“I have what I call a tense relationship with my body. Growing up I experienced a disconnect between an awkward natural athleticism and crippling disruptive performance anxiety. I shied away from working with my body to achieve things, and instead tried to make myself as small as possible. The most harmful thing, that I’m still working to heal today, was that when it came to looking in the mirror I didn’t really see myself – just this thing that didn’t fit what I thought it should be. Running is one of the most powerful things in bridging that gap – I am this body, I am proud of it, I am proud of what it can do – I am proud of myself.
I consider this my third attempt at running, but I’m not worried if there ends up being several more chapters to my running story. This era began, unfortunately, when any kind of movement was off the table after ‘doing a real doozy’ on my ankle and spending 6 weeks in a moonboot. Ironically the healing and rehab process from wiggling my toes, miles of walking in the pool, to being approved to be able to jog on gravel was what really stoked the fire of ‘maybe I could just keep doing, keep moving’, and I kind of fell upwards into becoming a runner again.
It was the process of achieving the small things that kept building into the bigger ones that kept me going. What really helped was the framing of things as ‘practice’. I was practising walking without limping, I was practising strength exercises, I was practising motivating myself to move and feeling good about it and what I was achieving despite being absolutely irrelevant to anyone else. I still try to think about my running this way today, I am practising my nutrition, practising my training and mileage loading. Emphasising the technical approaches to running and improving performance has let my mind work with my body in this sport. I know some people see themselves and their body as the same but for me, running is one of the only times I truly feel that connection and peace with movement and my mind is calm and focused.
More-so these-days it’s the joy of the running community that I adore and that motivates me. The people (not just runners) that surround and love this sport are truly spectacular and epitomise the type of people I want to be. They’re positive, enduring, committed to some truly quintessential human ideals of perseverance and ‘just having a crack at it’. An idea that sticks with me at the moment on my approach to running is that if your goals seem impossible maybe you need to grow into the kind of person for whom those goals are possible. This community makes that growth easy.”
Ailsa @ailsamouse
(Christchurch)
Photo taken in Te Anau
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