Running in Fear

I used to be afraid of running.

Not your usual “Oh I hate running, running sucks!” mentality that inhabits any rational human.

This was fear.

The thought of having to run any distance over 200 meters (650 feet for my freedom friends) used to make my heart sink, make my feet feel filled with lead, and cause me to, ironically, run in the other direction.

This phobia, like any good trauma, had a cause and I can, for better or worse, tell you exactly where it came from.

I went to primary school in Canterbury, a short walk from where I grew up, and a stones throw from Highfield Park. The park is nothing significant, just two ovals side-by-side, a small playground, and a clubhouse with a few nets. I romped and played there on many occasion throughout the years, mainly proving to my parents any dreams of cashing me in as a pro athlete for fat stacks were laughable – if only Cheerleaders got paid eh?

This park was also where, in my final year of primary school at the tender age of 11, the school held our Cross Country.

Whenever someone asks me why I like Cheerleading so much one of my answers is that I don’t have to run very far. A standard Cheer floor is 54 feet wide by 42 feet deep – nice and tight. Even using our favourite theorem tells us the most you ever need to move to cross the floor is just under 69 feet (nice). It’s a sport where your primary job is to stand still and look pretty – those in the know will tell you the fewer steps you take when stunting, the better. Sounds perfect to me.

Cross Country is the opposite of Cheerleading. Your “competition area” is the entire literal surface of the fucking planet and your obstacles are every tree, rock, and gentle incline mother nature decided to bless us with. The premise of a sport where the goal is to just.. run.. will never make sense to me; I will never “get” it. It used to cause me to recoil in fear, but I’ve managed to at least overcome that visceral reaction.

I’m not one of those people who has plenty of vivid memories from their childhood – to be quite honest, most of it is a blur. I will, however, never forget Cross Country day 2003. Looking today at the course they made us run, it must have been two kilometres at most, and that’s being generous. At the time, it felt like a marathon.

I was not a fit kid. I liked snacks, video games, and Pokémon cards (and still do). To me then, a two kilometre run might as well have been climbing Everest – it sure felt like it.

I was miserable, confused, and angry. I couldn’t understand why we were being made to do this, how anyone could enjoy this, or how some people had already finished. I can picture clear as day, right now, Michael Cray powering ahead and being quite literally an entire kilometre ahead of me across the other side of the park, resplendent in the colour yellow of our house – Flinders. Watching his graceful, spectacularly long strides made my loping, pitiful shuffling feel all the more embarassing.

Therein seems to be part of what made running so scary to me; it was the fear, not of how much my lungs would burn or my legs would hurt, but of failure. I learned that day that I sucked at running, never wanted to feel so hopeless at it ever again, so vowed to never even try.

Anyway, then Year 7 rolls around the next year and OH BOY! Scotch run a yearly Cross Country as part of their house competition.

It was going to be a long 6 years.

I’ll level with you right now; I think I only ran one Cross Country the entire time I was in high school. One year I had detention, another I was “sick”, and the others I’m sure had perfectly crafted, devious schemes to avoid them, but it’s been too long to remember. What I do remember is the one I did run immediately upon entering high school, utterly sorrowful and shameful as the first, as if to cement the fact as undisputable in my mind that running was to be avoided at all costs less I feel its despondent sting.

It wasn’t even just the cross country’s that felt my hateful gaze. In year 11 Mr. Price unceremoniously sprung on us a 1500 meter race during P.E, leaving me naught 10 minutes to come up with yet another devious plot to escape. The best I could come up with was to “trip and fall” mid-race and slink away with a “twisted ankle”.

I actually did try and pull this off, but as I pretended to stumble as Michael Hopwood overtook me I realised.. this is absolutely pathetic.

You see, by year 11 I was no longer the snack stuffing, Pokémon loving, beach ball-shaped kid from year 6. I’d leaned out to a gangly 6”2 and really had a lot more business being on the track than most. My peers were, to put it lightly, from all walks of life. ‘Tis the case in a school with such a large and diverse student population – you get plenty of large and diverse waistlines.

