essays about running

My Worst Best Marathon

When I arrived in Chicago for the 2021 marathon last week, I had every reason to believe I would beat my previous marathon time: a 3:29 at the 2020 Los Angeles Marathon that put me minutes under the Boston Marathon qualifying threshold. Qualifying for Boston is a big achievement for most runners, one I was proud of, and one I wanted to surpass. But it wasn't to be.

Eighteen months ago, I probably would have been too ashamed or embarrassed to write this story. But today, I'm surprised to find that not only do I want to, I feel proud to write it. The truth is, I've changed. I still want to chase big goals and push myself. But what happened Sunday during the 26.2 miles of the race made me better — even if it was my worst marathon time yet.

Running was not just a thing I did, it was a place I went. Somewhere I could be alone and let my thoughts unspool, or barely think at all.

When I started running more seriously five years ago, I instantly applied my Type A ambition to the endeavor. Running meant getting faster with every race. And for years, I did just that. Then, just a few short days after my running pinnacle at the LA Marathon, the city shut down. The pandemic took hold. I kept running, pulling up my mask whenever I came within 12 feet of my neighbors, but I was adrift. Like so many of us, I was full of grief for all we had lost, and a wave of depression left me feeling physically sick. It was hard to wake up in the mornings. My stomach always hurt. I cried when I listened to the news, then felt guilty for the crashing waves of my emotions, knowing how privileged I was and how much worse so many other people had it. But I still ran. I needed to. Running was not just a thing I did, it was a place I went. Somewhere I could be alone and let my thoughts unspool, or barely think at all. On my early-pandemic runs, I would ruminate on the beauty of the jacaranda trees in my neighborhood, leaving behind the stress that awaited me when I returned home to my computer and my phone, taking deep breaths and feeling how precarious and wonderful it was to be able to do just that. Then, in the summer of 2020, I sprained my ankle. Badly. Being injured is always hard. This time it was harder.

It was a long road back to recovery from me, both physically and when it came to mental wellness. But I dedicated myself to focusing on both. Not to, I felt, would be to disrespect everyone who wasn't able to do just that. I had to get better, I thought, simply because I had the opportunity to do it. I started back slow. In June of this year, when Nike asked me if I wanted to train for another marathon , I knew I was ready. I started working with running coach Rebeka Stowe to get race-ready for Chicago. It was a joyful training cycle. The world was cautiously reopening, and people were gathering together again. I ran with Koreatown Run Club and alongside my good friend Sheena as she prepared for the LA Marathon. I felt my speed returning, my belief in my running ability and my athletic determination trickling back into my body and brain.

Then it was race day. It wasn't long after I crossed the start line in Chicago that I realized I didn't feel right. I pride myself on my steel will, my ability to push through discomfort, and my dedication. I mean, marathons are supposed to be hard. But it also became clear that not only would reaching my goal time be nearly impossible after my rocky start, but to do it would require sacrificing something I didn't want to give: the joy of the run, the first of the American major marathons to take place since the pandemic began.

By mile eight, I knew that strange, elusive alchemy that creates the ideal race had not come together for me that day. And I changed my goal. As I looked around me at the tens of thousands of people running, I decided to let awe wash over me. All of us had survived, and here we were, back together, trying to do this impossible-seeming thing. Wow. How lucky was I to be sharing the asphalt with other runners again? To be able to be in my body, to smile, to laugh at the corny marathon signs people hoisted at us from the sidewalks? So lucky. My new focus was to lean into that feeling of elation, of gratitude, and turn my race into a fun run. To be honest, most of the miles were still not that fun. I've lucked out in my running career; even in my previous marathons, I didn't really struggle. Of course, those races were extremely hard, but I felt good — if challenged — throughout. This was different. My guts were twisted. My mouth felt made of cotton. It simply was not in me. Did I make some rookie mistakes that contributed to that? Yes. Did some things completely out of my control impact my performance? Yes. But do I feel the need to go into detail, make excuses, or offer to anyone an explanation? No.

The last year and a half has changed me. I'm still driven to push myself and accomplish more as an athlete, a writer, a person in the world. But as I gave myself the grace and understanding I needed during those long 26.2 miles in Chicago, I realized I'd grown. I'd come to learn that being kind to yourself doesn't always mean giving up on yourself. Being gentle with yourself doesn't always equal letting yourself off the hook. Sometimes it just means allowing yourself the grace you'd give anyone else in that moment. And that's hard. But I did it. And for that, I'm proud.

Don't doubt it: I'm still going to get that personal record. I know my Boston qualifying time was no fluke and I absolutely believe I can do it again. But I don't feel like I have to do it in order to prove something to myself or anyone else this time, to post my finish time on Strava and Instagram and impress some people, to feel like I've earned the label "fast." So, while my time in the Chicago Marathon wasn't an achievement for me, the race no doubt was. I've become a better athlete, a better person, and a better friend to myself. How could that not be a win?

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Essay on Running

Students are often asked to write an essay on Running in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Running

The joy of running.

Running is a simple yet powerful activity that can bring both physical and mental benefits. It’s a universal exercise that anyone can do, anywhere, anytime.

Physical Benefits

Running helps to strengthen muscles, improve cardiovascular fitness, and maintain a healthy weight. Regular running can also boost your immune system and increase longevity.

Mental Benefits

Running can help reduce stress and improve mood. It releases endorphins, often known as ‘happy hormones’, which can make you feel more positive and energetic.

Running and Friendship

Running can also be a social activity. Joining a running club or participating in races can help you make new friends.

250 Words Essay on Running

The essence of running.

Running, often regarded as a simple physical activity, is a complex interplay of mind, body, and spirit. It is a universal language that transcends cultural and geographical boundaries, serving as a metaphor for life’s journey, filled with challenges, victories, and personal growth.

Running is an excellent cardiovascular exercise that strengthens the heart, reduces the risk of heart disease and diabetes, and helps maintain a healthy weight. It also improves bone health, reducing the risk of osteoporosis, and enhances muscular strength and endurance.

Mental and Emotional Impact

Beyond the physical, running has profound mental and emotional implications. It is known to release endorphins, often referred to as ‘runner’s high’, leading to improved mood and reduced stress levels. It also fosters mental resilience as runners learn to push through discomfort and fatigue, skills transferable to other life challenges.

Social and Environmental Connection

Running fosters a sense of community, with runners often forming close-knit groups. These communities provide support, motivation, and camaraderie, enriching the running experience. Running also deepens our connection with the environment as it often takes place outdoors, providing an opportunity to appreciate nature’s beauty.

In essence, running is more than just a form of exercise; it is a holistic activity that promotes physical health, mental resilience, emotional wellbeing, and social connection. It encourages us to push beyond our limits, to explore our potential, and to appreciate the world around us. The beauty of running lies not in the finish line, but in the journey itself.

500 Words Essay on Running

Running, a fundamental human activity, is a complex interaction between the mind and body. It is an exercise that transcends the physical realm, providing mental, emotional, and spiritual benefits. It is not merely a form of physical exercise; it is a metaphor for life, embodying resilience, endurance, and the pursuit of goals.

Running and Physical Health

Running is a powerful tool for maintaining physical health. Engaging in regular running can help reduce the risk of chronic illnesses such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and stroke. It can also boost the immune system, lower blood pressure, improve cardiovascular health, and support weight control. The body’s metabolic efficiency increases, enhancing energy levels and promoting overall well-being.

Running and Mental Well-being

Beyond the physical benefits, running has profound effects on mental health. It acts as a stress reliever, providing an outlet for pent-up emotions and frustrations. The release of endorphins during running induces a sense of euphoria, often referred to as the “runner’s high.” This mental state can help combat depression and anxiety, promoting a sense of calm and well-being.

Running as a Social Activity

Running can also serve as a social activity. Joining running clubs or participating in marathons fosters a sense of community and camaraderie. It encourages teamwork and cooperation, promoting mutual support and shared achievement. This social aspect of running can help individuals feel more connected and less isolated, enhancing their sense of belonging and social well-being.

Running as a Life Metaphor

Running serves as a potent metaphor for life. Each stride symbolizes progress, each breath represents life, and each finish line embodies a goal achieved. The challenges faced during a run, such as fatigue or difficult terrains, mirror life’s obstacles. Overcoming these challenges instills resilience and determination, qualities that are transferable to other areas of life.

Running and Mindfulness

Running fosters mindfulness, a state of active, open attention to the present. The rhythmic pattern of footfalls, the sensation of the wind against the skin, the rhythmic breathing – all these elements bring the runner into the present moment, away from the worries of the past or the future. This mindful state can promote mental clarity, emotional balance, and a deeper understanding of oneself.

The Future of Running

The future of running is promising, with advances in technology providing new avenues for enhancing running experiences. Innovations like wearables and running apps provide runners with detailed feedback on their performance, helping them optimize their runs. Virtual races and augmented reality apps are transforming the running landscape, making it more engaging and accessible.

In conclusion, running is much more than a physical exercise. It is a holistic activity that benefits the body, mind, and spirit. It fosters community, instills resilience, promotes mindfulness, and serves as a metaphor for life. As we look to the future, the potential for running to enrich our lives in new and exciting ways is limitless.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on Rohit Sharma
Essay on Right to Equality
Essay on Ratan Tata

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

From Identity to Inspiration: A Reading List on Why We Run

“The Running Novelist” (Haruki Murakami, The New Yorker , June 2008)

Longtime fans of the Murakami Cinematic Universe will find familiar elements here: baseball, jazz, understated prose, and non sequiturs. For a time, before Murakami became a novelist, he was the owner of a jazz club in Tokyo. In this piece, he describes how — and exactly when — he decided to write and how his early habits and commitments allowed him to do so prolifically for decades.

Running a jazz club required constant physical labor, but when Murakami started to spend more time at his desk, he started gaining weight. “This couldn’t be good for me,” he writes in a deadpan statement. “If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to stay in shape.” Being metabolically challenged helped Murakami develop his work ethic.

Murakami drops writing advice while making parallel points about running. But the way he does it is frustratingly tantalizing — he’s not the one to share his tips openly à la Robert McKee. Murakami suggests that writing, like running, relies less on quick decision-making skills than patience and long contemplation: “Long-distance running suits my personality better, which may explain why I was able to incorporate it so smoothly into my daily life.”

Murakami calls himself a no-talent — a colossal understatement — but readers who have encountered unreliable narrators in his novels know better: We shouldn’t be so naïve as to take his words at face value.

Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins.

Murakami doesn’t debunk the myth of an artistic genius but shows that with a sustainable routine, the genius can be prolific. If you’re reading for concrete advice on writing and a neat analogy comparing running to writing, you won’t find it here. Rather, we get something better: a portrait of the artist as a young runner.

“Why I Run: On Thoreau and the Pleasures of Not Quite Knowing Where You’re Going” (Rachel Richardson, Literary Hub , October 2022)

Don’t let the title fool you. Rachel Richardson has no unconditional praise for Thoreau; she politely defies him. In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau spoke to an audience of men as he opined on nature. To him, women were symbols — “for the splay of land on which such a free man saunters,” writes Richardson — rather than his target readers.

To read Thoreau’s essay in 2023 is to be startled by his problematic view of women and puritanical sense of “capital-N” Nature. He would not approve of the urban environment that Richardson describes while she runs: “I was born in a California he didn’t imagine, in a hospital in a town laid out with lawns and gardens.” Her piece is a bracing tonic against the writer’s anachronistic thoughts.

Richardson, like many other runners like me, was not always a runner: “How or why anyone would do this for pleasure was beyond my ability to fathom,” she thought when growing up. But in her 20s, she discovered running as a refreshingly guilt-free activity to do in a world that made her anxious. (People who started running during the pandemic, like me, might agree. Unlike going to the gym or participating in a team sport, which were risky at the time, running was easier to navigate and do on our own.)

Richardson writes that she never knows what her running route will be. But that uncertainty brings relief. Freedom. Inspiration. Running rewards runners with a sense of uncomplicated happiness and goodwill, which Richardson details in this delightful passage:

When I run, I smile and people smile back. Kids wave at me and cyclists nod as they zoom by. Other runners raise a hand of hello or, my favorite, flash a big grin. Sometimes we’re wearing the same race shirt—me too!, I point. Sometimes they’re in a zone I can’t penetrate, with their earbuds and podcast or playlist keeping them company. I still smile, even when they don’t look up. Hey, we’re out here, doing this beautiful thing. When the endorphins start kicking in, around mile three, I love everybody, even the sourest-faced walker or most oblivious group of teenagers taking up the whole trail and dropping Doritos on the ground. Nice dog!, I shout when I see a dog happily panting at her runner’s side, or You’ve got this! to the struggling jogger stumbling to the end of his route. … I am an unrepentant dork when I run.

“To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past” (Nicholas Thompson, Wired , April 2020)

I have beef with running memoirs that try to overburden the sport with dramatic insights. Not because insights can’t be found in running, but because execution without sentimentality is no easy feat. Thompson’s essay — which deals with, among many things, family relationships, parental abuse and influence, sexuality, ambition, and mortality — is a clear-eyed piece that demonstrates what can be done in the hands of a dexterous editor and writer.

I’ve read this piece many times, and like a good novel, I’m drawn to different themes every time. In my most recent read, two ideas resonated: defining one’s identity separate from one’s parents’ and identifying with one’s masculinity without being poisoned by it. It’s an all-consuming narrative that spans four generations of men in Thompson’s family.

As he would later tell me, running was the rare sport where you mostly competed against yourself. You could learn without having to lose. It was also something he hadn’t failed at in front of his father.

I sent an early version of this essay to my older sister, who saw something clearly that I hadn’t identified yet. “Running solved nothing for [Dad]. You’ve had a longer journey with it, and used it in ways that are much more productive. But I have this nagging sense that your story of needing to follow footsteps (the schools, the running) and needing so much not to follow footsteps (the overindulgence, the flameout, the irresponsibility and failure) are more complexly interwoven.

“To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times , July 1999)

Whereas Murakami’s piece, detached from romanticism, was not a very effective sales pitch for running, Joyce Carol Oates’ ode to running may intrigue any writer who could use more literary imagination; she writes about running as a consciousness-expanding activity, allowing her to envision what she writes as a film or dream: “I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but as the attempted embodiment of a vision: a complex of emotions, raw experience.”

This piece was written more than 20 years ago. Oates, one of America’s most renowned storytellers, has published more than 70 books in her literary career. For her, running certainly seems to work.

The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort. Running is a meditation; more practicably it allows me to scroll through, in my mind’s eye, the pages I’ve just written, proofreading for errors and improvements. My method is one of continuous revision. While writing a long novel, every day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a consistent, fluid voice. When I write the final two or three chapters of a novel, I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening, so that, ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage concurrent with all the others.

