This week we want to thank Annalisa for allowing us to repost an excerpt of her training for the NYC Marathon previously published on Quartz.
I always hated running.
“At the right pace, anyone can keep going for a long time,” my PE teacher would try to convince me. I just never believed that was true for me.
And yet, on Nov. 6, I ran the New York City marathon.
I decided to run the marathon mostly out of an angry, rebellious desire to prove myself wrong. Even as an adult, I still believed that I couldn’t run far—or accomplish much of anything, really. But what actually made running a marathon possible—what made me even conceive of the idea and then helped push me past all the hardships and self-doubt and weeks of training—was America.
From couch to 5K
For years—decades, really—just talking about running was a kind of Proustian madeleine. Whenever the subject came up, I’d profess that I hated the activity and was terrible at it. I felt like my early teen self, again: unimpressive, unpopular, and scared. Other things—professional goals, relationships, and body image—held a similar power over me. (Some still do.) At times, life seemed like an exhausting exercise in fending off thoughts of all the things that I am useless at.
A year ago, that was the farthest I’d ever run. And a 5k is one thing—a marathon is quite another.
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Read the rest of the story of how I became a runner, and what I learnt training, here. It features the Whippets being really fast and really nice to me: your support was so instrumental, I can’t thank you enough for that.
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