s the part that’s painful, uncomfortable, boring and stupid. That’s the part that causes the blisters and bone spurs, the part that gives you sore hips and bloody nips. The part that sucks. But in doing something unrelentingly irritating and painful for long periods of time, it’s possible to forget the pain of the world for a while. It’s a reprieve from reality that you have to pay for with sweat.
Near the climax of the movie Forrest Gump, the eponymous hero runs out his front door in Alabama and doesn’t stop for “three years, two months, 14 days and 16 hours.” This is the most accurate and believable part of the entire movie for two reasons: First, he remembered exactly how long he ran. Runners are constantly looking at their watches and obsessing over their times. Second, he immediately told someone about it. Runners love to brag. Even the first marathoner somehow managed to tell everyone he’d just ran exactly 26.2 miles before dropping dead on the spot. Nailed it.
But to really understand what Forrest Gump really gets right about running, look at what happened just before the Heisman Trophy winner, war hero, millionaire fisherman and ping pong professional decided to run back and forth across the country five times. He got his heart broke. He proposed to his beloved Jenny, but Jenny didn’t love him back. In life and chocolate boxes you never know what you’re going to get, and sometimes you get grief.
When I’m hurting emotionally sometimes it seems the pain is never going to go away. Whether it’s been from the loss of a relationship or the death of a loved one or even just a mistake I’ve made at work, the constant, nagging pain of sadness can cloud everything we do to the point where it’s extremely difficult to concentrate on everyday tasks. It’s hard to sleep. It’s hard to eat — or to stop eating. The world feels colorless and gray. There’s a heavy, physical pain that sits on my chest and kicks at the pit of my belly. It’s a constant, low-level hum of sadness and despair.
I think this is probably how Forrest Gump felt when he started running, and it’s the reason why he kept at it for so long. It’s also the secret to why running works — at least for me — as a way to heal and cope with my pain.
When I’m running pretty much the only thing I can focus on is how much it sucks to be running. Every step is a new tiny agony to be overcome, every breath another struggle to get your heart and lungs the oxygen they desperately need to keep your legs pumping along. It hurts, and it’s impossible for my mind to ignore this fact. Really the only way to NOT fixate on how much it sucks that I’m running is to drift into a trancelike state where I almost forget to think about anything at all. It’s similar to the state I fall into right before sleep, that netherworld where everything in my mind kind of swirls around and coherent thought disappears.
Which is a long-winded way to say running makes me forget my problems for a while. I think Forrest Gump’s pain was so enormous that the only way he could get through it was to invent another, more immediate pain that would cancel out the nonstop misery of lost love. This seems counterintuitive. After all, we’ve been told all our lives that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” But with running that’s exactly what happens. At least for me, running creates this temporary world of pain that forces all the real sadnesses and disappointments of my life to take a little coffee break. And when they return, sometimes it seems like they’ve been dulled just a little bit.
In high school after I lost my mom, I’d often leave the house late at night and just jog around town aimlessly until I got tired enough to sleep. After a painful breakup in my early 30s I started training for a 24-mile mountain race, spending hours on end punishing my body in the mountains. The training itself was arduous and draining, sometimes boring and dangerous. But while I was focusing on the challenge of keeping my body going I forgot for a while that I was supposed to be sad.
A couple months ago I was lucky enough to experience both heartbreak and financial problems at the same time — the old double-whammy of adulting that for a while had me fully wallowing in a world of self-loathing and defeat. I felt like I had nowhere to turn. So I started running again. Long, painful, slogs. At first it didn’t help at all. But I kept putting myself through it, and there have been times in the past few weeks where I’ve been able to forget about my troubles for a while and just lean into the pain in my legs and back and lungs instead.
This is my “runner’s high.” It’s not some kind of euphoric, mountaintop kind of experience, but rather the feeling of profound relief that comes with being able to temporarily forget my cares, to get out of my head for a few minutes or miles at a time. To free myself from the mental slavery of depression or grief. It’s not a cure-all by any means, but it’s the best way I know to slowly move toward the direction of healing.
I think this is why a lot of people run. It’s why I love running and why when I’m at my lowest sometimes the only way to pull myself out of the darkness is to put on a pair of shoes and start running until it hurts so much that I can’t remember what I was so upset about in the first place.
Matt Tunseth is a freelance writer from Alaska.