Though I can’t claim the same level of inspiration, something similar happened when I first started running. During my daily runs, I experienced breakthroughs where I felt stuck: A connective sentence or a word I’d been looking for would pop into my head. On some days, this happened so often that I needed to stop every few minutes to record it on my phone, which disrupted my run. Eventually, I learned to run with a waterproof pocket notebook in my left hand and a retractable pen in my right.

“Running in the Age of Coronavirus” (Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated , May 2020)

The May 2020 timing of this piece on Jim Fixx, the “father of recreational running,” was wonderfully apt for pandemic-inspired runners. It was as if Chris Ballard, a seasoned sports writer, was inducting new runners into the history of the sport.

Ballard observed that more people started running during the pandemic, believing it “would in some way do them good, or make them feel better about themselves or the world, if even for a moment.” But the belief that running is good for your body and soul wasn’t always accepted wisdom but once an argument, even a radical and contrarian one.

It may sound glib to say that “running saved my life.” But for Fixx, it really did. And, in a tragic irony, it also killed him. Fixx was one of the central figures of the running boom of the ’70s and whose book, The Complete Book of Running , became “the most lucrative nonfiction title ever published by Random House,” writes Ballard. It was a hit, and the media couldn’t get enough of him. As Ballard writes, “a fad had become a craze,” and for the first time in a year, 100,000 Americans finished a marathon. The book was noteworthy not just because it was an encyclopedia of running; it heralded a certain kind of running memoir, one in which an author details their salvation by running.

Ballard writes both a pocket history guide on how running became a major sport in America and a personal history of the man who made it possible. Although this story has been told many times, Ballard’s reporting is enriched by Fixx’s journals, to which his family offered access for the first time.

After his death, the sports world changed profoundly. Running was no longer a craze, or a miracle cure. But neither did it die. Instead, it evolved. In 1977, 25,000 Americans finished marathons; By ’94, more than 300,000 did. In ’94, Oprah ran, and completed, her only marathon, spurring a boom among those who felt the feat previously unreachable. By the turn of the century, how you ran mattered as much as whether you did. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run spurred thousands to tromp through the woods barefoot. Ultramarathons gained in popularity. Rock ’n’ roll marathon and fun run entered the lexicon. By 2011, women accounted for close to 60% of the finishers in half-marathons.

It’s not exactly a light read, so let me leave you with an irresistible detail: Fixx’s father was born a Fix but added a second x to his name. Why? He thought, “a person’s name ought to be a proper noun, not a verb.”

“What We Think About When We Run” (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker , November 2015)

I couldn’t think of a better piece to wrap up this reading list than a meta-essay about writing on running by Kathryn Schulz who is, after all, a master of meta-writing. ( Her piece about Oxford’s “A Very Short Introduction” series is a good example.)

What do runners think about when they run? In the first part of this two-part story, Schulz looks to scientific research and lays out the uninspiring results. She writes: “Like a fair number of psychological studies, this one confirmed the obvious while simultaneously missing it.” But she continues:

Of course runners think about their route, their pace, their pain, and their environment. But what of everything else that routinely surfaces in the mind during a run? The new girlfriend, the professional dilemma, the batteries you need to remember to buy for the smoke detector, what to get your mom for her birthday, the brilliance with which Daveed Diggs plays Thomas Jefferson (if you are listening to the soundtrack to “Hamilton”), the music, the moment (if you are listening to Eminem), the Walter Mitty meanderings into alternate lives: all of this is strangely missing from Samson’s study. The British author Alan Sillitoe got it right in his 1958 short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”: “They can spy on us all day to see if we’re … doing our ‘athletics,’ but they can’t make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we’re telling ourselves.”

Then, Schulz points out, with a knowing wit, the shortcomings of contemporary writing on running. Writing about running without schmaltz — like Murakami — is no easy feat, which makes it hard for people to find books that “address the mind of the runner in descriptive rather than inspirational or aspirational terms.” You could also argue that Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run , despite being enjoyable, reads like gonzo journalism. And some running memoirs that read like redemption memoirs, such as Robin Harvie’s The Lure of Long Distances , follow the same formula.

Later, Schulz champions Poverty Creek Journal , a book by literary-critic-cum-runner Thomas Gardner, as “the only one to uncover the literary possibilities inside the terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative genre of the running log.” After reading this piece, I read this strangely profound book — it’s a mix of literary criticism, running logs, and thoughts that range from complaints to grief.

When Schulz says running logs are “terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative,” she doesn’t intend it as a criticism. Running is, admittedly, an incredibly understimulating sport to watch, so much so that I suspect even the most avid runners probably don’t sit down to watch the Boston Marathon from beginning to the end.

And here’s a pitfall of sports writing: There’s often too great a desire to imbue a grand meaning to the sport. “Life is a marathon,” goes the cliché. But the thing is, life is like a marathon. So writing about running becomes a balancing act, one in which — without sufficient craft and self-awareness — can be a challenge. But here, Schulz (and Gardner) masterfully explore the essence of running, in all its glory and tedium. A sport of contradiction indeed.

Sheon Han is a writer and programmer based in Palo Alto, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker , The Atlantic , The New York Times Magazine , Quanta Magazine , and elsewhere. You can read his work at sheon.tk .

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Sample Short Answer Essay on Running

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The Common Application no longer requires a short answer essay from all applicants, but many colleges continue to include the short answer as part of a supplement. The short answer essay prompt typically states something like this:

"Briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences ."

Colleges like this type of question because it gives their applicants the opportunity to identify an activity that is meaningful to them and to explain why it is meaningful. This information can be useful to colleges with holistic admissions as they try to identify students who will bring interesting skills and passions to the campus community.

Sample Short Answer Essay

Christie wrote the following sample short answer essay to elaborate upon her love of running:

It is the simplest of movements: right foot, left foot, right foot. It is the simplest of actions: run, relax, breathe. For me, running is both the most basic and the most complex activity I perform in any day. While my body adjusts to the challenges of gravel paths and steep inclines, my mind is free to drift, to sift through whatever needs sorting or disposing—the upcoming day's tasks, an argument with a friend, some nagging stress. As my calf muscles loosen and my breathing settles into its deep rhythm, I am able to release that stress, forget that argument, and set my mind in order. And at the midway point, two miles into the course, I stop at the hilltop vista overlooking my little town and the surrounding woodlands. For just a moment, I stop to listen to my own strong heartbeat. Then I run again.

Critique of the Short Answer Essay

The author has focused on a personal activity, running, not any history-making achievement, team triumph, world-changing social work, or even a formal extracurricular activity . As such, the short answer essay does not highlight any kind of remarkable accomplishment or personal talent.

But think about what this short answer essay does reveal; the author is someone who can find pleasure in the "simplest" of activities. She is someone who has found an effective way of dealing with stress and finding peace and equilibrium in her life. She reveals that she is in tune with her self and her small-town environment.

This one little paragraph gives us the impression that the author is a thoughtful, sensitive, and healthy person. In a short space, the essay reveals the maturity of the writer; she is reflective, articulate, and balanced. These are all dimensions of her character that will not come across in her lists of grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities. They are also personal qualities that will be attractive to a college.

The writing is also solid. The prose is tight, clear, and stylistic without being over-written. The length is a perfect 823 characters and 148 words. This is a typical length limit for a short-answer essay. That said, if your college is asking for just 100 words or something longer, be sure to follow their instructions carefully.

Role of Essays and Your College Application

Keep in mind the role of any essays, even short ones, that you submit with your college application. You want to present a dimension of yourself that isn't readily apparent elsewhere in your application materials. Reveal some hidden interest, passion, or struggle that will give the admissions folks a more detailed portrait of yourself.

The college has asked for a short essay because it has holistic admissions ; in other words, the school tries to evaluate the whole applicant through both quantitative. A short answer essay gives the college a useful window into the applicant's interests.

Christie succeeds on this front. For both the writing and the content, she has written a winning short answer essay. You may want to explore another example of a good short answer on working at Burger King as well as learn lessons from a weak short answer on soccer and a weak short answer on entrepreneurship. In general, if you follow the advice on writing a winning short answer and avoid common short answer mistakes, your essay will strengthen your application and help make you an attractive candidate for admission.

Sample Short Answer on Soccer
Sample College Application Short Answer Essay
Short Answer Response on Working at Burger King
How Long Should Your Common Application Short Answer Essay Be?
Common Application Short Answer Essay on Entrepreneurship
Short Answer Mistakes
Common Application Short Answer Tips
Ideal College Application Essay Length
"Gym Class Hero" - a Common Application Essay Sample for Option #3
Sample Supplemental Essay for College Admissions: Why This College?
What Does a Strong College Applicant Look Like?
UC Essay Examples for the Personal Insight Questions
Common Supplemental Essay Mistakes
Tips for Writing a Winning College Application Essay
How to Ace Your University of Wisconsin Personal Statements
"Handiwork" - Sample Common Application Essay for Option #1

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How to Write a Non-Cliche College Essay About Sports + Examples

What’s covered:, what makes a sports essay cliche.

How To Make Your Sports Essay Unique

Great Examples of College Essays About Sports

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You’ve been brainstorming essay topics for your college applications, and you think you’ve finally found the right one: an extended metaphor likening your experience on the field with overcoming personal struggles. The problem: many other students have this same thought.

The purpose of a college essay is to make yourself stand out as a unique individual, but when students write about sports, they often blend in. Because of that, students are usually advised to pick a different topic.

That being said, it is possible to write a non-cliche college essay about sports if you put in a little extra effort. Read along to learn how to make your sports essay different from all the other sports essays.

Sports essays are cliche when they follow a standard trajectory. Some of these trajectories include writing a story about:

An agonizing defeat
Forging bonds with teammates
Overcoming adversity
Overcoming an injury
Refusing to quit
Victory during a big game

Because sports essays have very similar themes and “lessons learned,” it can be difficult to make your story stand out. These trajectories also often focus too much on the sport or storyline, and not enough on the writer’s reflections and personality.

As you write your essay, try to think about what your experience says about you rather than what you learned from your experience. You are more than just one lesson you learned!

(Keep in mind that the sports essay is not the only college essay cliche. Learn about other essay cliches and how to fix them in our complete guide).

How to Make Your Sports Essay Unique

1. focus on a specific moment or reflection..

The college essay is a way for students to humanize themselves to admissions officers. You do not feel human if you are describing yourself as just another player on the field!

One important way to make your essay about you (not just about sports) is by focusing on a specific moment in time and inviting the reader to join you in that moment. Explain to the reader what it would be like to be sitting in that locker room as you questioned the values of the other players on your team. Ask your reader to sit with you on the cot in the trainer’s room as your identity was stripped away from you when they said “your body can’t take this anymore.” Bring your reader to the dinner table and involve them in your family’s conversation about how sports were affecting your mental health and your treatment of those around you.

Intense descriptions of a specific experience will evoke emotions in your reader and allow them to connect with you and feel for you.

When in doubt, avoid anything that can be covered by ESPN. On ESPN, we see the games, we see the benches, we even see the locker rooms and training rooms. Take your reader somewhere different and show them something unique.

2. Use sports to point out broader themes in your life.

The main risk when writing about sports is neglecting to write about yourself. Before you get started, think about the main values that you want to express in your sports essay. Sports are simply your avenue for telling the reader what makes you unique.

As a test, imagine if you were a pianist. Would you be able to talk about these same values? What if you were a writer? Or a chemist? Articulating your values is the end, and sports should simply be your means.

Some values that you might want to focus on:

Autonomy (you want to be able to set your mind to anything and achieve it on your own)
Growth (you seek improvement constantly)
Curiosity (you are willing to try anything once)
Vulnerability (you aren’t afraid to fail, as long as you give it your all)
Community (you value the feedback of others and need camaraderie to succeed)
Craft (you think that with deliberate care, anything can be perfected)
Responsibility (you believe that you owe something to those around you and perhaps they also owe something to you)

You can use the ESPN check again to make sure that you are using sports as an avenue to show your depth.

Things ESPN covers: how a player reacts to defeat, how injuries affect a player’s gameplay/attitude, how players who don’t normally work well together are working together on their new team.

Things ESPN doesn’t cover: the conversation that a player had with their mother about fear of death before going into a big surgery (value: family and connection), the ways that the intense pressure to succeed consumed a player to the point they couldn’t be there for the people in their life (value: supporting others and community), the body image issues that weigh on a player’s mind when playing their sport and how they overcame those (value: health and growth).

3. Turn a cliche storyline on its head.

There’s no getting around the fact that sports essays are often cliche. But there is a way to confront the cliche head-on. For example, lots of people write essays about the lessons they learned from an injury, victory, and so on, but fewer students explain how they are embracing those lessons.

Perhaps you learned that competition is overwhelming for you and you prefer teamwork, so you switched from playing basketball to playing Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe, when your softball career ended abruptly, you had to find a new identity and that’s when you became obsessed with your flower garden and decided to pursue botany. Or maybe, you have stuck with football through it all, but your junior-year mental health struggle showed you that football should be fun and you have since started a nonprofit for local children to healthily engage with sports.

If your story itself is more cliche, try bringing readers to the present moment with you and show why the cliche matters and what it did for you. This requires a fair amount of creativity. Ensure you’re not parroting a frequently used topic by really thinking deeply to find your own unique spin.

Night had robbed the academy of its daytime colors, yet there was comfort in the dim lights that cast shadows of our advances against the bare studio walls. Silhouettes of roundhouse kicks, spin crescent kicks, uppercuts and the occasional butterfly kick danced while we sparred. She approached me, eyes narrowed with the trace of a smirk challenging me. “Ready spar!” Her arm began an upward trajectory targeting my shoulder, a common first move. I sidestepped — only to almost collide with another flying fist. Pivoting my right foot, I snapped my left leg, aiming my heel at her midsection. The center judge raised one finger.

There was no time to celebrate, not in the traditional sense at least. Master Pollard gave a brief command greeted with a unanimous “Yes, sir” and the thud of 20 hands dropping-down-and-giving-him-30, while the “winners” celebrated their victory with laps as usual.

Three years ago, seven-thirty in the evening meant I was a warrior. It meant standing up straighter, pushing a little harder, “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am”, celebrating birthdays by breaking boards, never pointing your toes, and familiarity. Three years later, seven-thirty in the morning meant I was nervous.

The room is uncomfortably large. The sprung floor soaks up the checkerboard of sunlight piercing through the colonial windows. The mirrored walls further illuminate the studio and I feel the light scrutinizing my sorry attempts at a pas de bourrée, while capturing the organic fluidity of the dancers around me. “Chassé en croix, grand battement, pique, pirouette.” I follow the graceful limbs of the woman in front of me, her legs floating ribbons, as she executes what seems to be a perfect ronds de jambes. Each movement remains a negotiation. With admirable patience, Ms. Tan casts me a sympathetic glance.

