The Realities of Running While Fat
By: H. M. Johnson
Tags: Running, Lifestyle, Health, Fat, Fitness

The Realities of Running While Fat

Enjoying the world’s best workout with some extra baggage.

Photo by Daniel Reche from Pexels

As a once-accomplished varsity cross country runner and half-marathon finisher who used to be skinny as a twig, I feel compelled to take some time and map out the differences between running “now” and running “then”. Running is one of my all-time favorite passions in this life, but boy is it different running as a size 14 compared to running as a size 4.

It’s not actually about size so much as size is to help qualify the changes — it’s about the differences in speed, strength, stamina, and confidence. Whether I woke up tomorrow and found myself at a size 2 or a size 22, I’d still be running because it makes gray days exhilarating and is justified as quality exercise, which is great for my mental health. On days where I go for a run, I am often so relaxed by its benefits that I don’t even need to pop my daily Ativan for anxiety relief.

Haruki Murakami wrote an entire book about the ways in which his writing and his running benefit each other (quick link to that here) and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I find that non-runners and people who dread cardio just don’t understand “runner’s high”, but if you know what I’m talking about, you may have a fond memory or two of simply going for a run around your neighborhood on an average day to discover one of the best moments of your life. Despite being one of the slowest runners on my varsity team in high school, I cherish my race day memories and still to this day make regular trips to parks where I once ran the 5k as fast as I could.

The weight gain made me a lot slower

My one-mile PR was around 7:50, so I was never a very fast runner. Nowadays, though, it takes me over 10 minutes to run a mile. The feeling I get when my watch ticks to notify me that a mile has gone by with sometimes as much as 12 minutes to match the distance is an often mortifying feeling, and I find that I shame myself and become easily discouraged. It’s taken me a lot to power through the disdain towards myself and keep going. The increase in weight that my body has seen makes me much slower than I used to be, and while it’s something that I’m working on, it’s nothing that’s going to stop me from enjoying a run.

It’s more difficult than it used to be

It’s a lot harder to carry 200 pounds than it is to carry 125 pounds. An increase in weight has made running much more strenuous than it used to be. While in the past a 5-mile run was a casual thing, that isn’t the case for me now. I would need to lose a considerable amount of weight before running that much could become an easy thing to do again. Sometimes I find that I feel a certain sadness about the fact that I can’t muster up the energy to run for a whole hour right now, but I’m set on building my ability to run back up.

I want to enjoy myself, not just use running as a dieting tool

I run because I like it, not just because I want to lose weight. Yet I find it to be difficult not to focus on shrinking myself when I do go running. This can decrease the pleasure of running because instead of thinking about writing or observing the sights around me, I turn to thoughts of my body often obsessively.

Running is available to us at any size. It takes a lot of courage to stop worrying about what other people are thinking about us and just do what makes us happy, but whether we’re overweight or not, it’s our right to exercise and feel good, too. We deserve to feel good about ourselves.

I hope that if you’re like me and love running, you don’t let your size stop you. I’ve let it stop me for far too long and am just getting back in shape. I lost years of being able to enjoy myself because I was worried about being slower and concerned that I looked pathetic while trying to run, but getting over that has meant everything to me. We deserve worthy to feel the victory of successfully finishing each mile whether we’re skinny, fat, or somewhere in between.