How can running for your life change your life?

I started running just weeks after my 12th birthday, when my best friend and I decided to team up across middle school to escape gym class.

At the time, I didn't know what long-distance running was; Before my first day, I thought it involved some form of skiing, and since my boyfriend and I were two of the shortest and slowest riders on the team, we started training after school by running boulders in our backpacks, and away from me.  Recall, we can hardly wait for the announcement of the running tour to end.

I really don't know how this backache became the beginning of my long-term relationship with physical activity, but 14 years later I still run every day, sometimes with my old running buddies. 

The first question that comes to people's minds when they find out I run every day is: Do you do it in preparation for a marathon? I don't really run marathons, though my friends and I do occasionally run 21Ks, and I don't do it to keep in shape, though I still wonder what I'd look like if I decided to quit. 

For many, running is a way to get back in shape, fight heart disease, balance life after a breakup, or even catch a train that's about to close. I'm not an introvert who uses running to cut off human contact.

For me, running is a goal in itself, and the activity has become my own way of balancing the scales, and at some point since 2002 I started getting to know my body and counting my life in miles . 

I run because after all these years I have learned to find some serenity in the act of running, and at some point over the past decade I began to find joy in this activity. strange but painful. 

In recent years, long-distance running has gone from being a hallmark of masochists and binge-dieters to a national pastime for people in their 20s and 30s, with Runner's World estimating that the number of people running half marathons has increased almost tenfold.  , from 300,000 to over 2 million, since 1990, and according to Running USA, the number of people finishing marathons has increased by about 50% in the last 10 years. Long-distance running is a bit of a hobby regular, especially with the growing number of apps and online resources dedicated to serving people with the goal of preparing for a marathon in just a few months. 

As happy as new runners may feel when they leave home on the first day of spring with nothing but their shoes and tracksuits, they may not be aware of how running changes their lives.  By running for long periods of time, not just several miles, something about you changes while you run, perhaps in the same way that bilingualism expands your brain function, scientists say. 

It's only now that I'm beginning to understand the long-term effects of running on my life. Long distance running means that certain ligaments or muscles in the body will always be sore, even when we are not doing the act of running. So runners learn to categorize all kinds of pain they feel under just two elements: chronic or transients. , and therefore, any type of pain. It does not fall under the name of chronic pain, it can be circumvented, fought, massaged or simply ignored; To become a better runner, you have to repeatedly push yourself beyond your pain threshold, and with that in mind, can it be denied that this instinct that runners develop affects other aspects of 

Last fall I waited three days after falling with a rock cave-in before going to see a doctor, only to be surprised I broke two ribs in the fall, and last year , a friend of mine, a lifelong runner, endured her toothache long enough to kill a nerve her age before going to see the dentist.

Jordan Metzl, a specialist in sports medicine, states that runners adapt to ignore pain. "There are certain things about running that change the physiology and the psyche of runners," says Metzl. “Runners are able to endure because their response to pain lessens over time, they can suppress the pain and force themselves to run longer because they are used to it.  ”

For years I assumed that some of my antics were very personal idiosyncrasies, like leaving the house without a coat in freezing temperatures, not using oven mitts unless the dish was hot enough to burn the skin , and leaving the house not knowing that I had a fever or inflammation of the airways, but I realized that these behaviors are shared by many distance runners, and that does not mean that we cannot feel the pain, but rather that we simply choose to ignore it.  

But at the same time, a severely pulled hamstring changes almost the whole equation. Runners treat this type of crippling injury as a very serious condition that needs to be treated immediately. In other words, runners ignore all kinds of pain except those that threaten a fracture or tear, no matter how slight or discreet as they are.

On the other hand, it also seems convincing to link acquired tolerance to an increase in the pain threshold with an increase in psychological resilience. The sport of running often involves runners covering each mile at a faster pace than the mile that preceded it, and this type of repeated aggression against physical limits can only occur when developing psychological endurance, which means that runners accustomed to maintaining their activity over 9 Miles, they may find themselves very well suited to training intensely for long periods of "Psychologically, running is one of the things that alters the pain response," Dr. Metzl says. "These exercises create a kind of socialization where you train yourself to develop the kind of focus needed to run long distances. "

As an example of the above, for years I avoided learning to drive, but after I finally got my driver's license, I was surprised to find that I was completely up to speed.   comfortable to spend so much time behind the wheel, to be able to drive for hours before I get tired.

