“My parents met through running, they were both marathon runners, so I spent my childhood traipsing around athletics tracks and marathon courses and building sand castles in long jump pits. But my mum died when I was 11, and my dad had already switched to cycling, so I lost touch with running as a teenager. I always had the idea that one day I would run a marathon too – can’t be that hard, right? Must be in my genes, right? Yea one day.
Then at uni my exercise was limited to dancing til the pubs shut; until in third year my flatmate came home and asked me to complete a questionnaire for her PE class, because I was ‘inactive’. I argued, then realised she was right. I filled out her stupid questionnaire and decided it was time to run that marathon. A year later I did my first marathon, and a year after that I signed up for a 3 day ultra in Nepal, much to my dad’s horror. I spent the four months prior to the race backpacking around SE Asia, and realised that getting up at stupid o’clock to run before the humidity got overwhelming was the best way to sightsee, and I started joining local run groups in each town I went to as well. But it was some time during the first day of the ultra, running along rice fields and admiring the Himalayas, that I experienced my first proper runners high – I remember thinking HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO FUCKING AMAZING I FEEL SO GOOD I WANT TO DO THIS ALL THE TIME!!!!!
That was 8 years ago, and I still get snippets of that high, but running’s become much more than that. I love the connections that get made through running – a stranger can turn into a friend, or a workmate in to a husband – connection with the places I run, on my favourite local trails, on our holiday ‘runsplorations’, or in the places we end up in because of a cool looking run (Moerangi! Mongolia! Tromsø!) The connection with my mind when I need time to focus, or zone out, and with my body as I see what it’s capable of. And the connection across time and space – I’m doing the same thing humans have always done, that Olympians do, that my parents did. All that from going for a run. It’s kinda magic.”
Jaime @jaimevessiot
(Wellington)
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