…I was a runner. I never got very good at it (because, even as a child, I was never good at it), but I found it to be peculiarly satisfying. The shape of my body is not conducive to the mechanics of running, generally speaking. I have short legs and flat feet. I am very muscular, so I’ve always been marginally good at sprinting, but never at running for any sort of distance.

I was reading some of the links from Kell’s blog (specifically, this), and suddenly I found myself thinking wistfully about running.

Since I was a kid, I really had a hate-hate relationship with running. They made us run a mile in gym class every Wednesday…debilitating menstrual cramps or no. I always got a horrible time, and I never seemed to improve. It was humiliating, running at the back of the pack with your stupid gym shorts riding up your ass, your new boobs bouncing so much you felt they would slap you in the forehead, and all the boys in the middle of the field, watching. It sucked, and I hated it with every fibre of my being.

There was one time, however, when I made a deal with myself about the mile. I decided I would keep running through the whole mile, never walk, no matter how slowly that meant I had to run. I ran really, really, really slowly…so slowly, it hardly seemed possible I was going any faster than walking. But I finished with a decent time, and everyone was surprised, myself included. I had an inkling then that maybe running was a learned thing, and even if I was never born with a gift for it, I could do it, and it was nothing to be humiliated about.

So when I took up running about six years ago, it felt pretty good. I was able to do it on my own, without the punitive stares of my classmates or gym teacher. I could go as slow as I wanted. It felt like I was conquering something major. Unfortunately, it was all tied up in my big attempt to lose weight, so that was a lot of my motivation for running. But I did come to enjoy it in a way, though I was never good at it. I even read Jim Fixx’s book.

I put running away when I abruptly derailed the dieting train, along with everything else that had gone with it. That might seem like an unwise thing to have done, but it was what I needed to do. I knew there was something sick in what I was doing, and even if some of the things weren’t inherently wrong in themselves, the motivation behind it all was majorly screwed up. So I swept all of the puzzle pieces off the table, and for the last six years, I’ve been sorting through them and trying to put them back together to form a picture that isn’t an image of thinness. This is very difficult, tricky work.

One of the pieces I’ve found a place for, within the last year, is healthy eating. As a nutrition student, I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I am to have that one in place. (I’ll save the “what exactly is healthy eating?” debate for another post on another day. Suffice it to say that I am satisfied with my current eating practices, and that is my only requirement.)

And the sticky thing, the one I’ve been working on ever since Sylvia helped me figure the eating thing out, is movement. I can barely stand to even speak or type the word ‘exercise,’ and ‘physical activity’ is not much better. Movement, I can deal with. I move all the time anyway. I don’t own a car, so I walk just about everywhere (when I’m not taking the subway, which I also walk to), and I haul all sorts of heavy crap up the three flights of stairs to my apartment. So, informally, I’m lightly active (and my muscles are…er, kind of alarming.)

When I read that article, I decided to do a Google search for “fat runners.” Guess what I found? Right: zip — except for the repeated assertion that there are no fat runners, because running presumably makes everyone who does it magically thin.

In a perverse way, that makes me want to do it even more. I’d love to be the apocryphal fat runner come to life for all those assholes to see. But more than that, I miss running. With full force, I am just now beginning to recall how much fun it all was. I biked, I swam, I ran, I karated, I kayaked. I had a hell of a fun time.