Running with Joy: Reflections on 2020

By Cole Manley

Thank you to everyone for reading the blog this year, and for sharing your writing and thoughts! I look forward to more writing in the new year.

If 2020 has taught me anything, it has forced me to think about how I relate to the sport of running, and why I run. A year without races of any kind, let alone big city marathons, has made me reflect on why I started running in the first place. In the fall of 2011, I was a freshman in college, an 18 year old kid who was 6’3’’ and still getting taller. I studied too much and needed to get out of the library.

My first two years of college, I spent four to five hours in the library each day, taking pages of notes on all of my readings, assiduously re-reading my essays, and re-writing them to the point of excess and exhaustion. I liked my classes, especially my history seminars with Richard White and Clayborne Carson on 19th and 20th century US history, on the struggles for civil and economic rights which I now write about in my PhD program at UC Davis. School was my identity.

But I needed other identities. The world outside of the library opened up to me the more that I opened up to running.

Running became my escape, and my freshman resident assistant provided the gentle encouragement, inviting our dorm to join him on what proved to be speedy loops of campus drive (the main road circumnavigating the Stanford campus, a 4 mile loop). The first run with him, I only made it a mile and a half, before I slowed to a walk and trudged back to my dorm. I was physically exhausted, but for some reason I stayed with it. Within a few months, I was running several times a week and was able to finish multiple loops of campus drive. And, by the end of the year, I remember the joy of finishing my first double-digit mile run, an 11 or 12 mile effort from campus to The Dish and back to my dorm.

My running naiveté was so pure. I had stumbled upon a kind of happiness in motion that felt entirely different from everything else in my life. The history academic world provides many things: a flexible work schedule, an overwhelming amount of reading, and scandalously low pay. But there’s one thing that reading books can’t provide: bodily movement. The joy of movement--of moving one’s body through space--seems far removed from the daily life of grad school. I had been training--and probably over-training--my mind. But now I was learning about training the mind and the body together.

I was getting a crash course, via the Disneyland boulevards of the Stanford campus, in positive psychology, in the reinforcing benefits of endorphins and sunshine. It’s a potent mix. If the high of academia feels like a Honda Civic Hybrid (love you, buddy) puttering up the on-ramp upon the discovery of some cool new archive, or some recently-released interview, the post-run high provides a sense of serenity and peacefulness that I have not experienced in quite the same way doing anything else. It’s an elusive feeling, sure. It’s not all fun and games. Some runs end with GI distress. Others (tempos mainly…) are just painful.

But there are enough runs that provide that serenity that it becomes addictive. I had learned by the end of my first year at Stanford an important lesson that took time to really sink in: I could spend all of my time on Earth writing and reading and studying, or I could study a little less and live a little more. My roundabout journey towards becoming a runner, and eventually a marathoner, changed the way I approached my daily life and my mental health altogether.

There are so many runs that I can point towards as turning points in this journey. It wasn’t until the summer before my senior year in college that I entered my first race, a 10k in Palo Alto. It was a painful race, but, as in my first runs with my resident assistant, I kept at it. I entered more 5ks and 10ks, eventually my first half marathon, and signed up for the New York Marathon on a whim. Little did I know that I would be joining the established and incredibly-organized running group that is Team for Kids. The New York Marathon became for the marathon distance what my first run around the Stanford campus was for my entry into the sport as a whole: that sense of accomplishment, and joy, and suffering, and possibility. The feeling of fulfillment, and the desire for more. I signed up for my second marathon maybe two weeks after New York.

Throughout all of these runs, even amid this horrible pandemic, I have to remind myself of the privileges I have as a runner. For many, running is not so easy. My racial and gender privilege have provided me with a sense of security and safety that does not exist for many others. Along with a lot of the running community, I was horrified to learn about the tragic murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Arbery was a star football player in high school who attended South Georgia Technical College, where he trained to become an electrician. He regularly jogged around his hometown of Brunswick, Georgia. He was a year younger than me, but, due to the color of his skin and the structural racism of this country, his regular jogging was viewed as a threat, while mine was not even questioned, or, if it was noticed, it was seen as fairly healthy behavior for a 20-something-year-old. It’s difficult to know how to write about Arbery’s life in a way that honors his memory, and his running, while not downplaying or skirting the violence that occurred.

I still don’t know how to reconcile the joy that running provides me with the danger that other runners confront on a daily basis. I do know, however, that it is vital for white runners like myself to actively work to organize with other runners, especially those with racial and gender privilege, to recognize and work to dismantle the casual racism within running and society, and to work towards a more equitable and just sport and world.

There is so much work to be done, but I’m hopeful, against all odds, for 2021. I’m hopeful because 2020 provided a reset. It forced me, and a lot of people, to take stock of what really matters, who really matters, and what our lives look like. It forced me to remember why I run, and how I started running in the first place. There will be time for marathon training, for ramping up weekly mileage and for the mile repeats of old. The tracks are not going anywhere. The races will, eventually, come back. I’m not too worried about that. I’m more concerned about remembering WHY I started running in the first place, trying to recapture that flicker of surprise and joy at learning that running didn’t have to be punishment, that running could actually be quite enjoyable.

Putting the joy back into running, and working towards a world where that joy is equally accessible to everyone. That seems like a good mission for the running community for the new year.