I found an old, half filled notebook a while back, the one I used my first year of running to jot down times and routes, and one page just says “still don’t feel like a runner” in handwriting I recognized as mine but barely remember writing. That line stopped me for a minute. Nine years later, I still remember roughly how that felt, waiting for some threshold to cross where I’d finally feel like the thing I was doing, rather than someone faking her way through it.
The threshold that never actually came
For most of my first year, I was waiting for a specific moment where I’d feel like a runner, the way I imagine people feel like they’ve arrived at some identity once they’ve put enough time in. I don’t think that moment ever really arrived, not the way I pictured it. What happened instead was slower and less dramatic: I just kept running, month after month, and at some point, without a clear line I could point to, the doubt about whether I belonged doing this quieted down. Nobody could have told me that in a way that would have sped it up. I had to run enough months to find out.
How much the difficulty would fluctuate
I assumed, going in, that running would get steadily easier the more I did it, week over week, in a fairly predictable way. What I wish I’d understood is how much that first year would bounce around, good weeks followed by weeks that felt harder than when I started, for reasons that weren’t always obvious. I spent a lot of energy that year being confused and discouraged by runs that felt worse than ones from a month earlier, assuming something had gone wrong, when really that unevenness was just normal.
That comparing myself to other people was mostly pointless
I wish I’d understood sooner how little it mattered what pace or distance anyone else was running. I spent an embarrassing amount of my first year measuring myself against strangers I passed, people at the one race I ran that year, even people I only saw briefly out a car window. None of that comparison did anything for me except make an already hard year feel harder. It took longer than it should have to notice that the only version of running that mattered was the one happening in my own legs, on my own days.
That the hard days weren’t a sign I was doing it wrong
This might be the thing I wish someone had told me most directly, because I don’t think I’d have believed it without going through it myself. Bad runs, runs that felt heavy and pointless and discouraging, were not evidence that I was approaching running incorrectly or that I lacked whatever quality other people seemed to have. They were just part of it, then and now, nine years and a full year long injury layoff later. I still have runs that feel exactly as hard and confusing as some of the ones from that first year.
That it wouldn’t stay this hard forever, but also wouldn’t stop being hard sometimes
I think what I actually needed to hear, if anyone could have said it in a way I’d have absorbed, was something more honest than “it gets easier.” It does get easier in some ways. My body adjusted, my confidence grew, the specific difficulty of that first year faded. But running has never stopped being hard sometimes, even now, even after everything. I wish I’d known that the goal was never going to be a permanent state of ease, just a longer relationship with something that would keep being difficult in different ways at different points.
What I’d actually say if I could go back
If I could talk to the woman who wrote “still don’t feel like a runner” in that notebook, I don’t think I’d try to convince her she already was one, because I don’t think that would have landed. I’d probably just tell her that the feeling she was waiting for wasn’t a prerequisite for anything, that she could keep running exactly as unsure of herself as she felt, and it would still count, and it would still eventually turn into nine years and counting. She didn’t need permission or reassurance nearly as much as she needed to keep going anyway. As it turns out, she did.
Why I still keep that notebook
I’ve held onto that notebook for nine years now, through several moves, through the year I wasn’t running at all, mostly because it’s the only unfiltered record I have of what that first year actually felt like from the inside, before I had any of the hindsight I’m writing with now. Every time I flip through it I’m reminded how uncertain and unglamorous the actual experience was, which is easy to forget once you’re years past it and the story has smoothed itself into something more coherent than it felt at the time.
What I’d add now, looking back further
If I could add one more line to that notebook now, it wouldn’t be advice exactly. It would be something closer to a note for later: this uncertain, doubting stretch is going to turn into nine years, and a lot of it, more than you’d expect, and you’re going to be glad you didn’t wait until the doubt cleared up before you kept going. I don’t think that would have made the first year feel any easier in the moment. But I like imagining it would have been there anyway, a small, private reassurance tucked into a notebook mostly filled with confusion.