“I run to engage with my past.
I first went for a run 22 years ago while on an exchange program in Germany. Running hadn’t been part of my life growing up in post-Communist Romania up to that point. The way a Bulgarian friend (also a runner) put it, if you were out running people would think you were being chased by someone. Besides, I was the opposite of a sporty kid — nerdy, plump, uncoordinated. Running somehow, barely stuck with me after that first run with my host family through cherry orchards on the Elbe. I would go for a run in my hometown in Romania about once a week throughout high school.
Life and a scholarship took me to an idyllic university, a liberal arts college in the Northeastern US. That’s where I first encountered running on trails – the paved, flat Norwottowuck Trail connecting Amherst, Massachusetts to Northampton. Running became a more common habit as the stress of university accumulated. It was also a way to deal with my coming out as a gay man and to make sense of what had been my past up to that point.
After university I ended up in graduate school in the San Francisco Bay Area, truly an ideal place for runners of all kinds. I picked up running again on the Stanford Dish trail, the first time I encountered any vert. I also ran my first half marathon then, with a magic crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Running ceased for a while in graduate school. First the structure of the first years of graduate school gave way to a hectic interdisciplinary free-for-all in my research career. Then my father, living in Romania, was diagnosed with terminal stage lung cancer. I went back to Romania 13 times that year to witness his inexorable and unrelenting decline. After he passed I felt like an empty shell and running became my coping mechanism. For about 4 months I did a race every week in various parts of the Bay Area. This is when I ran my first trail half marathons, although I had no idea that’s what they were (I was still wearing road shoes and walking the uphills felt like cheating).
Running became an episodic thing throughout my 30s. I didn’t give it up entirely — even ran two road marathons in the process — but I also wasn’t consistent about it. I started running again when I moved to New Zealand a few years ago, but then the pandemic and its ensuing restrictions killed whatever motivation I had left.
Exactly a year ago, something happened. My partner and I moved back to Wellington, a town which we had missed dearly. I went for a run for the first time in months. Only 3k (or 2 miles — my preferred unit of running measurement) up to Mt Albert and back. I remembered then the long arc of running in my life, which I retold here. I was hooked again and it has stuck since.
Finding community is a big reason why running stuck with me this time. It started with the WoRM Tuesday Spectaculars up Mt Vic and then progressed to Big Sunday Runs. I have met tens of kind and resilient people, who are both encouraging and inspiring in their embrace of adversity. For there is adversity aplenty on trails in the lower North Island! This time I have not been running through perpetual Californian sunshine and on groomed pathways but through winter gloom, horizontal rain and knee deep mud. And despite this I have been at it for a year — the longest continuous bout of sustained physical activity I have ever done in my life.
This kind of running feels less like athletics and more like the kind of tramping I grew up doing with my rock climbing-obsessed older brother and his friends. I can’t say I loved those trips — I was always the slow and uncoordinated one, but after the WUU2k half I finally understood why my brother had himself gotten into trail running, to the point of organizing events. I have run many races since, including several ultras. After the Tarawera 50k I was able to join my brother and nephew on the UTMB index, which now serves as a kind of friendly family league tables, connecting our achievements on opposite sides of the Earth.
Running provides a metaphorical trail through a hectic personal history. It connects me to people and places that are part of who I am. Every time I get out I get to explore this trail a bit further.”
Bogdan @bogdanstate
(Wellington)
Photo taken on the Kepler Track, Te Anau
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