There is no time to wallow in the misery that is my right foot. Taekwondo calls for dorsiflexion; pointed toes are synonymous with broken toes. My thoughts drag me into a flashback of the usual response to this painful mistake: “You might as well grab a tutu and head to the ballet studio next door.” Well, here I am Master Pollard, unfortunately still following your orders to never point my toes, but no longer feeling the satisfaction that comes with being a third degree black belt with 5 years of experience quite literally under her belt. It’s like being a white belt again — just in a leotard and ballet slippers.

But the appetite for new beginnings that brought me here doesn’t falter. It is only reinforced by the classical rendition of “Dancing Queen” that floods the room and the ghost of familiarity that reassures me that this new beginning does not and will not erase the past. After years spent at the top, it’s hard to start over. But surrendering what you are only leads you to what you may become. In Taekwondo, we started each class reciting the tenets: honor, courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, courage, humility, and knowledge, and I have never felt that I embodied those traits more so than when I started ballet.

The thing about change is that it eventually stops making things so different. After nine different schools, four different countries, three different continents, fluency in Tamil, Norwegian, and English, there are more blurred lines than there are clear fragments. My life has not been a tactfully executed, gold medal-worthy Taekwondo form with each movement defined, nor has it been a series of frappés performed by a prima ballerina with each extension identical and precise, but thankfully it has been like the dynamics of a spinning back kick, fluid, and like my chances of landing a pirouette, unpredictable.

Why it works:

What’s especially powerful about this essay is that the author uses detailed imagery to convey a picture of what they’re experiencing, so much so that the reader is along for the ride. This works as a sports essay not only because of the language and sensory details, but also because the writer focuses on a specific moment in time, while at the same time exploring why Taekwondo is such an important part of their life.

After the emotional image is created, the student finishes their essay with valuable reflection. With the reflection, they show admissions officers that they are mature and self-aware. Self-awareness comes through with statements like “surrendering what you are only leads you to what you may become” and maturity can be seen through the student’s discussion of values “honor, courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, courage, humility, and knowledge, and I have never felt that I embodied those traits more so than when I started ballet.” These are the kinds of comments that should find their way into a sports essay!

“Advanced females ages 13 to 14 please proceed to staging with your coaches at this time.” Skittering around the room, eyes wide and pleading, I frantically explained my situation to nearby coaches. The seconds ticked away in my head; every polite refusal increased my desperation.

Despair weighed me down. I sank to my knees as a stream of competitors, coaches, and officials flowed around me. My dojang had no coach, and the tournament rules prohibited me from competing without one.

Although I wanted to remain strong, doubts began to cloud my mind. I could not help wondering: what was the point of perfecting my skills if I would never even compete? The other members of my team, who had found coaches minutes earlier, attempted to comfort me, but I barely heard their words. They couldn’t understand my despair at being left on the outside, and I never wanted them to understand.

Since my first lesson 12 years ago, the members of my dojang have become family. I have watched them grow up, finding my own happiness in theirs. Together, we have honed our kicks, blocks, and strikes. We have pushed one another to aim higher and become better martial artists. Although my dojang had searched for a reliable coach for years, we had not found one. When we attended competitions in the past, my teammates and I had always gotten lucky and found a sympathetic coach. Now, I knew this practice was unsustainable. It would devastate me to see the other members of my dojang in my situation, unable to compete and losing hope as a result. My dojang needed a coach, and I decided it was up to me to find one.

I first approached the adults in the dojang – both instructors and members’ parents. However, these attempts only reacquainted me with polite refusals. Everyone I asked told me they couldn’t devote multiple weekends per year to competitions. I soon realized that I would have become the coach myself.

At first, the inner workings of tournaments were a mystery to me. To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side. I learned everything from motivational strategies to technical, behind-the-scenes components of Taekwondo competitions. Though I emerged with new knowledge and confidence in my capabilities, others did not share this faith.

Parents threw me disbelieving looks when they learned that their children’s coach was only a child herself. My self-confidence was my armor, deflecting their surly glances. Every armor is penetrable, however, and as the relentless barrage of doubts pounded my resilience, it began to wear down. I grew unsure of my own abilities.

Despite the attack, I refused to give up. When I saw the shining eyes of the youngest students preparing for their first competition, I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was. The knowledge that I could solve my dojang’s longtime problem motivated me to overcome my apprehension.

Now that my dojang flourishes at competitions, the attacks on me have weakened, but not ended. I may never win the approval of every parent; at times, I am still tormented by doubts, but I find solace in the fact that members of my dojang now only worry about competing to the best of their abilities.

Now, as I arrive at a tournament with my students, I close my eyes and remember the past. I visualize the frantic search for a coach and the chaos amongst my teammates as we compete with one another to find coaches before the staging calls for our respective divisions. I open my eyes to the exact opposite scene. Lacking a coach hurt my ability to compete, but I am proud to know that no member of my dojang will have to face that problem again.

In the beginning, you might think this is another cliche sports essay about overcoming adversity. But instead, it becomes a unique statement and coming-of-age tale that reads as a suspenseful narrative.

The author connects their experience with martial arts to larger themes in their life but manages to do so without riffing off of tried-and-true themes. Through statements like “I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was” we learn about the students values and their desire to be there for those who depend on them.

The student also brings it full circle, demonstrating their true transformation. By using the “Same, but Different” ending technique , the student places themself in the same environment that we saw in the intro, but experiences it differently due to their actions throughout the narrative. This is very compelling!

“1…2…3…4 pirouettes! New record!” My friends cheered as I landed my turns. Pleased with my progress, I gazed down at my worn-out pointe shoes. The sweltering blisters, numbing ice-baths, and draining late-night practices did not seem so bad after all. Next goal: five turns.

For as long as I can remember, ballet, in all its finesse and glamor, had kept me driven day to day. As a child, the lithe ballerinas, donning ethereal costumes as they floated across the stage, were my motivation. While others admired Messi and Adele, I idolized Carlos Acosta, principal dancer of the Royal Ballet.

As I devoted more time and energy towards my craft, I became obsessed with improving my technique. I would stretch for hours after class, forcing my leg one inch higher in an effort to mirror the Dance Magazine cover girls. I injured my feet and ruined pair after pair of pointe shoes, turning on wood, cement, and even grass to improve my balance as I spun. At competitions, the dancers with the 180-degree leg extensions, endless turns, and soaring leaps—the ones who received “Bravos!” from the roaring audience—further pushed me to refine my skills and perfect my form. I believed that, with enough determination, I would one day attain their level of perfection. Reaching the quadruple-pirouette milestone only intensified my desire to accomplish even more.

My efforts seemed to have come to fruition two summers ago when I was accepted to dance with Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet at their renowned New York City summer intensive. I walked into my first session eager to learn from distinguished ballet masters and worldly dancers, already anticipating my improvement. Yet, as I danced alongside the accomplished ballerinas, I felt out of place. Despite their clean technique and professional training, they did not aim for glorious leg extensions or prodigious leaps. When they performed their turn combinations, most of them only executed two turns as I attempted four.

“Dancers, double-pirouettes only.”

Taken aback and confused, I wondered why our teacher expected so little from us. The other ballerinas seemed content, gracing the studio with their simple movements.

As I grew closer with my Moscow roommates, I gradually learned that their training emphasized the history of the art form instead of stylistic tricks. Rather than show off their physical ability, their performances aimed to convey a story, one that embodied the rich culture of ballet and captured both the legacy of the dancers before them and their own artistry. As I observed my friends more intently in repertoire class, I felt the pain of the grief-stricken white swan from Swan Lake, the sass of the flirtatious Kitri from Don Quijote, and I gradually saw what I had overlooked before. My definition of talent had been molded by crowd-pleasing elements—whirring pirouettes, gravity-defying leaps, and mind-blowing leg extensions. This mindset slowly stripped me from the roots of my passion and my personal connection with ballet.

With the Bolshoi, I learned to step back and explore the meaning behind each step and the people behind the scenes. Ballet carries history in its movements, from the societal values of the era to each choreographer’s unique flair. As I uncovered the messages behind each pirouette, kick, and jump, my appreciation for ballet grew beyond my obsession with raw athleticism and developed into a love for the art form’s emotive abilities in bridging the dancers with the audience. My journey as an artist has allowed me to see how technical execution is only the means to a greater understanding between dancer and spectator, between storyteller and listener. The elegance and complexity of ballet does not revolve around astonishing stunts but rather the evocative strength and artistry manifested in the dancer, in me. It is the combination of sentiments, history, tradition, and passion that has allowed ballet and its lessons of human connection to become my lifestyle both on and off stage.

This essay is about lessons. While the author is a dancer, this narrative isn’t really about ballet, per se — it’s about the author’s personal growth. It is purposefully reflective as the student shows a nice character arc that begins with an eager young ballerina and ends with a reflection on their past. The primary strength of this essay is the honesty and authenticity that the student approaches it with.

In the end, the student turns a cliche on its head as they embrace the idea of overcoming adversity and demonstrate how the adversity, in this case, was their own stereotypes about their art. It’s beautiful!

“Getting beat is one thing – it’s part of competing – but I want no part in losing.” Coach Rob Stark’s motto never fails to remind me of his encouragement on early-morning bus rides to track meets around the state. I’ve always appreciated the phrase, but an experience last June helped me understand its more profound, universal meaning.

Stark, as we affectionately call him, has coached track at my high school for 25 years. His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running. When I learned a neighboring high school had dedicated their track to a longtime coach, I felt that Stark deserved similar honors.

Our school district’s board of education indicated they would only dedicate our track to Stark if I could demonstrate that he was extraordinary. I took charge and mobilized my teammates to distribute petitions, reach out to alumni, and compile statistics on the many team and individual champions Stark had coached over the years. We received astounding support, collecting almost 3,000 signatures and pages of endorsements from across the community. With help from my teammates, I presented this evidence to the board.

They didn’t bite.

Most members argued that dedicating the track was a low priority. Knowing that we had to act quickly to convince them of its importance, I called a team meeting where we drafted a rebuttal for the next board meeting. To my surprise, they chose me to deliver it. I was far from the best public speaker in the group, and I felt nervous about going before the unsympathetic board again. However, at that second meeting, I discovered that I enjoy articulating and arguing for something that I’m passionate about.

Public speaking resembles a cross country race. Walking to the starting line, you have to trust your training and quell your last minute doubts. When the gun fires, you can’t think too hard about anything; your performance has to be instinctual, natural, even relaxed. At the next board meeting, the podium was my starting line. As I walked up to it, familiar butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Instead of the track stretching out in front of me, I faced the vast audience of teachers, board members, and my teammates. I felt my adrenaline build, and reassured myself: I’ve put in the work, my argument is powerful and sound. As the board president told me to introduce myself, I heard, “runners set” in the back of my mind. She finished speaking, and Bang! The brief silence was the gunshot for me to begin.

The next few minutes blurred together, but when the dust settled, I knew from the board members’ expressions and the audience’s thunderous approval that I had run quite a race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the board voted down our proposal. I was disappointed, but proud of myself, my team, and our collaboration off the track. We stood up for a cause we believed in, and I overcame my worries about being a leader. Although I discovered that changing the status quo through an elected body can be a painstakingly difficult process and requires perseverance, I learned that I enjoy the challenges this effort offers. Last month, one of the school board members joked that I had become a “regular” – I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Just as Stark taught me, I worked passionately to achieve my goal. I may have been beaten when I appealed to the board, but I certainly didn’t lose, and that would have made Stark proud.

This essay uses the idea of sports to explore a more profound topic—growing through relationships. They really embrace using sports as an avenue to tell the reader about a specific experience that changed the way they approach the world.

The emphasis on relationships is why this essay works well and doesn’t fall into a cliche. The narrator grows not because of their experience with track but because of their relationship with their coach, who inspired them to evolve and become a leader.

Have a draft of your college essay? We’re here to help you polish it. Students can participate in a free Peer Review, or they can sign up for a paid review by CollegeVine’s experts. Sign up for your free CollegeVine account today to start improving your essay and your chances of acceptance!

How to Write a College Essay About Running

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Kylie Kistner, MA Former Willamette University Admissions

Key Takeaway

If you love to run, you may be interested in writing your college essay about running. You’re not the only one.

Think about how many students are on a track or cross country team compared to, say, a basketball or volleyball team. A lot.

Since so many students find track or cross country to be a central part of their high school experiences, there is no shortage of running-related college essays.

Admissions officers read countless stories about make-or-break track meets, season-ending injuries, and thought-filled solo morning runs.

All this isn’t to say that you can’t write a standout college essay about running.

But the ones that are most effective come from students who find a genuine way to convey why they hold running so dearly.

We’ll lay out what specific topics you should avoid and give you a few questions to help you determine whether a college essay about running is the right choice for you.

Topics that college essays about running should avoid

Running for team captain.

Students who write essays about running for or being voted captain of their track or cross country teams are likely trying to show leadership and strong community involvement and support.

But the reality is that, unless done very tactfully, an essay about this topic isn’t likely to tell admissions officers any more than they already know from your activities section.

If you won the race, your leadership and excellence will be apparent just from the fact that you earned that position.

And if you lost, then chances are you have another story to tell that is more compelling.

Detailing the ins and outs of how you won or lost the captain position likely won’t add much more valuable information either.

Space in your application is precious. Use it wisely.

So unless you have an incredibly original or telling story about being captain, you’re probably better off using the story for a supplemental essay or choosing another topic altogether.

Overcoming an injury, losing a race, or wrestling with team dynamics

Students tend to choose these topics to discuss a pivotal moment in their lives. Their goal is often to show their admissions officers their work ethic, determination, or resilience.

While challenges like failure or team conflict seem like critical points in your life, the stakes usually aren’t that high or unique in the long run.

Your injury may have been devastating, but you’re hardly the first runner to be injured and unable to compete.

Plenty of other students have had to exhibit the same kind of character traits to overcome similar injuries.

While your college essay isn’t primarily about showing how unique you are, it is about showing your admissions officers something central to your background, values, or motivations.

Some students do have exceptional circumstances that can work with these topics, but essays on these typical kinds of setbacks tend to remain on the surface of who you are.

A college essay simply needs to do more than that.

Questions to ask yourself before writing a college essay about running

Now that the overused topics are out of the way, you may be left wondering whether you should still write your college essay about running.

The following questions should help you determine if this topic is the right choice for you.

They’ll also help you identify areas where running intersects with other important parts of your life, an approach that can be incredibly useful for writing a meaningful essay about running.

How has running shaped your sense of self or daily experience?

Thinking more specifically about the role running plays in your everyday life can sometimes be a helpful place to start.

After all, you run regularly because it serves a bigger purpose.

Since the most cliche essays about running tend to focus on participation in a track or cross country team, identifying how running impacts your life outside of your teams can encourage you to think about the deeper meaning it holds for you.

Example answer 1: My home life was chaotic. My daily run was my escape. With each mile I ran, I found more distance, literally and metaphorically, from the people who were holding me back.