But this socialization, as Metzl calls it, can also result in obvious faults. Short runs become boring and uncomfortable, as the distance runner often feels the first mile too difficult, only to suddenly feel at some point in the middle of the second mile that their stride becomes more open and flexible. 

From this point of view, running teaches us to wait for our performance in the second mile, which is where we have to evaluate ourselves according to, and everything that happens before that moment is not important, so the races of a mile frustrates me, because my mind is always going to measure my performance over the long term.  Therefore, new runners who do well in short-term training should switch to long-term endurance training before their changes do not become irreversible.

In terms of diseases, recently the doctor told me that it is not possible to know if I have a genetic predisposition to hypercholesterolemia because I have been running for a long time, and doctors have long believed that I was naturally hypoglycemic, but my new Doctor told me that I run so much that my sugar stays artificially low, and he even jokingly told me that I might have prediabetes, but you'll never know, because my body has always sugar hunger.

 
It seems that people who have been running since before puberty are clearly far from the baselines that determine the health of the human body, in every sense of the word; The runner does not know what the normal state of the body is.  It is as if the body's balance system is under constant attack. In fact, the idea that the runner is far from the natural state, the state of relaxation and the state in which the body should be, seems a little strange. The runner's body is different. Exactly, and my body today is much weaker than it should be for a 25-year-old, and there are traces of it that wouldn't have appeared if it wasn't for my running obsession. 

From this point of view, one of the orthopedists insists that running is very harmful for the organism. My body, for example, is very prone to injury, having a torn Achilles tendon in 2014, broken ribs this fall, chronic iliac ligament issues, weak quadriceps, knee pain and neck spasm. 

Runners subconsciously learn to reduce the severity of their symptoms in hopes that their willingness to report their pain will get them the go-ahead from the doctor to return to training as soon as possible, but that often doesn't happen.  and yet they go out running anyway, so much so that they can hurt themselves, and even Dr. Metzl, whose research shows runners have lower rates of depression and a reduced risk of heart disease and cancer, understands the risks associated with running, so he always advises combining running exercises with strength training to help the body on injury prevention.

But this struggle leads you to become more and more adept at understanding the other mechanics of your body. Experienced runners don't need a GPS to tell how fast or how far they've run, and they don't. don't need a heart rate monitor because calculating these metrics without the use of technology becomes a learned instinct for them. .

After all these years I really don't know if my body has become a microchip or just an empty loop stripped of its pain thresholds after years of abuse but either way my body still craves those times when I feel exhausted after a long day of running, because my idea of pain has changed over time, and so has my idea of pleasure; This source of pain now overwhelms my body with pure pleasure. 

Over time, you will begin to appreciate the moments when you feel that every movement of any joint in your body hurts, as if the joint were being injected with grains of wet sand or crumbs of metal, and you enjoy the sensation of warm blood flowing through all the veins of your face as if it were a mask enveloping it, the air will fizz violently in the orifices of your nose, carrying with it the harmful vapor and salty from the moisture that evaporates from your skin, mixing with the dust that flies off your feet onto the 

Within an hour of finishing your workout, you'll barely be able to move from one corner of your apartment to the other, as your body will feel like it's been pulverized into tiny beads, scattered like a chemical element stripped of its electrons from valence. 

It was this sense of self that caused feelings of fear in me during the early years of my running practice, and perhaps this same fear is what causes many people to refrain from running, but with the time I felt inside that feeling; Your perception of the world, and of the world itself, will change completely when you are so exhausted after a long run that you feel like a new person again, or as if, as you run mile after mile, you not only lose seconds of your race, but also parts of yourself, those parts that you will lose forever because of 

During those times when you pull yourself together from the squat position, fight off the killer urge to vomit, and catch your breath for a few more moments, live in a world of light, unencumbered, and post-race euphoria, which is the moment the hardest for new runners, is the closest.  Serenity for veteran runners, who literally steal that feeling for miles.

Time teaches us to find what we want right now, a sense of belonging, even a sense of natural order, as if at that exact moment the fog lifted from the scene in front of you for real.

If you are a stranger to this feeling, then let me tell you that in this moment of serenity you will find changes within yourself, when you do not feel the need to shake off the thin layer of earth that covers your palms; In winter you will be warm, in the heat of summer you will be refreshed, the thirst that haunts you in the third mile will vanish, and the pains you will feel in the fourth mile will mourn; You'll just feel drunk, like your body just exists, and you'll forgive yourself for the brutal abuse of your own body during your early years as a runner.  And here the question will come to your mind: can any other activity in the world ever open you to such a feeling?