Fast and Free

For the last several years I have spent every Monday morning at the same place: my neighborhood high school’s track. Each week I lace my shoes at an ungodly hour, meet two of my neighborhood besties, and head uphill to engage in the inevitably painful ritual of speedwork.

Here is the strange part: I have not run a race in many years. There are no medals in my future, and I have no interest in competing anymore. And yet, week after week, my friends and I push our bodies harder than they want to go. I don’t even decide the specifics of the torture. I leave that honor to my friend, who is a competitive marathoner.

We started this routine after one of my friends began reading about perimenopause. Riveting, I know. At forty-four, we were both noticing changes in our bodies: sleepless nights, irritability, sweaty wakings. Where I led with emotion, she led with intellect; while I processed, she researched. She read multiple books on menopause, and one day she showed up on our daily run and told me what she had learned: if we wanted our bodies to age well, we needed to vary our workouts. I knew this was true somewhere in the recesses of my brain, but I had always considered myself a “lazy runner.”

Lazy was a funny word for me to choose. I was never lazy in mileage. Since age fifteen, I routinely ran forty to sixty miles a week, depending on how deep I was in my eating disorder. But my routine did not include stretching, weightlifting, or cross-training, and it definitely left out speedwork. I had given that up when I quit the cross-country team after my freshman year of college.

Now, do not tell my friend this, but I did not agree to do speed workouts because her science convinced me. I agreed because I was in the middle of an anorexia relapse and I was willing to jump on any opportunity to burn more calories.

So for years I showed up at that track out of compulsion, not health. I ran myself ragged, obeying the intervals, never asking if they served me. I dreaded the mornings, but I showed up anyway. That is what compulsion is. No matter how tired or hollow I felt, no matter how hungry I woke up, I still ran those workouts and gave them everything I had.

Slowly, over the last couple of years, I have been doing the harder work of nourishing my body. With honesty and connection, yes, but also literally: I have been feeding myself better. As I have taken the painful road of becoming honest with myself and with others, I have also started listening to my body. Like a runner who finally stretches (I still do not), the more I stretch myself figuratively, the more flexible I have become. I still have plenty of eating-disordered thoughts, but the more I listen to my body, the better I become at feeding her.

I wish I could say this has led to a fully healthy relationship with running. It has not. I still run too much, and it remains more compulsory than I would like. Still, over the past months I have noticed how much better my body feels. I am stronger and faster. I no longer feel hollowed out. I feel strong.

This morning, on the same track, running a familiar workout, my friend noticed. Today it was just the two of us; our third was out of town. As I pulled ahead of her midway through the intervals, she yelled, “You are fast this morning.” And I was. I felt strong, healthy, maybe even happy. I noticed that the speedwork today did not feel punishing. It felt freeing.

Some context here: this friend has been my steady for many years. She has run with me through joy and through pain. She watched me shrink myself, though I never spoke of what was happening. Recently, I gave her my manuscript. She is on Substack too, likely reading along with you now. She may not have officially known about my worst-kept secret, but now she knows on every level. That made her observation land harder for me.

When we were running side-by-side on our cooldown, she commented again on my speed. She had noticed a new version of me, a healthier one. I looked at her and smiled.

“I have figured out the secret to speed,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “What is it?”

“Eating,” I told her.

She laughed. It was meant as a joke, but it was also true. Feeding myself when my body asks for it has changed many things. So has nourishing myself with connection. Saying this simple and historically shameful truth aloud is its own form of healing.

For years I tried to fix myself in silence. I pushed harder, restricted more, told myself I could outwork the pain. But nothing changed. It was not until I stopped trying to change alone, until I got honest with others about my struggle, that real shifts began. Almost imperceptibly at first, then undeniably.

I am not all better. But I am honest now. I am nourishing myself better than I ever have before. And, just as my friend noticed this morning, I am faster and freer too.