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 never felt upset with myself at any point in this training process. I never hated going to run because I didn’t antagonize myself for my pace, I just covered the distance and enjoyed myself.
On Sunday I knew I wouldn’t set a PR and I just went in with the idea of enjoying the experience and not focusing on my finish time. My relationship with running and my body has greatly changed in the last few years. I no longer punish myself for not being fast enough or skinny enough.
You can’t make your worth, confidence, or happiness reliant on reaching a certain weight or certain running pace. This is something you can create right now - it’s about your thoughts not about your external appearance. Feeling happy or confident is 100% based on your thoughts and not based on your size or weight. When you’ve spent your life fantasizing about finding your happiness when you’re in a smaller body, or living conditionally and hustling to find happiness in the future when you reach an arbitrary goal - you completely miss out on the opportunity to feel happiness now. Because we’ve been conditioned to believe that a better life, that a more confident life, is only possible if we are skinny. We’ve been conditioned to think our appearance makes us a failure, and on top of it as a runner I had the pressure that my race pace made me a failure.
When I lost all my weight, I was celebrated way too much and nobody checked in on my mental health and the toll it was taking on me to continually obsess over control. When you have lost a lot of weight through food restriction and controlling your diet it is really scary to lose the control and give up the restrictive behaviors. You don’t want to put weight back on because you don’t want to lose the thing that society has told you makes you valuable. Through weight loss society constantly gave me attention and validation that my behaviors were making me a better person and that me being thin made me more worthy, more beautiful, and more acceptable. We tell people that the way you look gives you a certain value as a human being. And that’s a huge issue we all need to look at in order to change that aspect of our culture. I was hyper aware of people’s opinions on my body and my food choices. I constantly put photos of before and after body comparison shots on the internet. I constantly put photos of my food on the internet. The constant need for validation from others became utterly exhausting. You become desperate for likes and spend so much time on curating your feed and your photos to try to display the person you think is acceptable. It becomes the way you feel okay about yourself. Your body size and weight do not broadcast to the world your worth. Don’t let other people decide who you should be or how you should look by living your life to please them. You don’t need other peoples validation to be happy. How much mental space is being taken up by food thoughts or body thoughts that are literally taking all of your joy away from the real things in life that matter to you?
The reality of moving through the world in a smaller body didn’t meet the expectations. From a physical comfort standpoint maybe but from a mental space - it’s hard! When you buy into weight loss you’re buying into this image and life expectation of a happier joyful existence but that didn’t happen. Love and acceptance doesn’t come with weight loss. Weight loss doesn’t guarantee happiness. Instead I was left feeling this anxiety, sadness, dread, and sense that I’m not in control and I’m not enough.
When is structure a prison and when is structure a good thing? You can make the choice but it’s important to tune into things you enjoy. You can stop whenever you want to, you don’t have to go out hard. For me as a runner - I don’t have to have any pace requirements. I enjoy running and doing races but my pace doesn’t need to be my prison. And fitness doesn’t need to be attached to weight control! It can take a lot of time to undo the obsession with trying to change your body. The rush of endorphins and the confidence of completing a run is way more valuable and enjoyable than a long term goal of getting thinner which quite frankly isn’t important to me anymore.
I am not a professional athlete, I do not need to have pace goals to be fulfilled by this sport. I am hoping to continue moving forward with a joy of running and movement and accepting my body and my life without conditions.
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