Nine years of running hasn’t taught me the tidy lessons I expected it to. Mostly it’s taught me that showing up inconsistently, imperfectly, and for changing reasons is still showing up.
For a stretch of a couple of years, running stopped being something I looked forward to and became something I just did, out of habit, without much joy attached. I still don’t have a tidy ending for that story.
I started running for a reason I can barely remember caring about anymore. Nine years and several shifts later, the reason I keep running looks nothing like the one that got me started.
Some Sundays I don’t want to run at all, and I go anyway because the club is meeting. That habit, more than any motivation, is probably the real reason I’m still running years later.
There have been a handful of stretches over nine years where I nearly stopped running for good, and not all of them had anything to do with injury. Some were just seasons where it stopped feeling worth it.
Nine years in, the reasons I keep running have almost nothing to do with the reasons I started. I used to think there had to be one steady motivation. It turns out it’s been several, changing over time.