Running to run

I am learning to run again like I have learned how to eat again.

If you're like I am, you may have spent too many years on the treadmill or on the roads, in the pool or in the weight room, trying to shape your body into something different from what it is. In high school I was a runner, a swimmer, a lacrosse player, and a skier; exercise started out as an excuse to spend time with friends and compete with other teams, but became a full-blown obsession once I entered college. I kept an exercise log during my freshman year, where I wrote down every minute that I spent in exercise, chiding myself if I missed a day. I rarely did. Thirty-day streaks of exercise were the rule rather than the exception, and if I felt tired or injured, well, I just ran right through it.

About four years ago, when I was midway through my recovery, I came down with a case of mononucleosis that had me out of commission for months. No more "I'm training for a marathon," no more gym workouts at 10 p.m., no more books read on the elliptical machine. Just rest, and more rest, and some yoga now and then.

It took me about two years of recovery -- from both mono and my eating disorder -- before I began to consider running again. I was living in Brazil, and found that I was spending far too much of my time indoors. Running gave me an excuse to get out and see the city and its parks, and it put an order to my week and structure to my time. But since I returned from the U.S. in 2006, I haven't pursued running seriously. Part of me knows how easy it is for me to go overboard when it comes to exercise: a few workouts a week easily turns into a mandatory schedule of one a day, plus stretching, plus cool-downs. I can't afford to follow this kind of regimen right now, what with my studies and my job, and so I mostly don't. Besides, there is little joy in such practice, and these days I try to fill my free time with things that I like to do.

But this laissez-faire attitude towards running (or other forms of hard exercise) doesn't suit me, either. I like routine, but not obsession. I like seeing myself improve over time, something that doesn't happen if I just run "when I feel like it." And there's much to be said about mood and exercise: I just feel better, all around, when I get some exercise. Tentatively, I have created a schedule for myself: three brief runs (or rides) during the week, and one or two longer runs on the weekends, depending on how I feel. I love rising early to exercise, and find that it makes the rest of the day feel so much better, knowing that I have already seen some beauty in the world, used my body to creative ends, and have given myself time that is all mine.

Strangely, this must be the first time that I am running without the expectation of perfecting my body from exercise. In fact, I seem to finally accept that fact that my body, when it changes, rarely follows the rules that I would expect it to. So this time, I am running for other things. I am running to feel the cold air in my chest; running to see the sun rise; running to keep up with my husband; running to remind myself that I am fast, strong, and resilient; running because I don't need to, but I can.

Why are you running (or not)? Why or why not do you exercise, and what does exercise mean for you these days?

home come coming home homing come home

This week has been a coming-home of sorts, in ways both literal and figurative.

As I write this, I am at my laptop in my parents' home in suburban Minnesota, back visiting for the Thanksgiving week. As always, coming back home (is this my home still? or in my home in New York, with my husband? ah such questions) is a strange combination of familiar and foreign. My bedroom, while not quite a shrine to my adolescence, is filled with shelves upon shelves of the books that I read in college: Borges, Neruda, Fuentes, Mistral, Arenas -- books that I read when I thought that I would become a professor of Latin American literature, and planned my career accordingly. What got in the way was an eating disorder that made me reflect on what I really wanted out of life. Would I live my life surrounded by books that no one else had ever read, attending literary conferences to debate over obscure topics, and spend my weekends memorizing poetry? Or would I -- as I considered later -- dedicate my life to understanding, to the best of my abilities, the origins of distress, of disease?

I know that I am not alone in saying that my eating disorder changed my life. The obvious ways: I chose psychology instead of literature, empirical study instead of postmodern critical theory. My Ph.D. is a means to an end: I want to do research that matters. I want to bring all that I have witnessed and experienced to bear on my work as a therapist. I want to have an impact that goes beyond my tiny circle. These are the goals that changed after having an eating disorder. And I know that I am not alone in rearranging my priorities, because on Friday night I met up with three other women who have struggled with eating disorders, and all of us are caught up in larger plans that have to do with healing. Twisted Barbie is studying to be a social worker; Stephanie produces films and plays about eating disorders; and the third woman in our group is studying to be a physician's assistant. Wounded healers, all of us.

That encounter was another sort of home-coming, because I haven't spent so much time, in person, with ED folks since leaving college. My ED changed my life, and even though I am not ashamed of it, there are few new people in my life with whom I would feel comfortable talking about what I went through. There are always "easier" explanations to give for why I study clinical psychology, and along the way I certainly have found other reasons to continue in the field. ED was my entry point to so much more, and most of the time I am content to talk about that so much more and take pleasure in the fact that there is so much more to my life right now than the fact that I had an eating disorder. Still, I had it. It marked me. I changed because of it. My eating disorder set off a transformation in me, or metamorphosis if you will, that has yet to end. There is no end to healing and learning from this thing, no limits to what we can do with our experiences. And this week I am coming back to that, reminding myself of where I have been and where I am going.