Runner Girl

Race day is two days away and I am sitting here reflecting. On how I’ve grown. On how I’ve changed. Four years ago there is no way in hell that you would have ever caught me spending my Saturdays running - let alone paying a race fee to do so.

But that was then. And this is now.

I’ve quit smoking. Quit drinking. Picked up yoga and meditation, and more often a pen and paper. I’m officially woo-woo :) Talking positive manifestations and spirit animals and shadow work. Take it or leave it. It’s the current iteration of me.

I even host woo-woo workshops, and while paging through magazines prepping for my Downdogs and Daydreams session I came across an article by Leslie Jamison titled “The Escape Artist” that chronicles how she used running to replace the high she often got from drinking. She says, “Running was difficulty, and drinking was ease, but in their shared capacity to deliver me from myself they felt like a pair of unlikely siblings: an odd couple, strangely aligned...If drinking loosened me from the cloister of my body, then running involved inhabiting that body fully….I liked courting the far edges of being in control - liked that risk, that sense of something happening.”

As a dreamy Pisces I resonate with wanting to live outside the realms of reality. And while I can’t claim to have reached a point where I would describe running as euphoric, I always feel immensely better for having done it. I think that is partly due to what Jamison describes when she says, “Running carrie(s) me to states where I [am] so exhausted that I [have] no energy left over for the spinning gears of my own self-consciousness.” Actually, there are few things that make me feel as capable, as strong, and as beautiful as I do after finishing a long distance run I thought myself incapable of.

And damn it - I tore out this article without realizing it continued on page 172 so while some things change, I guess others continue :) Still a hot mess - just one without a hangover.

But what I really want to know, is what makes you feel capable, and strong, and beautiful?!

Do more of that!

📸Herb Ritts