Example answer 2: I have a condition that makes it hard for me to breathe. Running is a constant battle with my body, yet I do it anyway. Why?

How has running been part of your connection to a significant person or place?

Running can be a transformative individual and community sport as it gives you time and space to connect with the world around you.

For those who run with others, there can be intense camaraderie or emotions as you push yourselves side by side. And when you run outside, you’re also inherently connecting to place.

Think about how the relationships and values you hold closest developed from or are manifested through running.

Example answer 1: I’ve gone on nightly runs with my dad since I was ten. We’d talk as we ran. He’d tell me about the stars. I’d tell him what I learned in AP physics. We’d argue about the best way to get to Mars.

Example answer 2: My weekly run would take me through my local park. Over the years, I noticed the changes: increased litter, degrading play structures, fewer ducks. I used my story to advocate to city council for increased funding for park maintenance.

What meaning do you see in the details that make up the experience of running—your schedule, gear, bodily experience, etc.?

If most of your running experience has occurred as part of your school team, or if you still haven’t been able to find any significant connections to make, this final question may spark some new ideas.

Think specifically about the logistics of what it takes for you to run: when you go, where you go, who you go with, what you wear, how you feel, how long it takes, what parts you love and hate most.

By identifying salient details, you also begin to close in on what the actual experience of running looks like for you. Once you’ve got that figured out, you can begin to extrapolate deeper meaning.

Example answer 1: My track team got new uniforms that were supposed to make you faster, but I felt uncomfortable with how much of my body was exposed. I began researching and became fascinated with the differences between men’s and women’s athletic uniforms.

Example answer 2: I have nowhere in my neighborhood to run, so I decided to train for a marathon on a treadmill. Doing so taught me a lot about how to creatively confront obstacles.

The bottom line

Try this exercise. Excluding any tell-tale details, imagine that you hand your coach your essay to read. Now pretend that you ask them to guess which member of your team wrote it.

If your coach could read your essay and attribute your narrative and main takeaway to anybody else on your team, then your essay doesn’t tell admissions officers enough about you.

To write an effective college essay about running, you need to focus on the meaning you make through running rather than the running itself.

Concentrating on the meaning will encourage you to leave behind overused and cliche topics in favor of ones that communicate something that is authentically you.

Use caution when choosing running as your essay topic, and dig deep to find a theme that resonates with a core part of who you are or how you’ve experienced the world. It's all part of creating the perfect cohesive application narrative .

Liked that? Try this next.

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Running events, running articles, triathlon events, cycling events, triathlon articles, cycling articles, fitness events, fitness articles, sports events, outdoor events, sports articles, nutrition articles, health & injury articles, why i run: an essay from a marathon maniac, ultramarathoner and 50 states club member.

"Why do I run?" I ask myself this same question repeatedly, especially when I am ready to give up while I am running a race. But upon crossing the finish line, my next question to myself is, "Where's my next race?"

I started running 25 years ago when I met my partner, who is an avid runner. But I didn't get serious about it at the time. First of all, I was not into sports in any sense of the word. Secondly, I disliked running because I could not catch up with my partner and I got tired easily. So why do I run? Being a long-distance runner, I will make my story long!

View the original piece as published on Racertrips.com .

The Journey From Grade School to 50th Birthday

I am an only child and was overly protected by my Catholic Mother and my Military Officer Father. I went to Catholic school, and even under the watchful eyes of the priests and nuns, I was bullied because I was short and skinny and was called a weakling. At the time, I detested every form of sports activities, and being in an all-boys school, there were plenty of sports. I could not throw a tennis ball or, what's more, a basketball. During those days, I would go home hurting from all the taunting and name calling, and I was so miserable.

Okay, let me fast forward now. I went to college and to medical school. I came to the United States, and while I was in practice as a Gastrointestinal Pathologist, I was challenged to run a 5K at the hospital where I was working. This was my turning point as a runner. In 2011, I turned 50 and decided to do something different to celebrate this milestone. I registered and trained for my first marathon, which was the Marathon du Medoc in Bordeaux, France, 400 miles south of Paris.

During the race, I cramped twice and was going to drop out. But a friend of mine reminded me that flying all the way from Chicago to Bordeaux and not even getting a medal was such a waste. That did it. I ran, and I beat the cut-off time of 5:30! I was so proud to earn my first medal. At that time I thought that was my first and last marathon.

One and Done? Not this Marathoner

But in 2013, I ran my first Chicago Marathon. I enjoyed the the race and decided to run it again in 2014. During the race, I met another runner, who later became my running buddy. We decided to run the Naperville Marathon the following weekend. The weekend after that, I ran in Middleton, WI. Then 2 weeks later, I ran my first ultra, a 50K (30 miles) race just outside of Chicago. This was the first ultra sponsored by Arctic Frog , with race director and soon-to-be-friend Rey Letada. I knew right there and then that I was hooked.

With all these races in such a short period of time, I qualified and earned my two stars with Marathon Maniacs . This is an international running group that one needs to qualify to become a member. Yes, three marathons and one ultramarathon in 5 weeks was more than enough to qualify!

To date, I have finished a total of 78 marathons/ultra marathons. As of April 15, 2019, I completed the Boston Marathon and earned my Sixth Star for the Abbott World Marathon Majors . Along the way, I also qualified to be a member of the 50 States Marathon Club . I am one state away from completing a marathon in all 50 states and am 10 states into my second round of 50 states.

What Does the Future Hold?

What else is in store for me? This year, I'm going to earn my medal for completing a marathon in all 50 states, and I have a very ambitious goal to complete 100 marathons by the end of the year. I also have four more continents to run in. Will that be it? Maybe. Maybe not. We will have to see...

So going back to the question, "Why do I run?" In my journey as a marathoner, it has been an adventure and a thrill to see our beautiful country in a different perspective. But the best part of running is the solitude of being alone while I am training and while I am racing. Running has become my "zen," my peaceful space and my form of meditation. In addition, being an avid cook and a foodie, running keeps me fit and healthy. Furthermore, I met some of my best friends through my races all over the country and the world. Now, you all know why I run.

Why Do You Run? If you would like to share your story with the Racertrips community, email [email protected] to find out how.

READ THIS NEXT: How This Runner Went From OCD to the BYC Marathon

Jose Maria H. Gabriel, MD Gaby ran his first marathon at age 50 in Bordeaux, France, and has since finished more than 78 marathons/ultra marathons. He's a qualifying member in both Marathon Maniacs and the 50 States Marathon Club . In 2019, he ran the Boston Marathon to earn his Sixth Star for the Abbott World Marathon Majors . He's also one state away from finishing a marathon in all 50 states and has set an ambitious goal to complete 100 marathons by the end of 2019. Gaby is a Brand Ambassador for Racertrips, Nuun Energy , Marathon Maniacs (Illinois and Chicago) and XOSKIN Running Apparel .

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, need advice on writing a college essay about running.

Hey! I've been on my school's track and cross country team since freshman year, and it's really been a transformative experience for me. I want to share this journey in my college essay, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to make it relatable and memorable. Any fellow runners out there who have written about their running experiences in essays? I'd appreciate any help!

Hello! It's great to hear that your running journey has been so transformative. In order to make your essay relatable and memorable, you'll want to avoid focusing on the common aspects like training, getting faster, and winning races. Instead, try to find a unique angle or narrow in on a specific experience that conveys a larger truth about yourself.

One approach is to explore how running taught you a valuable life lesson, such as discipline, resilience, or self-motivation. You could use an anecdote about overcoming a challenge or achieving a personal goal that had a significant impact on you.

For example, maybe you set a goal to break a certain time in the mile and made a plan to reach it, despite numerous setbacks. What strategies did you employ to reach that goal? What did you learn from that process? How did it change your approach to other aspects of your life?

Another idea is to discuss a connection you made through running that had a significant impact on you, such as a special friendship with a teammate, a mentoring relationship with a coach, or a unique experience during a race that resonated with you on a personal level. Delve into the details of that connection, how it helped you grow, and how it reflects your values or character.

Lastly, consider discussing running as a part of a bigger personal narrative. For instance, maybe running helped you cope with stress or manage a difficult situation in your life. In this case, you could intertwine the story of your running journey with the story of overcoming personal adversity, thereby showing how the two aspects of your life influenced and supported one another.

In the end, what matters most is conveying your growth, self-awareness, and personal qualities through the lens of your running experiences. Make it unique to you, and it'll be both relatable and memorable. Good luck with your essay!

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Four men running on a track, dawn light visible on the horizon.

MIND, BODY, WONDER

Why the world's oldest sport is still one of the best exercises

Few physical activities can match the cardiovascular benefits of running. It’s also good for your muscles, bones, and mind—and can help you live longer.

When it comes to cardiovascular exercise, running is in a class of its own.

It's a sport that has endured millennia—the oldest and once only Olympic event was a sprint known as the stadion, but its practical benefits date back to prehistoric times.

"In order to hunt and survive, humans had to develop the ability to run millions of years ago, so it's engrained in who we are as a species," says Alyssa Olenick, an exercise physiologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. "Over the centuries, it's grown into one of the most popular and accessible worldwide sports for both elite athletes and everyday people."

Today, some 50 million Americans regularly engage in the activity that appeals to both the old and young alike and is about as popular among women as it is among men.

( Oral contraceptives may help lower the risk of sports injuries )

"Across all age groups, running helps to improve cardiovascular fitness and reduce overall mortality, to manage weight, to improve bone density and muscle strength and coordination, and to reduce stress and improve mental health," says Danielle Ponzio, an orthopedic surgeon at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and a co-author of running-related research .

For Hungry Minds

Though running isn't for everyone—people with certain medical conditions may need to pursue non-weight-bearing exercises such as swimming —it's a sport that benefits its participants as much today as it would have helped runners in ancient times.

Unparalleled cardiovascular and respiratory benefits

The most consistently studied benefit of running is improved heart health. It does this, in part, by making the heart "a stronger, more efficient pump," says Allison Zielinski, a cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the co-director of the sports cardiology program at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. A stronger cardiac muscle, she explains, improves one's cardiac output —a scientific measurement of how much blood the heart can pump in a minute, which healthcare providers use to gauge the strength and efficiency of a patient's cardiovascular system.

Zielinski adds that running also affects one’s autonomic nervous system—the body’s network responsible for regulating involuntary physiological processes such as digestion and respiration—by reducing one's resting heart rate. This is significant because studies show that every 10-beat-per-minute increase in one's resting heart rate is associated with a 16 percent increase in mortality risk.

Such improvements in cardiovascular performance are among the reasons the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognizes running as a "vigorous-intensity" activity—the health agency's highest measurement of aerobic exercise.

Running has also been shown to improve circulation, causing " favorable changes in your blood vessels, including increased capillary density and improved endothelial reactivity—something known as vasodilation," Zielinski explains.

Research shows that running improves lung capacity and performance as well. It accomplishes this, in part, by improving the maximum rate at which one can utilize oxygen—a measurement known as VO2max. This measurement reflects the maximal amount of oxygen-rich blood someone can pump out of their heart and deliver to their muscle to drive movement, says Olenick.

Living longer and better

This has a direct association with improved all-cause mortality as "even a small increase in VO2max can have meaningful improvements in long-term health," says Olenick. But it's only one of many markers of longevity associated with running.

One landmark 15-year study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, for instance, found that running for even five to 10 minutes a day resulted in an average three-year life expectancy gain. Duck-Chul Lee, a co-author of the research and a professor of physical activity epidemiology at Iowa State University College of Human Sciences, says these benefits are accomplished, in part, because "running reduces the risk of many diseases and conditions including coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes."

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A nother longitudinal study found runners had a 39 percent lower mortality rate and experienced less physical disability than non-runners. Running has also been associated with decreased LDL cholesterol levels and improved blood pressure .

( Pickleball is everywhere. Here's why the fast-growing sport is good for your health )

The activity is good for muscle growth and increasing bone density, which is especially important for older people. "As we age, we tend to lose muscle mass and bone density," says Ponzio, "and weight-bearing exercise like running is an effective way to counter these losses." Indeed, one study shows that long-distance running in particular increases biological markers of bone formation.

Because of these and related benefits, "running can reduce your risk of developing osteoporosis and arthritis," says Austin "Ozzie" Gontang, a clinical psychotherapist and the director of the San Diego Marathon Clinic in California.

Healthy weight management is another quality-of-life advantage associated with running. One reason for this is that running at even a moderate pace of five miles per hour (many runners run in excess of 12 mph) burns 590 calories per hour in a 154-pound person, which is as much or more than any other CDC-measured physical activity including swimming, weightlifting, bicycling, or playing basketball. "Running is a powerful tool for burning calories and is crucial for weight loss and maintenance," says Gontang.

In this regard, it's also helpful that running increases energy expenditure and boosts one's metabolism by helping the body metabolize fats and carbs , "both during exercise and after we eat," says Olenick. In similar fashion, running has also been shown to help with healthy blood-sugar regulation.

Mental health advantages

Running's mental health plusses are no less intriguing. "Running can be done on your own, but often has a social component as well, whether it's running with a friend or being part of a running club or virtual community," says Karmel Choi, a clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. "This adds to the emotional benefits by reducing isolation and increasing a sense of support and motivation."

The activity can also be good for depression. Choi points to a recent study that found that individuals with depression who started running regularly "recovered at similar rates to those taking antidepressants." She's published supportive research and notes that her team estimates that if someone swapped just 15 minutes of sitting for 15 minutes of running each day, they could "reduce their risk of depression by as much as 26 percent." Part of the reason for this is because running has been shown to release "feel-good hormones like endorphins and dopamine , that have been linked to better mood, reduced stress, and even the 'runner’s high,'" Choi explains.

Beyond helping one feel better, running is associated with improved cognitive function. "Running can boost brain function by enhancing memory and learning capabilities," says Gontang. He says this occurs because running increases blood flow to the brain and stimulates the production of a molecule known as the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), "which supports the growth of new neurons and protects existing brain cells."

Getting started

Perhaps most compelling of all is that there are very low costs and almost no barriers of entry associated with participating in the sport. "Running can seem intimidating because it sometimes seems like people need all the latest watches or gear or tools or shoes to participate, but people can simply start with a road or trail near them, and often things they already own," says Olenick.

To get started, begin slow and then work up to higher and higher fitness levels.

"Try and make it easier to increase physical activity in your daily life and within the context of daily activities you're already doing such as parking a bit further from the grocery store or taking the stairs at work," suggests Rajesh Vedanthan, a physician and population health scientist at NYU Langone Health in New York City. From there, he suggests briskly walking around the block before attempting jogging and then running.

Even after getting used to the movement, Lee suggests alternating running laps with walking or jogging laps. Adopting proper form and posture is also recommended. "Keep your head up and look forward as you run to align your spine," offers Gontang. He also says it's important to keep your shoulders relaxed and to keep your elbows at 90 degrees and to "avoid overstriding."

