Huffing and puffing, I crawl back up the steps to my front door, where my mom waits, perplexed: “why are you doing this to yourself?” she asks. 

When I was younger, sports were a very large part of my life. I grew up on baseball dirt and grassy soccer fields, playing up until the lockdown hit when I was a sophomore in high school. In practices, running was a punishment: make an easy mistake or goof around in practice, and it was always laps. Confined to my house and with no social pressure to get out into the Texas heat, my only exercise became lifting weights in my garage. While I grew to love the deliberate process of strength training, I also began to grow too comfortable on my couch when I wasn’t lifting, attributing the countless hours I spent on video games and the like to “recovery.” Once life got back into full swing, I remained stuck in my ways. 

Flash forward two years, and I find I get slightly winded at the top of staircases. Without realizing, I had been avoiding any type of cardio activity at all, and that moment showed me that I needed to make a change before I built lifelong habits that could really harm my health. 

This summer, I tasked myself with running in my neighborhood every other day— not far, and not for very long, but every other day regardless. My first “run” devolved into a walk within minutes. Still, I stayed out there until I hit the two mile mark. Understanding it was a process, I didn’t let my poor performance send me straight home. Two days later, I went out again, trying to focus more on keeping a steady pace this time. I still ended up walking, but it was a smaller portion of the distance than the run prior. The process continued, and soon after I could make it all the way through two-milers. Moving on, I tried to stretch my distance further. In these runs, unlike those from sports practices years ago, I had a clear goal: building my health and exercising my discipline. Keeping this in mind proved extremely beneficial. When I was younger, I never failed to find myself dragging my feet and waiting for the end of a run. I wasn’t thinking about getting faster or building endurance, which may have been why it used to be so difficult to get through. It sounds obvious, but I had never experienced it in practice like this— remembering a task’s purpose makes its work loads easier to face. Thinking back to why I started kept me moving, and it turned me back around a few times when I had started the walk home. 

There are many ways to get healthier other than running— sports, hiking, and yoga come to mind, and when I told my friends about what I was doing, they frequently asked me why of all things I chose the exercise I hated most. But my issue was twofold: not only was I getting out of shape, I realized I had been letting this perception I had about cardio, starting from my youth, drive me to a physical and mental state I didn’t want to be in. This frustrated me, and I felt that I needed to take control of my actions and my discipline.

The benefits of this extended beyond health, too: running put my productivity issues into perspective. Facing a task that was daunting to me at the time made getting little things out of the way much easier by comparison. Work shifts became the second hardest part of my day, and I strove to find the purpose in the other tasks I found myself in. Framing difficult events as a challenge to better my mental strength proved to be much more effective than allowing myself to dread them and just wait for them to be over.

Now, in college, I am working on getting my rhythm back. This process was by no means a permanent fix, and it takes continuous effort to maintain benefits from things like these. Wrapped up in moving to school, I got complacent. I’ve only ran a handful of times in college, and now it’s been taking time to get back into my routine.

A college freshman may not be able to have the most developed perspective on this, but I believe that too often we get so absorbed in the day-to-day troubles we face that we lose sight of what we’re trying to get out of them in the first place. In my own experiences, I started trying to be mindful of the steps I am taking to reach my goals, and what those goals even are. I now know that if I work towards building a more deliberate life, I’ll not only have a better chance at reaching my aspirations, but the work I put in will feel more meaningful. 

I may not be a marathoner yet, but I did take away something very important: when you don’t want to get faster, it’s a lot harder to run.