Find Your Run: Be Happy. Be Great. Be Better.

I don’t run for my health. I don’t run to lose weight. I don’t even run for the sake of exercising. I run because I’m selfish. Because I’m determined. Because I need to.

It started five years ago. I was, admittedly, disgusted with who I was and continued to be. I had no drive, no pride, no true accomplishment to my name. I wasn’t living; I was gliding by. There was no singular moment of clarity, but rather a build up of smaller, more granular moments of desire. It was my reflection in the mirror. It was the drenched-in-sweat-just-because-I’m-on-the-subway-in-the-middle-of-the-summer feeling. And, most of all, it was the innate need to break out of my skin day after day after day. I didn’t want to just be better. I wanted to cure my sense of self.

So, I started small. Embarrassingly, I followed “Eat This, Not That.” I made the kind of changes that may sound insignificant, even foolish. Oh, look! I took the cheese off my burrito bowl! The sum of these parts did make a difference in the way I felt, though – and I became addicted to that feeling.

Then, came the running part. Naturally, I’m a daydreamer. I daydream every day, at nearly all times of the day. I can walk miles & miles & miles around the city just imagining scenarios in my head. It stems back to the (nerd alert) way I would let my imagination as a child dream up situations in which I’m saving the world via Power Ranger-esque moves & Bill Nye smarts. Every day, I would dream myself up running, imaging how it would feel to do 1 or 2 miles. I would dream of how it felt to progress after each run. I even dreamt of the sweat, this time from true dedication & work.

Oh, the running. Trust me, it was not easy. Most of the times, it was not fun. 240 lb men who are 100% out of shape do not enjoy running. Fortunately (or luckily, depending on how you view it), my obsession of music gave me a crutch to live by during my runs. My first couple of runs, I just stared at the clock, counting the seconds & milliseconds until my mile was up. The only zone I was in was the “Get me off this contraption as soon as possible” zone.

Music changed it all. I wasn’t living by the clock; I was living by the song. At the time, a mile took me ten minutes. Ten minutes is roughly equivalent to three songs. Surely I could run for three songs, right? And that slight change in perception changed running completely for me. When I got through one mile I thought Hey I could run for three more songs. Three songs became six, six became nine, nine became twelve. The pounds shed, the progress sped forward, my clear obsession with the feeling of improvement grew. After only seven months, I had lost 70 pounds.

As most stories go, life (sort of) got in the way. I became content with my figure, focused a lot of my time on dating & my social life & let the running fade. Years legitimately passed. Dating weight gained. I was back up to 210 within three and a half years.

A year ago, almost to the day, I saw a picture of myself and hated what I saw. Yes, part of it was the distinctive weight I put on but the bigger issue was the void I was feeling from letting go of running & that addiction of improvement. I let myself became stagnant in my own life because I thought short term contentment was long term happiness.

So I started running. Again. This time, it was different. There was no weight goal; it was solely just to feel better. It was almost instantaneous, that runners’ high, and it started to seep into my veins. Improvement was being achieved. Progress was being made.

And here I am. 165 pounds, training for a half marathon. While I’m clearly training for a singular event, it will not be the end of my running; it will merely be just the beginning. I love my moments at 6:30AM, the quietness of Chicagoland on treelined streets while my feet bounce off pavement. I love Saturday’s along the lakeshore, letting the wind cool my body down. I love the music that drives me, shakes me to my core and causes my pace to accelerate until I can barely breathe. Running for me isn’t an exercise, it’s a way of life.

What am I trying to tell you? Find Your Run. It doesn’t have to be exercise. It doesn’t have to be a sport. It doesn’t have to be a hobby. What it does have to be is the one thing that makes you want to be a better person in every capacity. It makes you strive for greatness in your own personal way. It makes you smile because you understand your potential. And greatest of all: it makes you happy.