Developing a running schedule, finding a running buddy (the family dog counts!), and setting realistic and measurable goals are additional ways of staying motivated and keeping yourself accountable. "Proper shoe type and fit are also important," advises Ponzio.

As you go, she suggests listening to your body, avoiding doing too much, too quickly, and varying your surroundings, terrain, and destination. "Eventually, sign up for some races as the adrenaline of being part of something bigger with a community of like-minded runners is really so special," she says. "It keeps runners coming back for more."

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By Megan Baxter

True Story, Issue #21

Equally a meditation on the pursuit of running, a reflection on Lewis and Clark’s endeavor to map the continent, and an exploration of the body’s limitations, True Story #21 asks: Is it possible to outrun yourself?

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?

—Walt Whitman

I want to say up front that I am not a good runner. I am neither very fast nor very graceful. I don’t run competitively, although I have completed a few races. But nor am I a jogger. Some people would tell you that although in both gaits there is a moment when both feet are off the ground, what distinguishes running from jogging is speed. Some people would tell you that runners strike the earth with the forefoot while joggers strike with their heels, but in fact many competitive long-distance runners are heel strikers. For me, the difference between the two comes down to intent. Jogging is something like a shuffle, a lack of commitment to intensity. But running . . . Running is a pursuit or an escape. To run, the body goes all in; every ligament and muscle fiber strikes, pulls, and returns to the earth; the runner tips forward like the front edge of a wheel, rolling into space.

I remember the first time I ran. I felt like a queen, divine on the earth. I was thirteen and had never run before. I remember the night clearly because of its novelty and because running is a little like taking flight. I often dream that if I run fast enough I will begin to fly, as if speed on the runway is all the jet plane requires.

A walking step, not too long, not too short—in the United States, roughly 2½ feet.

The sort of step I take around the edge of my yard in the morning, surveying the quality of the coming day.

To walk at a steady rate, back and forth, as an expression of anxiety.
To keep pace.
To measure by walking.

To pace is both to lead and establish competitive speed and to do something slowly in order to prevent overexertion. That is, although John Henry kept pace with that steam engine, he did not pace himself, and his heart burst, while the cold steel kept ringing.

In my sixth-grade history class, we did research papers on famous explorers. I was assigned Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. I became enamored of the two captains (although Clark was never officially granted that title) and especially fond of Lewis, who seemed, even from my amateur research in the middle school’s library, to be somewhat eccentric, somehow unfitting of the explorer archetype. Lewis was prone to what his contemporaries, including Thomas Jefferson, described as “hypochondria,” noting that the condition ran in Lewis’s family. Modern medicine would have diagnosed him with severe depression.

In 1809, at the age of thirty-five, Lewis committed suicide. It had been three years since the expedition had returned to St. Louis. In that time, he had run up debts, developed a crippling addiction to alcohol, struggled at his post as governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory, failed at love, and been unable, or perhaps simply too depressed, to complete his written account of his great journey. He was carrying his journals with him when he died. Revisionist biographers claim that his death was murder, noting the brutal nature of his demise, or that he died accidently while cleaning his pistols. Even as a girl, I knew this was wistful, their need to rewrite a hero’s end.

I include the details of that night here only to summon the horror I felt as a girl at the absolute darkness of suicide, that shutdown of all possible routes. The story begins always with two gunshots, one to the head, then another to the chest, fired from his pistols. Some sources say he died shortly afterward from the bullet wounds. Others claim that when Lewis’s servant found him, he was slumped on his buffalo and bearskin blankets, slicing his veins with his shaving razor. He begged the man for water. “I am no coward; but I am so strong, so hard to die,” he is reported to have said.

He bled out before dawn.

“I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him,” Clark wrote to his brother, describing Lewis’s passing. A few months prior to Lewis’s death, Clark had named his first son Meriwether Lewis Clark. He didn’t know that during the drunk, hallucinatory final days of Lewis’s life, his former traveling companion had claimed repeatedly that Clark was near and would help him. His servant reported his saying that “he herd [Clark] Comeing on, and Said that he was certain [he would] over take him, that [he] had herd of his Situation and would Come to his releaf.” I thought of the times when the two had separated on their journey to pursue forked waterways or explore passes through the mountains and how easily, and with what faith, they had found each other again in the wilderness. At his most lost, Lewis had expected Clark to locate him.

I wrote my research paper from the point of view of Lewis before he fired the first bullet, in a series of educational flashbacks. To me, he became a symbol of discovery, of expansion, but also of emptiness. How, I wondered—and wonder still—could a man fill his memories with so many maps of beauty, herds of 10,000 buffalo, Indian ponies in the Bitterroots, the Great Falls of the Missouri, and still shut down that vision from within? Could you run fast enough, or far enough, to escape yourself? I think not. I think Lewis taught me that you can’t outrun yourself.

When I was five years old, I almost died from a lack of oxygen. It felt not so much like Darth Vader’s invisible choking force strangling my throat as a slow march away from light. My nail beds turned blue. So did my lips. I remember the sensation of tunnel vision, zooming in on the flooring tiles. By the time I got to the hospital, the scary part—the “I can’t breathe” part—was long past. Sometime in that breathless night I had come to terms with the fact that I could die, though I think I must have understood it only as not breathing. I might have said that I understood that I could stop breathing and then rest, for it is very hard to breathe into the tight fist of asthmatic lungs, and I had been fighting that constriction for hours. The long sleep of death would have been welcome.

And because I had learned that it was actually rather easy to die, after I recovered from that near-fatal attack death became even more frightening. Death was in every inhale, every game of tag, every hide-and-go-seek chase, every gym class. My asthma was triggered by allergens and temperature changes, too, so petting a cat could be deadly, or helping my dad mow the lawn, or waiting outside for school to begin in a frigid New England winter and then charging into an overheated room in my snow suit.

My childhood was a well-regulated series of interactions, aided by medications. In any other age I would surely have died, if not on that night when I was five, then on one of the many other occasions when even triple doses of inhaled steroids failed and I was rushed to the ER. The doctors said there was a chance I might outgrow it entirely, but to imagine that I could grow out of such a routine, that my lungs would change like my breasts and hips would, seemed impossible.

Dear Meriwether Lewis,

In your dreams the country becomes a map with waterways like a surgeon’s guide to the circulatory system, upcountry, downstream, all following the easiest path. The mountains rise and again you are trapped in the snowy gulches and deep-throated avalanche channels. You at the mouth of the Columbia, where I’ve read there are more waterfalls per acre than anywhere else in the world; great corridors fall down into that river, steep and tough in the north and choked with a mist that breaks through the spruce and cedar at the coast. You are there at the edge of everything, camped for the wet season in a shingled fort, the rain in your bones and in the blue of your wrist veins. You trace them up the forearm, to that soft spot in the elbow and then up through your shoulder and across the breast bone, to where they meet and pulse. There is nothing to do but return, with your bags filled with specimens, the shining birds and prairie creatures, gutted and eyeless.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote to Congress to ask if he might send a party into Spanish territory for the purpose of “literary pursuit,” he meant to increase geographic and scientific knowledge.

When Jefferson wrote in his rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, “we hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness,” he didn’t mean happiness in the modern sense. The root of that word implies the fortune or luck that was once associated with the whim of the gods. Jefferson meant this older form of happiness, the happiness of the ancient writers, like Cicero and Plato, for whom it was found through morality, justice, and duty. Cicero wrote “a happy life consists in tranquility of the mind.” That tranquility consisted of living virtuously.

When the assassins hired by Mark Antony finally caught up to a fleeing Cicero on the road outside of Rome, they found the old essayist sweating in his carriage. Accepting his fate with manly grace, Cicero bared his throat to his murderers like a defeated gladiator. Before the orator’s body was brought to Rome, Antony ordered the hands and head to be cut off and had them displayed on the rostrum in the Forum, where Cicero had once delivered his famous speeches. The hands were brutalized for having written those words; the head, defiled for having spoken them. Antony’s wife pulled out Cicero’s tongue and jabbed it with her hairpin, so bitterly did she hate his essays against her husband’s power.

When you say happiness , think of a hairpin in the tongue and imagine fleeing for your life on a cedar-lined road; smell the dust and the horses. When you say freedom think of a life of essays. When you say power imagine two old hands.

The length of a man’s belt in medieval England. Irked by the inconsistency of this definition, King Henry I measured the distance between his nose and the thumb of his outstretched hand and standardized the unit.

In a Chinese-food restaurant I once overheard a first date combust as a drunk woodworking teacher explained to a stone-faced woman that he forced his students to use his body’s measurements to make their pencil boxes and birdhouses. One Bob ! he called it, and held his foot up for her so she could take note of that exact unit. The woman shuddered. Only kings can get away with this sort of thing.

To measure the world with one’s body seems a particularly gross form of egotism. But who understands time and distance in theory alone and not through the measurement of individual days or steps along a familiar running path?

I am in the pinewoods, and the light is still golden like it is in the summer in Maine. I am in my girl body again, lighter and strange to me. It is a body I have just been given, and it seems to do things on its own as if it just became mortal. We are playing Capture the Flag. The ground is a soft golden carpet of fallen needles.

The light is behind me. I feel its last warmth on my shoulder blades. At first I am walking. I leap to cross a log, and then I leap to cross another, and then I am running. I am not playing, I am not running for a flag, I am running for movement. Oh, the ground is soft under my sneakers! And the light fades behind me so that I am running into the darkness of the woods, and the sound of the other girls is getting dim behind me, and I am up a slight hill, and still running, and my legs move like some animal’s, and my arms pump like strong pistons. I breathe in through my mouth and nose and then out again, clear and fleshy, almost bloody but healthy, like the taste of a coin.

I run and leap until I am high up where the ground gives way to boulders, the bones of Maine, and I look down and see the lake and the camp’s roofs and docks. The girls yip in the pinewoods like coyotes, and briefly I feel myself above everything, the systems in my body working, invisible and perfect, pulsing, exchanging, and I love it for the first time ever, this body that is now mine, but night is close so I head back. Running down is almost better than running up. I am pumping and swift, and sweat is rising then running its own course over me, salty and new, until I am again among the girls from my cabin, and they are sweaty too and out of breath, and we walk together under the flickering street lights down the sandy path to our bunks.

I could measure my life in the running trails I have followed. I could map it for you from that first evening to this morning, when I returned to my home flushed with sweat and, closing my pores with a cold shower, sat down to essay running, to measure it properly against what I know of myself.

In 2007, when I lived in Portland, Oregon, I visited Cape Disappointment and Fort Clatsop, which during the stay of the Corps of Discovery was a miserable place but has since been transformed into an educational national memorial. The replica of Lewis and Clark’s split-log fort has been lacquered a shiny honey gold, and costumed rangers lead groups from the gift store to the film hall. The day I went was sunny, and the spruce needles glistened underfoot. Later, I drove along the Columbia River, marveling at the power of the water and the height of the gorge’s walls. All along the rocks, tiny waterfalls drained into the mighty river. I imagined Lewis shivering on the coast, bored during the cold, rainy winters. “Everything moves on in the old way,” he wrote—a haunting description of cabin fever.

At the time, I was training for my first marathon and took my long runs on Sauvie Island, just north of the city, where the Wilmette River joins the Columbia. Lewis and Clark camped there, scuffled with Native Americans, ate a potato-like food that grew wild on the island, and then pushed back upstream toward the mountains. As I ran I imagined I was retracing their route, expanding their maps each night. The long runs took up three or four hours of my Sundays, and I was always flush with excitement beforehand, wondering what I might see on the road. The running mind is the traveling mind, noting each odd color, granting each license plate and cloud formation significance. I gave names secretly to houses and trees I passed, just as Lewis had named rivers and mountains.

the average length of a man’s foot.

A woman’s foot is smaller, which is not to say her world is smaller, but rather measured differently. My foot is nine inches long.

In 2007, when I was twenty-two, I purchased a how-to book that began with the reassuring sentence, “Oprah ran a four-hour marathon.” The book was slim and contained training plans. It divided the work of training for a marathon into three categories: the long run, once a week, which I would take on Sauvie Island; the short run, which I would do as a loop around my apartment complex; and sprint intervals, which I would complete under the lights on my college’s track, long after the sports teams had left the field for the night. The long runs I found to be an exercise in patience. My mind created its own tricks, calculating my speed, naming the houses and farms I passed, watching the mountains on the horizon as Lewis and Clark might have as they rowed up the Columbia. The short weekday runs of between two and five miles were charmingly repetitive, in the sense that I could depart with no expectation for a timed mile. Fitting them in was the challenge since I could generate only a little enthusiasm for the slog. The track workouts, which consisted of quarter-mile sprints followed by prescribed rest periods, were the most physically demanding portion of my training. One loop around the track accounted for a quarter mile, so I could mark my pace easily. The struggle was to stay steady from start to finish, to push through with my original thrust during the final 100 meters.

My lungs burned. My legs threw themselves long on the track’s surface. The bright white lights above the fields made me feel Olympic, although I was alone in the drizzle and dusk. During the minutes of rest my ragged breath seemed amplified, all-consuming. Sweat grew cool on my skin. Then, at the beep of my watch’s timer, I was off again, along the same path, trying to summon the drive forward, with all my body calling for speed. The sprint required, in a short period, many cycles of motivation, like a compression of many days into one intense hour. Each sprint was its own expedition around the track, past the bleachers, the lampposts, the stadium gates. Every time I broke free from the starting line I had to commit, again, to flight.

To understand why I run, know that I both love and hate my body and have come to accept this balancing act. My body is like blood, constantly in flux, sometimes depleted and sometimes new and full of life. My body has been sick, and my spirit has hated being in a sick body. And of course I wish my body were something that it isn’t. I wish it were taller and longer. I wish my neck would grow a few inches and that my shoulders weren’t as wide as my hips. I could go on. When I was a sick kid, I dreamed of waking up in a new body. I dreamed of flying.

But when I am running I have to be with the body I have. Love it or hate it, there is no escape from it. Under the discipline of miles, the virtue of routine is that there is no turning back. There is just forward motion—the feet pulling and the hip flexors sweeping the legs back and my arms swinging, my chest slightly forward—and trying to breathe and not swallow the wind. The violence of running fills the body. Even at my leanest, running shakes me loose. Fatty female hips and ass jiggle, and I feel heavier than when I am standing still, as if motion itself increased gravity. I feel my bad right knee and my tight left hamstring and the curve in my spine where scoliosis takes it off course before it veers back again. There is no hiding when I am running.

To make it to the road I must first inhale medication, so before I even set out I acknowledge my limitations. This, my body screams, is what you’ve got!

Horsepower:

The amount of power required to lift 75 kilograms one meter in one second.

