Running For My Life

For the last 30 years, I’ve been running – everywhere. I’ve run up and down Syracuse University campus, through muggy Michigan fields and towns, down the lakeshore of Chicago, up steep hilly trails of Marin County, along long New England roads. I’ve jogged across the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge and beside the banks of a misty gray Lake Zürich in Switzerland, at the foot of the Alps. I’ve squinted and huffed through snow, rain and sleet. I’ve pressed my fists and mind through disapproval, heartbreak, depression, job loss, sexist bosses, through a squishy postpartum body, insomnia, parental stress, an ill child, through crime and betrayal. “What are you running from?” one trainer once asked me as she rubbed a knot in my hip. “Your body isn’t made for this,” she added. “You shouldn’t have so much pain.” But my running isn’t about avoiding discomfort. I run to press through hard stuff – to feel bones and muscles, alive against pavement, upright in a big, complicated world. I run to pump and sweat out false messages and expectations that hang on me, blind me and confine me from living the life I’ve been blessed to receive. Sure, I run to stay fit. But also I run from hopelessness – I run from the myths that moms should be sweet and tidy and happy and smooth and young and beautiful; that bad schools can never change; that hunger and poverty and homelessness will never end; that a mother can’t help her child without giving him medication. I ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news