An account of the author's struggle to become a runner, focusing on the lack of 'runner's high' and the unexpected satisfaction of simply completing a run.
When I travel for work and my colleagues catch me on an early morning run? Smug. When someone calls me and I have to apologise for being out of breath because I’m on a run? Smug.For me, jogging isn’t about the euphoria – it’s about the small, everyday achievement of doing something I know will make me feel better in the long run. I am a bad runner. OK, maybe not “bad”. I get out there, I do it. But I am slow and plodding. I’ll bargain with myself to just run a short 3km.
The farthest I have ever run is 6km – and it happened because I was heading to a pub at the other end. One of the things they try to sell you on when you start running is “runner’s high”: that magical sense of euphoria you get from really pushing your body. It’s dangled as a carrot in front of all of the terrible runs you will have to do to get any good at running. Keep doing this, they say, and you’ll experience that extraordinary phenomenon. I’ve never run fast enough, or far enough, to get even close to experiencing runner’s high. But I have experienced something which, while perhaps less sensational, is nonetheless its own buzz – runner’s smugness.I’ve been running now for four years. I had tried to become a runner before, downloading the Couch to 5K app after reading Bella Mackie’s book Jog On, about. I thought maybe this was something that could help my anxiety, too. But it didn’t stick. It felt impossible to jog for a whole minute. To add to that there were just too many other, less horrible-feeling, things I could be doing. That changed with Covid lockdowns. Suddenly I had too much time – and increasing anxiety that I needed to get on top of. So I reopened the app and started running agai
Running Jogging Fitness Well-Being Anxiety
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