The engineer James Watt, who designed the machines that dug the coal that fed England’s Industrial Revolution, calculated that a horse could turn a mill wheel 144 times an hour. He sold his steam engines on the power of the horse: imagine all those beasts pulling, their breath rising, their hides slick, imagine that power inside a steel piston . Everyone then had seen how hard a horse can work. Now no one can remember it.

An article in Nature cites measurements from the 1925 Iowa State Fair, reporting the peak output of horses at 14.9 horsepower (which lasted but a brief few seconds as they pulled a weighted sled through what I imagine was damp sand in the humidity of a late August evening).

Many years later, on a cool August night in Berlin, under the flickering lights of the Olympiastadion’s half-domed ceiling, Usain Bolt generated just 3.5 horsepower during the 9.58 seconds it took him to run 100 meters, faster than any other recorded man or woman. No holding back, no! He wins! He kept running after crossing the finish line, at least another 100 meters, first holding his pointer fingers out long like a conductor orchestrating the cheering crowd, then with his arms out wide, like wings.

Whenever I move to a new place, or vacation somewhere for more than a few days, one of the first things I do is to go for a run. I am, like most, a creature of habit, so when I find a route that is enjoyable—a good length with varying terrain, not too many cars, no scary places like dark tunnels or alleyways where I might meet my end, and interesting things to look at; ideally a loop, but if not then an out and back—I run it again and again until I start to read the landscape for markers of my pace, until I start to tell the same story again and again.

In the history books they show you on a rise above the plains, in leather and uniform with a breeze from the Continental Divide blowing the fringe on your jacket back toward the Missouri. You squint into the western sun, like some great bird, just ahead of Clark with his sunburned skin and heavy forearms. I have always imagined you right before you put the first bullet in your head. Your intake of breath, like a storm’s first tracking up the valley, your eyes closed, finding your temple with the gun barrel, setting your teeth, and outside in that trailside inn, the other people drinking and falling asleep without terror, and the country filling in all the places that were only prairies and mountain ranges in your maps, and all of their quick starts at the sound of the gun while you faded, backward through increasing darkness, up to the spring source where the purest water rises.

Have you reckoned the earth much? asks Whitman. If you have run the same route many times, I think you have, at least that piece of it. You’ve learned its terrain, its highs and lows. You are familiar with its smells during different seasons and times of day (the sweet grass of summer, the dull salt of winter, the rising swampy springtime mornings and sharp autumn sunsets). You know the pattern of traffic and the paths of animals. On the side of the road you find the things that happened when you weren’t there to witness. In the night, deer were hit. Trash was thrown. A bottle was broken over the blacktop. On each run a new note reveals itself. Two fence posts closer together than all the rest. The tree scarred by a snowplow. On a clear, sunny day in November, when all the leaves are down, you look further into the woods and notice an old shack by the creek. The body works hard here on the hill but not on the long downslope to the pasture. And here the road tilts to prevent flooding, and your ankles sway under that strain. Jump a puddle. Skip over a rock that has rolled down from the cliff. Here, the blood pulsing hard in your ears. Here, the sweat drying on your cheeks. Here, the howls of dogs. Here, a strange silence from the swamp, the half-built subdivision, the echoing farmland.

In the Middle Ages, the amount of land a man with a yoke of oxen could plow in a day.

Like a man-hour, this unit is subject to specific conditions: the ox, the driver (a man of tolerance? a man of violent need?), the soil, the air through which they both must push.

The bones in our feet shifted as we began to walk upright. The shape of a foot can date a skeleton as quickly as can a skull or a jaw. As we evolved, the opposable big toe was phased out, so that we can no longer hang from a branch with our feet like we grip a barbell or bike handle or steering wheel with our hands. We became runners. We didn’t evolve to escape from lunging lions or packs of dire wolves; humans aren’t great sprinters. And anyway, everyone knows running from predators is a bad idea; it triggers their chase drive, and we simply won’t win in that race. Instead, ancient humans were long-distance hunters; they pursued animals until they ran up against cliffs or fell shaking to the earth with capture myopathy. In this hunt our hairlessness was perhaps our greatest advantage. We could sweat and release heat while our furry prey overheated to its death, and in this manner a beast with two legs could catch a beast with four.

There are traditional running cultures, and I claim no connection to their practices. When I think of those Incan heralds or the tribesmen of the African plains, I think always of my own death. I simply could not have survived in any time other than this one, and so nostalgic daydreams of living and running in times past are not longings of mine. I run to stay in shape, a problem that my ancestors would not have understood, in the same way that I can’t imagine the power of a horse on a mill wheel. What haunts me is the idea of chase, followed by the idea of escape, and the concept of measuring the earth with a body.

I have run away since I was a little girl, packing up and leaving home, moving instead of fighting. I have a powerful flight instinct. I say I run in pursuit of health, but I am also escaping its opposite. The idea of fitness is as powerful to me as my fear of sickness. My asthma is not influenced by my running, but my running will always be influenced by my asthma. The two exist together but are not equally affected. I will never outrun my asthma, but it will always bear on my running.

Through the map of years they hunt each other. One winning. One retreating. Then charging back. There are seasons when I am invincible. There are days when I come into my body weeping for its weakness. But had I nothing to fight against I’d have nothing to pursue.

Every clear night of their journey, Lewis and Clark made celestial observations, sometimes staying up well after their men, reworking their complex implements. On cloudy nights, when there were no visible stars to cast onto, they noted the temperature and tended to their maps. Even on days when neither man wrote a journal entry, they entered information on longitude, latitude, temperature, and weather. They named the rivers and mountains they’d passed during the day after sweethearts, heroes, and dogs. Although their collected work fills volumes, it is still incomplete. Whole books were lost or, perhaps, never existed. Clark dutifully kept a log, but in the summer of 1804, Lewis, who spent his days walking the banks alongside the Corps’ small fleet of boats, botanizing and keeping an eye out for Teton Sioux, rarely expressed his thoughts on paper. Was he joyous beyond words? Was he so focused on his saturated vision of expansion that the overflow of ink onto paper seemed unnecessary? He left to Clark the task of journaling, and I imagine him on the banks of the Missouri in the golden light of early fall, drawn away intensely by happiness, as he would later be isolated by pain.

The following spring, after the party pushed off from Fort Mandan, where they had camped through winter, and rounded the great bend of the Missouri, Lewis’s journal entries thicken. Some are over 5,000 words long and would have taken him, at a stream-of-consciousness pace, about two hours to write by hand. He seemed to have words for everything: specimens, geography, bear encounters. It’s during this time that he produced his best travel writing, summoning a sense of adventure and grandeur in his prose. But on June 13, walking ahead of the party as he often did, he confronted a sight that, despite his many words, he felt unprepared to describe. He’d discovered the Great Falls of the Missouri, a series of five linked waterfalls that would present a massive obstacle to the expedition. He sat down on the shore and feverishly wrote.

. . . my ears were saluted with the agreeable sound of a fall of water and advancing a little further I saw the spray arrise above the plain like a collumn of smoke which would frequently dispear again in an instant caused I presume by the wind which blew pretty hard from the S.W. I did not however loose my direction to this point which soon began to make a roaring too tremendious to be mistaken for any cause short of the great falls of the Missouri. . . . to gaze on this sublimely grand specticle . . . formes the grandest sight I ever beheld, . . . irregular and somewhat projecting rocks below receives the water in it’s passage down and brakes it into a perfect white foam which assumes a thousand forms in a moment sometimes flying up in jets of sparkling foam to the hight of fifteen or twenty feet and are scarcely formed before large roling bodies of the same beaten and foaming water is thrown over and conceals them. . . . from the reflection of the sun on the sprey or mist which arrises from these falls there is a beatifull rainbow produced which adds not a little to the beauty of this majestically grand senery. after wrighting this imperfect discription I again viewed the falls and was so much disgusted with the imperfect idea which it conveyed of the scene that I determined to draw my pen across it and begin agin, but then reflected that I could not perhaps succeed better than pening the first impressions of the mind. . .

He thought about crossing out his words and beginning again. His imperfect description disgusted him. He left the account in his journal nonetheless, sensing that time dulls memory. In it I read his rush of excitement, the thrill, and then his loss of faith in his ability to record it. You see him embark then retreat into darkness.

Heading out, my lungs expanding, I think of the pig’s lung I dissected in fifth grade; I stuck a plastic straw down the esophagus and blew into the straw. Careful, our teacher warned, don’t inhale. The lung ballooned out. I think of the tests I took in the hospital with an asthma specialist. I blew into a tube that was connected to a computer screen. I was the wolf, and my exhales were meant to blow down the door of the pig’s house. A scale at the bottom measured each puff.

Before I head out to run I suck on the red plastic mouthpiece of my inhaler. My lungs expand. I bend to lace my shoes. There is the house, then everything beyond it. Each foot claims a bit of earth. Sometimes when I leave I am reluctant. Sometimes I bolt into the dawn.

What I want more than distance now is speed. I want the sprint and thrust of a fast mile. The unbounded, reckless joy of that night in Maine, when my body was both my body and something new that drove me with it. A run is something faster than you want it to be. It is a statement against the body’s frailty, written on earth by the body. The contractions astound me, the stop and go, the pull and release of ligaments and tendons, how the legs load and unload in one swing and the heel bears weight and then takes flight.

Running in the First 5k Race Essay

Introduction, preparation for the race, running the 5k race, after the race; lessons learnt, reference list.

Athletics is a very popular sport since it stands distinctly from other sports like football, basketball, table tennis, hockey, golf or even swimming. It involves aspects like, walking, jumping, and running in the form of cross country running, race walking, road running and track and field running. Athletics has become a resourceful sport in different countries due to the image it creates and the revenue earned from it. Many have taken it as a profession and earn their living primarily from athletics, for example, the athletes, the athletic director, and other staff concerned with the running of athletic programs at different levels while others take it as a form of relaxation and physical exercise that helps to keep the body fit and healthy. A 5k race is essential and gives runners especially those doing it for their first time a nice experience as it offers motivation and helps the runners enjoy all the aspects in the race and also enhance speed in future races. This paper discusses my experience in a 5k race from preparation, actual running and even after the race giving the practical significance of the experience in my life in general.

Just like any other aspect of life, running requires preparation so as to make the exercise a success. Being my first 5k race, I had a lot of anxiety and needed a lot of training and preparation to make sure that I gave it my best and win in the competition. It was a relay and I had to be cooperative with my team members who were my workmates. Running requires some inner motivation and training since not everyone can run. It may be very intimidating especially for a person who is doing it for the first time due to the challenges associated with it, for example, fatigue and injuries. Prior preparation is very essential to ensure that the body is used to the practice of running and one can therefore run comfortably. Two months prior to the actual exercise, I took the initiative of getting a medical clearance from my doctor to ensure that am fit to participate in the race without health complications since it is important to always maintain good health. I also had to identify the appropriate shoes for my foot type to ensure that I am comfortable when running and to avoid unnecessary injuries that could interfere with the process of running.

This is done by visiting experts in the running field who stock sports shoes, giving the right information after which the appropriate shoes are provided. Warm ups are very essential for example walking for some minutes prior to running. During my first week of practice, I had three sessions of walking for 6 minutes and jogging for 1 minute and three sessions of 5minutes walking and 2minutes jogging; week three involved four sessions of walking for 3 minutes and jogging for 4 minutes, and walking for 2 minutes and jogging for 5 minutes four times during the fourth week. During the fifth week, I had four sessions three times, 2 minutes walking and 5 minutes jogging while I walked for 2minutes and jogged for 9 minutes thrice on the sixth week. I had four sessions of walking for 1 minute and jogging for 11 minutes thrice during my seventh week. It was after the practice that I could now be able to run for twenty minutes at the beginning of the eighth week and thirty consecutive minutes towards the end of the week. I continued doing this four times a week and realized that things were becoming easier and that my endurance and fitness improved day after day making me more suited for the 5k race.

The training part of the running process helped me so much as my body was now used to and I had the stamina and fitness it takes to run the 5k race. I ran the 5k in a relay with other four workmates. Having done the training together although with some discrepancies in approaches due to our differences in strength and determination, we were able to take the third position and we were not happy about the results bearing in mind that we had the chance of becoming the winner. It was after the race that we learnt that we could have adhered to some of the tips that aid in proper running, for example, looking ahead while running to ensure safety, avoiding landing on the toes or heels but land on the mid foot, keeping hands at waist level and relaxing them, maintaining the right posture, avoiding too much bouncing that uses a lot of energy and keeping the shoulders in a relaxed state (Herreros, 2003).

After the race, there were different views on what happened and everyone tried to evaluate why we performed that way. At some point it was viewed as a good attempt as it was our first time but to some people being the first time did not justify the poor performance. I learnt that preparation especially for the first timers is the most crucial part of the running process and should therefore be taken very seriously as it determines the success or failure of the activity. It is not good to ignore the simple things involved in the preparation and training as it is their combination that brings the end result. Rest is essential since it enhances recovery and helps prevent injuries through muscle building and repair. A comfortable pace is also recommended as long as the targeted mileage is covered to avoid straining of the body muscles. Other exercises apart from running and jogging for instance swimming are vital to reduce monotony while at the same time relaxing the body.

It is also advisable to warm up before running and cool down after running. I also learnt that a run-walk method of preparation is good to start with as beginners usually do not have the stamina to run throughout without breaks and to increase running time gradually while reducing the walking time. Controlling the breathing while running is essential and one should make sure the breathing is not heavy and can allow talking while running. It is important to reduce the workload of training a week before the actual race so as to increase the peak by loosening the legs for the race day. Resting and stretching the body muscles the day before race is crucial and drinking plenty of water on the day before the race and after the race is good to avoid dehydration of the body. One should wear the appropriate shoes, pay attention to pains in the body to sense signs of adverse injury and wear right clothing, not too much or too little for the weather to ensure one is comfortable and not in danger of developing weather related illness. One should also train moderately and avoid being overconfidence and bear in mind that the competitors have also undergone some training (Earl, 2005).

In every aspect of life, it is important to pay attention to all issues however simple they may seem to be. Preparation is essential in any activity as the effort put in determines the result. Teamwork is a good skill to be adopted as it is through the combination of ideas and efforts that overall success is achieved, for instance, if all my team members had proper training, we would have been able to secure a second or even the first position.

It is evident that there has been an increased interest and participation in athletics and sports. Athletics has become the most attractive activity because of its simplicity nature and use of inexpensive equipment among other factors. The 5k offers a good chance for the beginners and tests the speed and strength of runners that have been in existence and so it should never be under emphasized. It has also proved to be essential in building the speed for long distance runners. It emphasizes on the need to balance mileage and speed in running and the importance of adequate training that ensures that the runners’ bodies adapt well to the strenuous exercise of running and in the long run perform well.

Earl, W.F. (2005). The Complete Guide to Running: How to Be a Champion from 9 to 90. New York: Meyer & Meyer Verlag.

Herreros, M. (2003). Running in Florida: A Practical Guide for Runners in the Sunshine State . New York: Pineapple Press Inc.