Shame, like God, works in mysterious ways. In that moment I agreed that’d I’d rather be ashamed of how shit I was at running over shamefully faking an injury. So I stuck it out, and crawled across the finish line. Truth be told I didn’t do too badly. I remember noticing that, true to my genealogy, I finished last behind the white kids, and just in front of all the Asian ones.

Running and I would keep our frosty, bitter relationship on ice until Sunday August 2nd, 2020.

This was the day that all Melbournians should remember; where during the peak of the Covid pandemic Dan Andrews came on TV and announced a ‘state of disaster’. An 8pm curfew, 1 hour of exercise allowed per day, and no straying further than 5 kilometres from your home. It was a day that caused panic, terror, and confusion amongst the entire population, and everyone had their own questions and their own ways of coping.

Me? I vowed to run 2 kilometres every single day until the restrictions were lifted.

I have absolutely no idea why; even now I can’t remember what the inspiration was – probably just trying not to get fat again. I did it though; I ran every single damn day during lockdown till we could get back into the gym.

I’ll tell you what was annoying though – I looked good. I looked really freaking good. I’m pretty sure that was the second time in my life I could see my abs without downward lighting. I really didn’t want to admit that running did anything positive to affect my life, but I also couldn’t deny that I had come to enjoy my evening sojourns outside. They were calming, peaceful, and got me away from my smelly housemates for 20 minutes (I was still a very slow runner).

Fast forward a couple of years and there’ll you find me, once again, starting down a cross-country run of 5 kilometres, only this time being dwarfed by the might Wasatch Front and surrounded by 50 college cheerleaders. In what was either a cruel coincidence or a twisted turn of fate, the Weber State cheer team has a tradition of running a 5k every year.

The legacy and story behind the run is a long and personal one, and not my story to share; what I can say though is that it boils down to the mantra, “because we can”. Simply put, there are people out there who, for many reasons, physically cannot run 5 kilometres, and by virtue of being on this team, you can, and that’s a good enough reason to do so. Whether it’s to prove it to yourself, to others, or to the powers that be, it doesn’t matter – you’re running, because you can.

And so I did, and yet again, I didn’t do half bad. Each year I was a part of that program I laced up my program-supplied adidas sneakers and shuffled my way across 5km of brisk Utah pavement. The initial nerves I get when faced with such a long run haven’t yet dissipated, but what I can say is that the post-run endorphins are getting really, really infuriatingly addictive.

If you haven’t been keeping up with my life (and I don’t blame you if you haven’t, it’s quite dull most of the time) I have returned to Australia, a triumphant 30-something-year-old “retired” cheerleader. I have left the college life behind, and with it the friends and teammates who I called family for 3, wonderful years.

Here’s the funny thing about family though – they’re not so easily discarded. They linger, and with them linger their traditions. The annual 5k was set for October 30th last year, and I made the previously unthinkable decision to participate voluntarily from across the globe. Hell, I even ran in the weeks leading up to that date to “prepare” for the big day… who the fuck am I?

In a fashion true to my writing style I started writing this piece almost 6 months ago before the day of the 5k in an attempted form of a declaratory-style post to essentially commit myself to doing this run. Instead, I’m proud to retrospectively say I did the run, and in an effort to be just a little poetic about it, I ran it at the same park where my fear of running was born all those years ago.

That little fat kid all full of Thins Light n’ Tangy chips could never comprehend what we chose to do that day, but I guess that’s part of growing up. Those who’ve asked me about my writing know I only do so when I feel like I have something to say, and I’ll never force myself to write otherwise. There’s definitely a lesson here about facing your fears, pushing your limits, all that Goggins-esque bullshit. In reality though, I just wanted to brag, mostly to myself, that I did something I’m proud of.

I did that run because I can, and for perhaps the first time in my life, I actually believe that.