When I was younger, running felt like some sort of punishment.  Ms. Parr, my elementary school gym teacher, made my class run the mile a couple of times a year.  I hated it.  For some reason, we always ran the mile in the gym.  This meant each student had to run around the gym 27 times.  Since we were little and therefore not required of the responsibility to remember the amount of laps we needed to do, we were given 27 straws and we would drop one in a trashcan each time we finished a lap.  The combination of running a mile in a tiny gym with 20 or so other kids and wearing jeans was torture.  I hated running.

            My relationship with running continued like this into middle school although it got a little better since we were allowed to change into shorts when we had to run the mile.  I still thought having to run the mile for P.E. was stupid but I didn’t mind it as much.  For reasons primarily fueled by my social life, I joined the track team in eighth grade.  Track was fun because it turned out that running wasn’t that difficult and I got to hang out with my friends all the time.  Middle school track turned into high school cross country and somewhere in there I became a runner but I had a lot to learn. 

First I had to learn the simple stuff like what shoes to buy and how long a cross country race was.  My high school cross country coach always said that with running, there are really high highs and really low lows.  During high school, I experienced the high highs but never really the low lows.  I went to practice each day, the meets on the weekends and each year I got progressively faster.  Occasionally, I would have a bad race but it was usually because it was a hard course or I just wasn’t feeling great that day.  My bad races were my lowest of lows which really aren’t lows at all, they happen to every runner.

Last spring, I started to sense that there was something wrong.  My gait just felt off.  I’d go running for a couple of days in a row, each time trying to figure out what my legs were doing that made me feel so awkward.  Usually my legs felt so natural doing this, running, putting one foot in front of the other.  I went to talk to the athletic trainer and she said maybe it was a calf strain and told me some therapies to help it.  I did them but nothing made my running feel better.  Something was out of whack and since I couldn’t figure it out and apparently the trainer couldn’t figure it out, I just fell out of it for a while.  When there was perfect running weather out, I would force myself out there but still something was wrong.

Once it was summer, I decided it was my shoes.  I went to the local running store and chose a new pair of shoes, a different brand since something was now wrong with my old trusted Asics.  With a false hope that my problem was solved, I went for a run in my neighborhood.  It was incredibly hot out and the sun was blazing but I was determined to go for a run.  I had almost finished my three mile loop when my right shin was hurting like crazy.  I stopped for a second to maybe try a stretch or two but as soon as I did, tears were running down my face.  It was the middle of July and my last cross country season was fast approaching and I had this sinking feeling that it wasn’t going to go like I wanted it to.  I walked home sweaty and blurry eyed.

I had never had a serious injury during my running career.  But finally I was faced with one.  I started going to see a chiropractor who specializes with runners.  He started by aligning my hips and making some adjustments.  It helped somewhat and I continued running.  The last day I was going to see him before I headed to Kalamazoo for preseason, he was just feeling curious and decided to take an x-ray of my right lower leg.  He had a hunch that I had stress fractures.  He came back with the x-rays and he was right.  Two tiny lines ran across my upper and lower shin.  Those two lines were the cause of all the trouble I had been dealing with my running for the past months.  I hated those two little lines.  He said I’d have to start off with taking a couple of weeks off.  Those two tiny lines benched me. 

The next couple of weeks I was confined to a stationary bike and aqua jogging in the pool.  I went to the trainer each day to get treatment and tried to stay off my legs as much as possible.  Meanwhile, the weather had finally cooled down and it was prime running weather.  My teammates got to take full advantage while I was in the pool pretending to run.   I counted down the days until I would be able to try running again.  My trainer would say “maybe next week you will get to try running.”  My first day back I was allotted ten minutes to run and that was it.  I was told if I felt any pain, I had to stop.  Running had start to become a privilege, something that was given to me only a couple of times a week until my stress fractures healed.  The bike and the pool were my chores and then every so often I was given minutes to run, my ten minute reward.

Running has been a lot of things to me.  For a lot of people, it’s a punishment.  Sometimes you’ll see the quote “My sport is your sport’s punishment” on the backs of runners’ t-shirts.  For me, I have way more of an appreciation for it than I ever thought I would.  It changes from day to day or even during a run.  Sometimes it feels like work or a chore.  Something you want to put off until tomorrow.  Sometimes I take it for granted, like you might do with anything you love.  But I always know that after a run, I will feel so much better off than I did before.

Intended publication: Life & Times section of Runner's World.