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IvyPanda. (2021, March 19). Running in the First 5k Race. https://ivypanda.com/essays/running-in-the-first-5k-race/

"Running in the First 5k Race." IvyPanda , 19 Mar. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/running-in-the-first-5k-race/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Running in the First 5k Race'. 19 March.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Running in the First 5k Race." March 19, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/running-in-the-first-5k-race/.

1. IvyPanda . "Running in the First 5k Race." March 19, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/running-in-the-first-5k-race/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Running in the First 5k Race." March 19, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/running-in-the-first-5k-race/.

Run streaks: is it safe to run every day?

PhD Candidate, Sport and Exercise Science, Anglia Ruskin University

PhD Candidate, Exercise Physiology, Anglia Ruskin University

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Jonathan Melville owns Breakaway Coaching and Analytics.

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A man checks his smart watch while out on a run.

Running is a great form of exercise that has numerous benefits for our health. For instance, people who consistently run at least an hour a week throughout their lives tend to live three years longer and have fewer chronic illnesses, compared with people who don’t do any exercise.

But some people are taking their love of running up a notch – running every day for as many days in a row as possible. This trend is being referred to online as a “run streak” . The rules of the run streak trend are simple: runners must complete a minimum of one mile (1.6km) every day, either on road, trail or the treadmill.

There are some remarkable streaks currently ongoing. Jim Taylor is said to have the longest streak among runners in Britain, having completed at least a mile a day for over 30 years. Globally, the longest streak is held by Jon Sutherland, a US runner who has reportedly run at least mile a day for over 50 years .

These are certainly incredible feats – but what are the effects on the body of running every day? Is it actually safe?

Whether you’re an amateur or professional runner, in order to get fitter you need to follow a training regime that places just the right amount of stress on the body so it can adapt. This is usually done through low-intensity runs and interval training , followed by periods of rest.

When this cycle is consistently repeated over months, runners will notice many changes in their fitness. These include a 5%-10% improvement in maximal oxygen consumption (the maximum amount of oxygen the body can use and transport to its working muscles), reduced heart rate during low-intensity runs, and improved ability to use fat for energy . All of these improvements help runners get faster or run further with less fatigue.

But a key element to becoming a better runner is taking rest periods . This allows the joints and ligaments to recover from the stress that running places on them. Rest also permits the body to replenish carbohydrate stores in the muscles , ensuring the body has energy for subsequent training days. Rest days can also help improve a runner’s recovery time between workouts .

But the nature of the run streak trend means there are no days off. This could have many potential pitfalls that runners should know about.

Continual training without adequate rest can cause many harms to the body. In extreme cases – such as ultra-endurance running – mild scarring of the heart can occur.

It can also weaken the immune system by reducing the function of immune cells. This can increase risk of respiratory infections and cause drastic changes in hormones , such as an up-to-40% reduction in adrenaline and testosterone. This may lead to poor recovery between runs and symptoms of overtraining – including changes in mood or muscle damage .

An older woman in running gear holds her shin in pain.

Runners must also be mindful of potential overuse injuries. These affect up to 70% of elite and recreational runners and could derail a run streak. One of the leading causes of overuse injuries is poor hip-muscle stabilisation in runners. This type of injury is more likely to happen as the training volume increases.

Is there a safe way to run every day?

To complete a run streak safely, pay attention to your training load – a combination of the volume, frequency and intensity of your workouts. It’s pivotal to manage this – taking particular care with the intensity of your runs, since the frequency of training is daily and the duration of runs is at least one mile.

High-intensity runs – such as intense sprint intervals – place more stress on the body and take longer to recover from, compared with low-intensity runs.

There’s also a window when the immune system is suppressed after high-intensity running of up to two hours . Keeping most of the runs easy will not only help you stay consistent, it will also reduce the chances of illness and injuries.

When starting a run streak, consider simply completing the minimum distance required (one mile per day) before gradually increasing the amount of running you do .

If you’re worried about taking days off, active recovery may be useful. This involves doing light exercise on your easier run streak days – such as a very light jog. Or, if you’re willing to break your streak but don’t want to take time off from exercise, you could always go for a brisk walk instead. This allows muscles to recover from the stress of running and can reduce muscle soreness .

Rest days are still strongly recommended, however. Even elite runners have periods away from running or incorporate rest blocks during a week of training. In fact, passive recovery ) – which involves doing no exercise at all – is generally considered better than active recovery for helping the body to repair itself and adapt to the stress of training.

Not taking any rest and attempting run to every day could also result in obsessive behaviour towards exercise – and in turn, have negative effects on your body. Before starting a run streak, evaluate whether it’s really in line with your fitness goals.

Running is a great way to improve your health, both physically and mentally. But runners should proceed with caution if they’re thinking of going for a run streak, to prevent overtraining and other risks to their health. Keep in mind things such as intensity and be sure to properly fuel after each run . This will reduce the likelihood of injury and health complications, and should ensure a more enjoyable run streak experience.

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Why You Need to Rethink Running Slow

When it comes to distance running, speed shouldn't be your only objective. Here's how to ease up—and shoes that might help.

Our product picks are editor-tested, expert-approved. We may earn a commission through links on our site. Why Trust Us?

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WHEN I FIRST started running long distances, I had one goal: go as fast as I could for as long as I could. I ran the same 5k route a few times a week, always aiming to go faster. Every time out needed to be better than the last—because that’s how training works for everything, right?

Plenty of guys have this mindset when they take up running or decide to train for a race. It seems logical, too, especially if you’re familiar with the principle of progressive overload in strength training. Running culture is also currently in a faster-is-better phase, with records falling at the competitive level. To top it all off, the rise of super shoes has everyone believing they can tap into speed on their local tracks and roadways.

Thing is, after a few months of hitting that 5K course as hard as I could, I wasn't improving. If anything, I was regressing—and my legs were sore and tired. As I (and many other newbie runners) have learned, always running your fastest isn't really feasible, especially if you're prepping for a specific goal or race. When you’re working toward speedier times, most of your workouts should be downright slow.

Why You Should Want to Run Slow

THIS MIGHT SEEM counterintuitive, but the only way you’re going to be able to perform on a race day or run well with consistency is if your training plan is composed of mostly slow (or, to be more technical, “sub-maximal”) workouts. “The value in running slow is so you can run faster,” says Ben Rosario, a pro running coach and Executive Director of the HOKA NAZ Elite running team in Flagstaff, Arizona. “What we've learned over time is that if you want to perform at a super-high level one day, you can't expect to do that the day before, or the days leading in.” Rosario recently coached me for the Big Sur Marathon—a famously tough, hilly course—and our biggest focus was on keeping my speed down during “shakeout” (slow-paced runs to start the week) and long-distance workouts.

Rosario also points out that if you’re regularly running as fast as you can for long distances, you’re not actually coming close to your true top speed. If he’s working with an athlete and notices that all of their runs are at the same pace, he recognizes an issue. “That's probably more [like] their medium-effort pace. They're probably not running as hard as they can every day,” he says. Maxing out your body on every single outing takes a toll on your muscles, tendons, and ligaments, says Rosario.

portrait of happy fit people running together ourdoors couple sport healthy lifetsyle concept

“Anecdotally, we definitely see that,” says Brad Whitley, PT, DPT , a physical therapist at Bespoke Treatments in San Diego. “Generally, if people are including easy runs in their training, consistently, they tend to be a little less injured.” The key here, Whitley notes, is recovery. “If you're doing back-to-back hard days, you're just not allowing the recovery mechanisms to occur efficiently. You'll be stressing that system to a point where it's not going to be able to have the same effect that it would have if you're doing an easy run.”

This is also due to the impact running hard has on your body. When you run fast, you’re creating more force on every stride than you do when running at a more leisurely pace. In doing so, you’re amping the impact on the bones, tendons, and ligaments. “I try to stay away from the negative insinuation [that] you'll get injured if you run faster,” Whitley says. “But I'd say the more times that you run faster, and putting your joints under that load, cumulative stress will compound and yeah, you could increase your risk for injury.”

There’s more to slow running than just preserving your body from injury, too. Along with giving you the chance to recover, Whitley notes that training this way allows for “adaptations that don't occur with higher level speeds.” In other words, your slow workouts are affecting your body in ways your fast ones won’t. “You're actually training a very specific system in your physiology to operate at a low heart rate, “ Whitley continues.

You might have heard the term “ Zone 2 training ”, and that’s what Whitley is talking about. The exact numbers will be different for everyone, but Zone 2 generally refers to sustained exercise at 72 to 82 percent of your max heart rate. When you train in Zone 2, you build mitochondria (which you might remember from high school biology as the "powerhouse of the cell"). With more mitochondria, you’ll be able to produce more energy and recover better, too.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run fast at all. In fact, sprint workouts are actually key to helping you amp the force you create on every stride (and they’ll help your finishing kick on long runs, too). But not every single session can be at your peak output—especially when you’re running multiple days per week.

Don’t Think Slow. Think Easy.

YOU MIGHT BE reading this as a beginner runner who doesn’t even know what counts as “fast” or “slow.” That’s fine. In fact, that’s an important aspect for your mindset in approaching these submaximal workouts. Rather than assigning a value that comes with “fast” or “slow” running tied to a finishing time or a pace, think about your overall “effort” on each run.

Jes Woods , a Nike Running coach, suggests dropping the term “slow” from your vocabulary. Instead, think of a submaximal session as an “easy” run. “If you call my community run ‘slow’—meanwhile it’s one of my beginner runner’s hardest runs of the week—I’m going full mama bear,” says Woods. “The whole point is to run at a low effort. So your ‘slow pace’ might feel ‘easy’ or low-effort one day, and you run that same ‘slow pace’ another day when you’ve had no sleep and three beers the night before, it no longer feels easy.”

Woods admits that it can be hard to break the commonly held mindset that workouts should feel hard. “I have all of these analogies and coach-isms because historically, it's been difficult to convince runners to actually slow down and embrace the easy run days,” she says.

Not sure how to balance the easy run with your desire to get better? Our three experts agreed that such workouts should actually make up the bulk of your training. Runners should aim to run 80 percent of their workouts slow (or easy), at or below their aerobic threshold. High-effort sessions (think sprint repears or interval training) should compose the remaining 20 percent of their workouts. “This 80/20 ‘rule of thumb’ was studied by Dr. Stephen Seiler and made popular by Matt Fitzgerald's book: 80/20 Running ,” says Woods.

.css-vjih4b{font-family:Knockout,Knockout-roboto,Knockout-local,Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:3.125rem;letter-spacing:0.03rem;line-height:1;margin:0rem;}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-vjih4b{font-size:3.125rem;line-height:1;}}.css-vjih4b b,.css-vjih4b strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-vjih4b em,.css-vjih4b i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-vjih4b a{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-color:#FFF200;} “If you call my community run ‘SLOW’ —meanwhile it’s one of my beginner runner’s HARDEST RUNS of the week—I’m going FULL MAMA BEAR. ”

How you structure this depends on how you think about your split. If you take on the week as a whole, you should have hard workouts two days at most. Then, you determine which days are easy and which are for rest. Narrow it down even more to five days, and you have one "hard" day and four easy workouts. For three training days, again, there's only a single "hard" workout, with a medium-distance shakeout and a long run as your other two sessions (this is the structure I most often implement).

No matter how you do it, make sure that you prioritize recovery when you’re creating your plan. “I never have two days in a row that are hard or fast,” Rosario says. “There's always got to at least be one, if not two, slow/easy days in between.”

How You Can Slow Down

MY BIGGEST PROBLEM once I knew I needed to slow down was learning to take my foot off the gas. When I tried to ease up, I would constantly find myself creeping closer to race pace. And how should I know where my aerobic threshold is at, anyway? Thankfully, there are methods you can use that are much more exact than just running by feel.

Both Rosario and Whitley mentioned using heart rate as a reliable gauge for effort (which ties back into those Zone 2 principles). “Regardless of what shoe you're wearing, what terrain you're on, what the weather is, what your stress level is that day, your heart rate is the output data point that you have to be able to assess whether you're in an aerobic state,” Whitley says. You’ll need a heart rate monitor to do this, either on your smartwatch or a purpose-built device . Lab tests can determine exactly where that threshold is, but Whitley often uses a simplified version of the MAF 180 formula (a methodology developed by Dr. Phil Maffetone in the 1980s to determine the ideal aerobic threshold for exercise) for rough estimates. This is easy: just subtract your age from 180. If you’re 33 years old, 180 minus 33 is 147, so you make sure your effort doesn’t push your heart rate above that number.

portrait of sporty man with earphones in forest checking his smartwatch

If biometrics aren’t your bag, try the tried-and-true method most running coaches use to determine effort, the talk test. “I know this sounds old school and unscientific, but it really is true—if you can't hold a conversation, then you're not running slow,” Rosario says.

This is also called conversation pace by coaches. It introduces another element into the equation, too: the social nature of running. Conversation pace means you can talk to your friends while you’re training, which makes these easy outings way more enjoyable.

Running has become a social sport for people from all walks of life as run clubs have formed around the world . These aren't just groups of hardcore athletes training to break PRs; they're micro-communities. There are groups in London, Los Angeles, and maybe even your local area, too; I see friends from places like Charlotte, North Carolina, Richmond, Virginia, and Nashville, Tennessee sharing photos of their run clubs on social media. The group dynamic can make easing up on your effort, well, easier, according to Woods, who is a coach for one of the most popular clubs in NYC, Brooklyn Track Club , and often leads group runs with Nike. “If subtly attributing your 'slow pace' to your community run in your Strava or social media post is what it takes for you to run easy, I'll take it!”

Can Super Trainer Shoes Make Easy Runs Better?

ONE UNDENIABLE INFLUENCE on running’s speed culture comes from the latest footwear trend: super shoes. These long-distance racing sneakers have features designed with running efficiency (and therefore, faster race times) as the main priority. Elite athletes have rewritten record books wearing the shoes. Unlike other sports with more specialized equipment that's are out of reach for weekend warriors, just about any everyday runner (with $300) can have their own pair.

These shoes are built purely for speed, which goes against everything the experts above have discussed about the merits of slowing down. This means your expensive new toys aren’t going to be useful for 80 percent of your workouts—but there might be a solution this, too. There's a new category of special shoe that might be appropriate for the easy run days that should make up the bulk of your workouts. They’re being called “ super trainers ”—kicks that use some of the same high-level materials as the super racing shoes, but aren't just about record-breaking speed.

According to Runner’s World , a super trainer has a tall stack height of highly-responsive midsole foam, an efficient midsole geometry (think the rocker shape that helps to roll you into your next stride), and usually some sort of plate, made of carbon fiber or some less stiff material. You might have already seen these almost comically cushioned shoes out on the road, since they’re hard to miss—one super trainer, the adidas Adizero Prime X 2.0 Strung, boasts a 50 millimeter stack height. That’s 10 millimeters above the 40 millimeter limit imposed by World Athletics, making the shoes technically illegal for competition.

