run

Week Three, Day 3

Saturday, July 29th, 2023

I am on the train. 

The 1 train, to be precise, which is my favorite train on my favorite line; the red line. People like to give it shit, and honestly, I do not know why. She is reliable, even on the weekends, and serves as an artery to the parts of this city that I love the most. I also have this terrible affliction where I arrive at most places at least a half hour early, a habit instilled and internalized in me by one of my favorite voice teachers, Anna Maria Sylvestri. “Early is on time, and on time is late,” she would say, and I hear her voice even today, which is why I like the local. Because it helps me be just a little bit less early. I can stretch my commute out and read or write or just listen to some music, catch up on a podcast. It’s a buffer where time and cell service get suspended for just a little while, and today, you ask? 

Why yes.  

I’ve done it again. I’ve left too early, and I will undoubtedly be downtown with too much time, but I’m choosing to see this as a good thing. I want a little more of a buffer in my already buffered timeline for this morning. 

You see, today, I am meeting my darling friend, Este, for a coffee at The Tin Building¹, and then we are taking a ferry to the most magical place in the five boroughs: The Red Hook Ikea². And I figured, since it is going to be raining later in the day, that I would take the train down, get off at an earlier stop, and do my run downtown, which means that I will be running outside of my neighborhood for the first time ever. Seriously. I have lived in NYC since the fall of 2007, and I have only ever run in Morningside Heights and Harlem. This feels big in a way that I don’t fully understand. It shouldn’t feel like a big deal, but it does. 

There is something safe about my neighborhood. Familiar. I know the paths. I know my route. I have my landmarks. I feel safe there. I feel ok running in my bike shorts and tank, sometimes even just a sports bra. It’s like, I don’t know, I’m so myself here, it’s easy to let me explore whatever this journey is. 

Taking this outside the confines of my radius makes it feel real. 

And listen, I lived in FiDi for four years when I went to college, so it’s not totally unfamiliar territory. Those cobbled and uneven streets will always be a part of my New York story, if for no other reason than they were my introduction. But even when I lived down here, I didn’t run. Not in these streets. Not with all of these men in their grey flannel suits and women who walk so confidently in heels. There was this one night that I remember so vividly. I had been up for three days³ and the sun was just about to come up over the water towers of FiDi. I had watched The Phantom of The Opera for the second time that week though it was only Tuesday – don’t you dare judge me, Gerard Butler AND Patrick Wilson in those tight tight pants did it for my sleep-deprived 18-year-old mind, alright? – and I was, for lack of a better word, bored. That’s the thing with insomnia; it’s actually really boring when you are awake and the rest of the world around you is asleep. But the sun was rising, and I had this thought that I would run the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Why? Who can say? Apparently, I’ve had this insane impulse to run for a while, which is wild because I was not working out at that time and the fact that this was where my brain went to to pass the time can only be blamed on the fact that I was running on fumes. But I was excited at the prospect. I was eager to greet this new and dawning day from the bridge and to feel accomplished by something my body had done. But as I reached for the door handle to my dorm, I stopped. Something inside of me told me to stop. Asked what are you doing? There are people out there. They’ll see you. 

They’ll see you. 
A fat girl, trying to run across the Brooklyn Bridge⁴. 
Hoofing and breathing heavily and stumbling. 
They. 
Will. 
See. 
You. 

And I let my fear get the best of me, and I stayed inside until it was time to go to class hours later. 

Today, I’m feeling the echo of that fear. It is ricocheting off of my insides and getting louder as we chugga-chugga our way south and it’s fucking with me more than a little bit. Like, running down here isn’t for me. It’s for the real people, the thin and beautiful people who live in Battery Park who are dressed head to toe in Alo and ALALA with 401Ks and trust funds to dip into when they want to buy a $13 water from the vendors at the seaport⁵. This area is not for me, in my Old Navy bra⁶, shorts by Bezos⁷, and Brooks⁸ that I got on a mega after-Christmas sale at Dicks Sporting Goods⁹.¹⁰ 

I think what I’m feeling right now is a lot of imposter syndrome. 

And I can’t really figure out what that is about. 

Because, listen, if you don’t live here, if you’re not from NYC, it’s easy to think that everyone is all up in everyone’s business. And I get why you would think that. We all literally live on top of one another, and personal space is a matter of millimeters at times, but for the most part, nobody really gives a fuck what you do. You could walk down the street topless and screaming Nirvana, and people wouldn’t think twice about it. Nobody gives a fuck. And that’s something that I like about this city, you know? It lets you be you, and that is a beautiful thing. 

But what do you do when you’re not confident with being you? 

What do you do when there is a voice telling you that you look like an idiot? Worse, when that voice wishes you could fit into the Alo you can’t even afford. That would love to guzzle down a $13 bottle of water and then pour it over my face in slow motion as a song from Flashdance plays in the distance.

It’s incredible the amount of stock I can put into prescribing what other people are thinking about me. And, like, I get it, right? It’s not like these thoughts are coming from my brain and my brain alone, you know? I don’t think humans inherently have it in them to hate themselves. We are taught to hate ourselves from outside forces. And that’s all we need. A tiny little seed of someone else’s influence to take root in our mind, and we’re fucking goners. I can, right now, as I sit on this yellow seat on this dusty and beautiful 1 train, think of seven different times when someone called me fat. When they weaponized that word to try and take me down, and maybe in the moment, I clapped back at them, but inside? 

The damage was done. 

If I am rubber and you are glue, your words will bounce off of me, but when they do, they leave behind a little bit of residue. And why is it that I can think of and name those seven instances so fiercely, so brightly, and why is it that they shine with the most intensity when there is so much light in my life? So much love. And so many people who would and who have supported me through anything. 

