Unconditional
On Sunday, I completed my second marathon. I finished this marathon with a slower pace than my first marathon, but I also finished this marathon a lot happier. In 2018 I started training for my second marathon and quit because I hated it. I thought I hated running, but I have come to realize I was really just struggling with my image. I came to believe that running was responsible for making my body smaller and to keep myself skinny I needed to run. I also started to believe that in order to be a real runner or feel like I was good enough I had to run at a certain pace. I put a lot of pressure on myself to PR marathon number two in 2018 and when I realized those paces were not coming it made me start negative self talk and the constant negativity around running wasn’t about the running it was about my thoughts. When I started working on accepting my body no matter what size I was and accepting my running no matter how slow I was, I found peace in the process of marathon training. I nev