But these shoes aren’t close to as fast as their racing cousins. I’ve worn a few pairs of super trainers for long runs and easy days—notably the Hoka Skyward X , which I tested as part of my easy run marathon training plan—and have found that their value is in how they take less effort to maintain a consistent stride at sub-maximal paces, rather than the propulsive ride of the racers. The super trainers are heavier, given their excess foam, and they’re made to last longer. In other words: Perfect for logging those easy miles.

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HOKA Hoka Skyward X

HOKA Hoka Mach X

ASICS Asics Superblast

New Balance New Balance FuelCell SuperComp Trainer v2

adidas adidas Adizero Prime X 2.0 STRUNG

On Running On Cloudmonster Hyper

On Running On Cloudeclipse

But does every runner need that type of tool?

“The shoe conversation is constantly evolving, so I'm careful not to use absolutes when speaking about them,” says Rosario. For example, he says that he shifted his stance on super racing shoes after noticing the success—and the lack of injuries—his athletes had wearing them for their hard runs and races.

Super trainers, on the other hand, are still new, so he’s not ready to pass judgment on the best way to use them or if they’re all hype. He does note, however, that serious runners now have the option to have a “quiver of shoes that is a little more comprehensive,” with multiple options that includes super trainers. “By no means do I believe to be a runner, you have to have all of those shoes,” he says. “But I think if you're super into it, and you want to be a part of this evolution, then continuing to try those things and see how they work for you is probably the best way to go.”

My take: Super trainers are a step up from a regular shoe, and when I wear them, I have an easier time remembering that my ultimate aim is to keep the pace easy, given the smooth ride and (slightly) heavier steps than with other kicks. I don’t need a super trainer to run, but it is easier and more fun to run in them. Ultimately, that should be your main objective.

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Nicholas Kristof: ‘Never Bet Against Democracy in the Long Run’

Why, after decades of conflict reporting, the columnist is still hopeful..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

I’m Nicholas Kristof. I’m a columnist for “The New York Times,” and I’m also the author of a new memoir called “Chasing Hope.” Writing my memoir was a chance to reflect. And one of those reflections is on something that I think we don’t tend to think of at this moment, which is the material and moral progress that I’ve witnessed in my career as a reporter.

I used to sneak into Darfur back in the early 2000s to cover the genocide there. I couldn’t get a government pass to get through checkpoints in Darfur, but I realized that the UN workers were showing these English language credentials, and the soldiers only spoke Arabic.

So I put my United Airlines MileagePlus card on a lanyard, and I drove up to a checkpoint. And I showed my United Airlines card, and presto, the soldiers just waved me through. Eventually, I was stopped at a checkpoint, and the troops said that they wanted to hold my interpreter for what they called investigation. They said, oh, you can go.

But look, I couldn’t leave my interpreter because it was pretty clear that that investigation would end as soon as I disappeared with a bullet in his head. So the troops detained me as well. It was a frightening wait because they kept us in a detention hut. It was decorated with a grisly mural of this prisoner being held down and then impaled by a stake through the stomach.

Eventually, the soldiers’ commander arrived, and so he ordered me released. And then at that point, one of my captors who previously had seemed ready to execute me, sidled up, and he said, hey, can you get me a visa to America?

That memory comes to me because I’ve been thinking so much today about the despair and gloom that is gripping America. And this moment is just particularly dispiriting. We’ve got wars in Gaza and Ukraine. There’s a poisonous atmosphere in the country related to the turmoil on college campuses and to the presidential election. But what strikes me is that while we despair, people from all over the world are just taking desperate risks to come here. They may loathe U.S. policies, but they love the idea of America. That’s true even of people who hold us at gunpoint.

People, when they meet me, they expect to meet this dour, grim person because I’ve spent a career covering war, genocide, poverty. They think I’m going to be utterly depressing, but in fact, I emerge from those frontlines with hope, hope for the world and hope for America.

So let me make the case for hope in this country while acknowledging, yes, there are very real challenges ahead. And look, one of those challenges ahead is the possibility of a Donald Trump election. I think that hangs like a shadow over America. But it’s also true, I believe, that even if Trump were elected, I think America has a dynamism, an inner strength, that will allow America to survive four years of national misrule, chaos, and even subversion of democracy.

There are real risks ahead for the US, and one of the challenges is that there are dictatorships that have gained strength, particularly in China and Russia. But I’ve got to say that in my career, I’ve learned to doubt despotism in the long run.

And partly, that stems from my coverage of the democracy movement in China and that terrible night in June 1989, when Chinese army troops turned their automatic weapons on unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square, including the crowd that I was in. You just never forget seeing soldiers use weapons of war to massacre unarmed citizens. That was a horrific night.

But just as vividly, I also remember this day five weeks earlier in the democracy movement. It was April 27, 1989, and Beijing students were preparing for a protest march from the University District to Tiananmen.

The students knew that this was incredibly dangerous. That evening, before they marched, some students spent the night, writing their wills in case they were killed. So that morning, I saw the roads lined with tens of thousands of the Wujing, the People’s Armed Police.

I slipped onto the Beijing University campus by pretending to be a foreign student, and I watched as this very frightened band of about 100 students emerged from a dormitory, parading around the campus with these pro-democracy banners.

And gradually, other students came out of the dorms and joined in, and they proceeded, just terrified, toward the gate to leave the university. There were rows of armed police that were blocking their way, but the students jostled, they pushed, and they finally forced their way out through the police onto the road.

Once that vanguard broke through, thousands more students materialized to join that march. So did ordinary citizens. So did faculty. By the time they reached Tiananmen Square, there were probably half a million protesters. And then they marched triumphantly back to the universities, cheered on by people of Beijing, screaming support.

And I will never forget that evening at the gate of Beijing University. Those students were met not by these phalanxes of armed police, but by these white-haired professors who were waiting for them, just crying, happy tears, cheering for them. And this one professor shouted, you are heroes. You were sacrificing for all of us. You were braver than we are.

That exhilaration that day obviously did not last. But in my reporting career, I’ve learned first not to bet on democracy necessarily in the short run because the challenges are enormous, but second, never bet against democracy in the long run, because in country after country, over the years, from Poland to Indonesia to Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan, I have seen that in the long run, there is a real force and yearning for democracy. So I’m betting that someday, I’ll see that democracy emerge, even in China, even in Russia, and elsewhere.

Look, no one can accuse me of ignoring the problems that beset this country or our planet because they have been my entire career. They’ve left me too scarred to be a classic optimist. But the Swedish development expert, Hans Rosling, he used to say that he wasn’t an optimist but a possibilist. And, in other words, he saw better outcomes as possible if we work together to achieve them. And that makes so much sense to me. It means replacing this despair that I now see in our country with a guarded hope.

So my message is that all the problems around us are real, and I understand why there is so much pessimism and fear. This is a grim time. There’s war. People can’t afford homes. Climate change risks boiling our planet. And we’re all pointing fingers at each other and shouting.

But take it from the guy who spent years, decades, covering even worse conflicts. We are just an amazing species, and we get ourselves into messes, but we can also get ourselves out, if we understand the challenges and our own capacity to fight back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

May 22, 2024 • 8:19 Nicholas Kristof: ‘Never Bet Against Democracy in the Long Run’
May 16, 2024 A Former Prosecutor on the ‘Incredibly Strong Case’ Against Trump
May 15, 2024 • 5:57 What MAGA’s Beef With Lab-Grown Meat Says About the G.O.P.
May 9, 2024 • 5:16 Trump on Trial: ‘The Odds of Conviction Have Gone Up’
May 8, 2024 We Have a Housing Crisis. This New Jersey Town Has a Solution.
May 6, 2024 • 6:17 I’m a Doctor. I Was Unprepared When I Got This Disease.
May 2, 2024 Campus Protests Aren’t Going Away. Colleges Need to Draw Lines.
May 1, 2024 • 8:07 Bird Flu Is Spreading. Did We Learn Nothing From Covid?
April 26, 2024 • 6:10 Biden, Let the Protests of 1968 Be a Warning
April 25, 2024 • 8:58 Closing the Gap Between Nature and the Self
April 24, 2024 Biden’s Deep Miscalculation on Israel and Gaza
April 18, 2024 • 6:12 After Decades on the Court, I Want a Divided America to Know This

By Nicholas Kristof

Produced by Jillian Weinberger

Nicholas Kristof has spent his career reporting on difficult topics: genocide, war, famine. But decades in the field have not weakened his belief in humanity. In this audio essay, Kristof reflects on his life as a reporter and makes the case for hope. “Yes, there are very real challenges ahead,” he says. And yet, he argues, the United States “has a dynamism and inner strength that will allow America to survive.”

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] .

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Pat McCusker, Isaac Jones. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Special thanks to Shannon Busta.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “ Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life .” @ NickKristof

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Running — Ethics, Education, and Responsible Practices in Running

Ethics, Education, and Responsible Practices in Running

Categories: Physical Education Running

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Words: 1110 |

Published: Feb 22, 2024

Words: 1110 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Addressing the ethical dilemmas of using performance-enhancing drugs in running, understanding and reducing the environmental impact of running events, exploring effective methodologies to introduce and teach children about running.

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Officials change course amid outrage over bail terms for Indian teen accused in fatal drunk driving accident

By Arshad R. Zargar

May 22, 2024 / 1:37 PM EDT / CBS News

New Delhi — Indian justice officials have changed course amid outrage over the bail terms set for a teenager accused of killing two people while driving a Porsche at high speed while drunk and without a license. The 17-year-old son of a wealthy businessman had been ordered to write a 300-word essay and work with the local traffic police for 15 days to be granted bail — a decision that was made within 15 hours of his arrest.

He is accused of killing two young people while speeding in his luxury car on Sunday in the western Indian city of Pune.

The lenient bail conditions initially imposed by the local Juvenile Justice Board shocked many people, including officials, across India. The local police approached the board with an appeal to cancel his bail and seeking permission to treat the boy, who is just four months shy of his 18th birthday, as an adult, arguing that his alleged crime was heinous in nature.

In 2015, India changed its laws to allow minors between 16 and 18 years of age to be tried as adults if they're accused of crimes deemed heinous. The change was prompted by the notorious 2012 Delhi rape case , in which one of the convicts was a minor. Many activists argued that if he was old enough to commit a brutal rape, he should not be treated as a minor.

On Wednesday night, after three days of outrage over the initial decision, the Juvenile Justice Board canceled the teen's bail and sent him to a juvenile detention center until June 5. It said a decision on whether he could be tried as an adult, which would see him face a more serious potential sentence, would be taken after further investigation.

Late Sunday night, police say the teen, after drinking with friends at two local bars in Pune, left in his Porsche Taycan, speeding through narrow roads and allegedly hitting a motorcycle, sending the two victims — a male and female, both 24-year-old software engineers — flying into the air and killing them.

The parents of both victims have urged authorities to ensure a strict punishment for the teen.

The suspect was first charged with causing death by negligence, but that was changed to a more serious charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. On Wednesday he was also charged with drunk driving offenses.

Police have arrested the suspect's father and accused him of allowing his son to drive despite being underage, according to Pune Police Commissioner Amitesh Kumar. The legal age for driving in India is 18. Owners of the two bars where the minor was served alcohol have also been arrested and their premises seized.

"We have adopted the most stringent possible approach, and we shall do whatever is at our command to ensure that the two young lives that were lost get justice, and the accused gets duly punished," Kumar said.

Maharashtra state's Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had described the original decision of the Juvenile Justice Board as "lenient" and "shocking," and called the public outrage a reasonable reaction.

Road accidents claimed more than 168,000 lives in India in 2022. More than 1,500 of those people died in accidents caused by drunk driving, according to Indian government data.

Under Indian law, a person convicted of drunk driving can face a maximum punishment of six months in prison and a fine of about $120 for a first offense. If, however, the drunk driving leads to the death of another person, the offender can face two to seven years in prison.

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Cloud and Hybrid Cloud: Differences and Use Cases

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Modern digital infrastructures, where companies run business-critical operations, are possible thanks to cloud computing.

There are different types of cloud computing; they might be private or public, or combine edge and cloud technologies. These classifications can often lead to confusion about what a cloud computing infrastructure is and how it differs from a hybrid cloud operation.

This analysis, written by Ray Fernandez for TechRepublic Premium, will do a deep dive into cloud and hybrid cloud technologies, explaining their differences and use cases.

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THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF HYBRID CLOUDS

Hybrid clouds also have different kinds of models. Let’s look at what tiered hybrid, edge hybrid and cloud bursting are.

Tiered hybrid: In this type of hybrid cloud, frontend applications are deployed on public clouds; usually, these are customer-facing, while backend applications run on on-premises or private clouds. This type of cloud is deployed to increase efficiency, security, ownership and reliability.

Edge hybrid: Edge hybrid clouds are deployed when a company needs to bring the data closer to the user to reduce latency or prevent downtime of business-critical operations in case there is no internet connection. These can be deployed, for example, in ocean logistics operations, factories, power plants or point of sales.

Cloud bursting: The cloud bursting model involves using a private computing environment for the baseline load and bursting the cloud temporarily when extra capacity is needed. These types of hybrid models are commonly used by companies or organizations that experience peak surges in traffic and use public cloud resources to meet those demands.

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Running is not just a physical activity; it is a journey of self-discovery, perseverance, and growth. As the pounding of my feet against the pavement echoes in rhythm with the beating of my heart, I am transported to a place where my mind is free to wander and my spirit is liberated. In this narrative essay, I will delve into the profound ...
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Scientific research has shown that running can help the body release serotonin, a neurotransmitter that promotes feelings of calmness and happiness. For individuals struggling with anxiety or depression, incorporating running into their routine can provide a much-needed mental health boost. Furthermore, the long-term health benefits of running ...
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The world was cautiously reopening, and people were gathering together again. I ran with Koreatown Run Club and alongside my good friend Sheena as she prepared for the LA Marathon. I felt my speed ...
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Running is a sport of contradiction. Finishing a marathon is at once extraordinary and unremarkable: Running 26.2 miles is an exceptional achievement, but it's also one that 1.1 million people complete every year. In running, themes of life and death coexist. On one hand, it's a celebration of what the human body can do and achieve.
Sample Short Answer Essay for a College Application
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In conclusion, running offers a myriad of health benefits, including improved cardiovascular health, weight management, mental well-being, and bone and joint health. Whether you are running for health or leisure, it is important to start slowly, listen to your body, and gradually increase the intensity and duration of your runs.
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Hello! It's great to hear that your running journey has been so transformative. In order to make your essay relatable and memorable, you'll want to avoid focusing on the common aspects like training, getting faster, and winning races. Instead, try to find a unique angle or narrow in on a specific experience that conveys a larger truth about ...
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