It’s a wild thing. To be at the mercy of your own brain. To have it wield and warp your thoughts until you’re not even really hearing yourself anymore. It’s just this hissing viper come to collect on your fear and doubt. 

And this viper has made me afraid to do this right now. That might seem silly, but I am freaked the fuck out that when I get off this train at Chambers Street, I might have a panic attack. Or that someone will look at me. Or, god forbid, that someone will say something. That they will confirm what I am worried might be true: that I don’t deserve to do this? Again, it sounds silly when I write it out like that, but maybe you understand. 

The thing of it is, though, when this train does get to Chambers Street, I am going to get to the street level, and I am going to open my app, and I am going to choose to do this anyway. 

I am choosing to do the thing that terrifies me. 

Because that is the thing of this whole mess, right? To face the fear and run it down, pun abso-fucking-lutely intended. Besides, coffee, a breakfast sando, and one of my absolute best friends in the whole world wait on the other side of it. Oh, and Ikea, too. My god, how could I forget the shining beacon that is Swedish innovation? 

So today, I run for Sweden. 
Today, I run to face the fear.
Fuck it, today, I run for myself.

FiDi, I am in you.
28 minutes on the clock. 
One step at a time. 

POST-RUN MORTUM 

Running Time: 28 Minutes 

Distance Achieved: 2.1 miles – fuck yeah

Tunage: Hamilton (come on, you didn’t think I would run through the Financial District to anything else, did you?)

Outside Temperature: 950,270,912,123,563°

Ok, so my first thought post-run is that was not as bad as I had built it up to be—surprise, surprise. 

My second thought is; exactly how toxic is the East River? Like, what level of toxicity and pollution are we talking about? Are we talking like emerge from the murk a la Toxic Avenger? Or, like, a bacterial thing that I could knock out with a Z-pack? Because honestly, at this point, I don’t know how much I care; I just want to get into that green water and feel the steam rise from my singed flesh. 

My third thought is that I will have to continue this later because I see Esteban and carbs await us. More later.

Later:

Sup. 

Ok, so it is indeed later, and I have to tell you, I am feeling tired. I usually write these immediately after the run when my endorphins and adrenaline are spiked, but now, literal hours later, I am feeling it everywhere. It was like this in the evening last Saturday, too. This sort of full-body exhaustion from the three runs on top of the four days of working out. On top of the added miles that Este and I walked to and from Ikea. It’s a lot. And it feels good, but it’s also like, this is the part of my training where I’m like, “Will I ever be able to squat or reach down for anything without feeling pain?” And I know that I will. But wowzers. I just took the coldest showerbath ever because the idea of subjecting myself to hot water and steam felt like a punishment I didn’t deserve. 

So this run. I honestly feel like it was one of the better, if not the best, runs I’ve taken so far. Being downtown, intimidating though it was, felt good. It felt familiar. I will say when I got off the train, I took off my tank, leaving me in my shorts and sports bra, and there were a few people who looked at me, and I’m proud to say that I didn’t prescribe anything on to those looks. I didn’t try to think what they were thinking, I didn’t go into lockdown or fight mode. I clocked them clocking me, and then I put the shirt in my bag and opened the app. 

And then, I was kind of good? Like, being back down there, running the streets that were my introduction to the city, it felt like I was reclaiming something by being there, in a way? I focused on my breath, and I focused on my pacing, Jesus, like a runner, I guess, but I did. I felt very dropped into myself. 

And, like, listen, just because I was dropped into myself doesn’t mean that I don’t have eyes. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t clock those beautiful and sweat-glistening Adonis’ who were running down there as well because I did. I was, by far, the biggest person running. And then It got me thinking about why that is? Because, up by where we live, there is actually a really great amount of body diversity. I don’t feel so othered. But today, I felt a little like the fat lady at the fair, and I had to work hard not to let it deter me. That’s when I came back to my breath and back to my pace. I saw these beautiful – and I mean, like, really good looking, like what??? – people, in their tinier bras and shorter shorts with strides that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to match, and I let them out just as easily as I let them in. They were like those little towels with bees on them? You know the ones where the dots track their path? They flew into my line of sight, did one loop in my brain, and then flew out. And I let them go. 

What’s more than that, I let them see me 

I don’t even know who “they” are, really, and maybe that’s the point? 

Maybe “they” can just be all around me, and I can just not care. And what an amazing thing that is. It’s hard work, and I have no delusions that I will never feel judgment again or that I won’t build up a situation in my mind or convince myself what you’re thinking because I’m a human. And to err is to be just that. I will falter; I will relapse. But for today, at the end of this week? I am proud. And I am ready for rest. And to re-pot the little cactus I got at Ikea. I think I’ll name her Penny. 

1. Sponsorship opportunity? ↩︎
2. Swedish sponsorship opportunity?? ↩︎
3. I don’t say that for dramatic flair, I have insomnia, and in college it went unchecked for a while and that week, at that point, I had been up for literally three days. It is under control now, and we thank the gods for modern medicine. ↩︎
4. Also, if you’ve never walked the bridge, let alone run it, the on and off ramp for pedestrians is steep. This would not have been an easy run for me at the time, honestly it probably wouldn’t be an easy run for me now. ↩︎
5. No. Seriously. A bottle of water was $13 last time I was down there. ↩︎
6. Sponsorship Opportunity??? ↩︎
7. I don’t think Amazon deals in sponsorships, they only deal in the acquisition of your soul and bank account……but I’m not above trying. ↩︎
8. Sponsorship Opportunity???? ↩︎
9. SpOnSoRsHiP OpPoRtUnItY?!?!?! ↩︎
10. HELP ME I’M POOR. ↩︎