I love running. 

This may sound unusual, lots of people run because they feel like they should, because it’s an inexpensive way to keep their weight down, but they don’t necessarily love it. For me, I love it, because running taught me that if you can break anything down into its parts, you can overcome it. 

I never thought of myself as athletic, I am tall and somewhat lanky and do not put on muscle easily. I was always the last one to finish the mile when we had to run it starting in middle school, namely because I walked most of it. I was not a good runner and I did not like to run so I saw no reason to run. After coming out strong in my first lap, a teacher of a different PE class commented on my performance to her students.

“See, if you come out too strong and don’t pace yourself, you’ll fail,” she said, as if I couldn’t hear her. I glared at her. Obviously, I knew that, and the pace I came out with was the one I thought I could maintain. 

In high school, I learnt I had to play sports to go to a good college. None of the other International Baccalaureate students were taking PE and I quickly noted the unfamiliar faces in my PE class. I joined a sport with the main goal of being a benchwarmer since I had no real interest in any sport. My high school was small enough to get on any team you wanted simply by showing up.

Basketball made the most sense. I was tall and I disliked it the least, and some of my friends were joining at the same time. 

I learned basketball was more physically taxing than other sports. Once, a friend and I joined the run last because we were late and we ended up walking the last bit. “Fucking babies,” said the senior team captain, who was taking her job leading this team in which everyone made just by having a pulse a touch too seriously. She said it under her breath but intentionally loud enough for us to hear. 

There were other runs that did not end like this, that ended more triumphantly. Once we took the run out to the streets of San Jose and I remember beaming with pride when I made it to the end without walking, perhaps one of the only times of my life. 

But overall basketball wasn’t for me. Besides the running, which I hated and wasn’t good at, I didn’t have the muscle to shoot the hall and I on the rare chance I got on the court, I learned there were tall girls with a lot more body to them, and I found myself swung around the court just by someone’s hip crashing into me. I ended up joining badminton which was much better for me. Not only were there enough good players for me to be pretty sure I would rarely play (I had no idea the entire Vietnamese population of the school, which was quite large, played badminton and were quite good at it), but it was not so physically taxing. And running. There was very little running to it and we did not run long laps around the track for it. 

Once I got to college I knew I could drop the facade. I would never run or play sports again. I did join the college gym eventually with my friend Jenny. We both proclaimed we wanted to stop being “squinny,” a term Jenny and I coined and meant skinny-fat. It was 2005 and even though I was 5’10” and 135 pounds, I looked to models for how I should look. I became an elliptical bunny and used the machines at the school gym per the drawings because like everyone else I wanted to look “toned,” whatever that meant.

As I got older, on and off, I’d join the gym and follow this exact strategy and then quit when I did not feel like I was getting any more toned or thinner.

All of this changed when a few years ago, at 36, I looked in the mirror and realized I truly didn’t like the way I looked. After a nasty divorce in which I mostly ate grilled cheese sandwiches, Covid, a heartbreak to do with a man and another with a job I had deeply wanted, I had put on some weight that truly made me not feel good. It wasn’t like being 5’10” and 135 pounds and wanting to be lighter—pure vanity. I felt ashamed and bad about myself. Regardless of society’s standards, I genuinely did not feel good in my body at that moment in time.

I realized I was at a crossroads of a lot of 30-somethings, which was to decide I was okay with this and love my body as it was, or work on it by really working out. I had an existential crisis about loving my body enough to start working out since usually the conversation around loving your body means accepting it exactly as it is, and accepting that you will not work on it. I made a hybrid approach. I would love my body as it is, while also loving it enough to exercise. This involved being gentle as to how I looked, gentle about my workout performance, but also asking myself to have the discipline to do it.

It was still Covid and I was living with my parents so I started walking on the dusty treadmill in their living room around an uphill incline. I told myself I would walk at an uphill incline for 30 min a day no matter what. 

I took a progress picture in my parents’ floral wallpaper bathroom every Friday. Each week I could see how some fat had peeled off. I became encouraged, and kept going. The fat kept coming off.

I ended up going to Costa Rica quite unexpectedly and told myself I would keep this up no matter what. I walked long distances to gyms off the beaten path in Costa Rica, where the locals, men and women alike, took weight lifting very seriously. The first gym I joined in Costa Rica was a round building next to an abandoned hotel. It was sweltering but they kept the doors wide open and blasted reggaeton at such a volume that you had no need for headphones—and no use. Still, the body building women looked like they could hip thrust tree trunks. They we jacked. I kept walking uphill for more and more amounts of time.

I would eventually join four gyms in Costa Rica as I moved around those two months. By the time I left Costa Rica for Mexico, I had lost the fat I wanted and felt quite sexy again. But I was addicted and now I wanted to lift. I was addicted to understanding and seeing what my body was capable of. I eventually hired a trainer and learned enough about lifting to find out why my attempts when I was younger failed and what it would take to become fit. One year later, I finished my recomposition and decided to do a cut. I had visible abs for the first time in my life. I couldn’t believe it. Me, the lanky girl. I was ripped. My trainer essentially fired me, for reasons I didn’t fully understand, but for one, as a friend put it, was that the student had surpassed the master. I had a better understanding of the mechanics of the body and how to make a split than he did, and he didn’t like when I disagreed with him.

But running remained a moving target. Up until a certain time, my cardio was still elliptical or uphill walking. Visiting my parents from Mexico once, I looked at the again dusty treadmill that started this fitness journey that stuck and told myself to give running a try. The desire was largely pragmatic. I still have a rule that if I travel somewhere for more than three days I have to exercise and joining gyms for such short periods of time can be expensive. 

I hated it. Just hated it. But I told myself to only run for a minute. I’d walk. Then run for another. I googled how to run, believe it or not, and how to love running. As I suspected, you had to start small. You couldn’t be made to run laps around the track having never done it and expect it to go well or for you to like it. 

One minute. Two. Three. Five. I slowly increased the amount of time I would run over the weeks to come. I’d do it by asking myself to hold on just for one minute more. Then another. And another. “You can do it,” I’d tell myself in my heart. “Just one more minute.”

I slowly asked myself to add another minute over weeks until before I knew it, I ran for 30 minutes without stopping or resting. I was amazed at what I could do, what I was capable of. It wasn’t that I am not a runner, I had just never given it a real try. Since then, I have been obsessed with the idea that anything you want can be achieved just by doing a little at a time, and starting today. 

These days I do my best thinking while running. I write while I run too. I wrote this while running. My legs move almost by instinct and my head clears. It’s a great time to reflect. If I could safely close my eyes, I would meditate while running too.

“I could never do that,” friends have told me, “I hate running.” I’ve tried to break down how to did it to friends, as if to say, I don’t have any innate abilities. I too was a run hater and thought I was not a runner. It’s no use—I have literally not convinced anyone to run. 

But this isn’t about running really or how or why you should run. It’s about doing one thing just one time. Then again. Again. Again. Now you’ve run for five minutes. You can finish a set this way. Then the whole exercise. Start with one day. Then a second. Then a third. Before you know it, you’ve been exercising a year and are one of those elusive fit people that people will talk to and say “how do you do it? I could never do that.” 

Anything anyone has is the result of diligent, daily hard work. 

People don’t believe this. When they see a fit body, they see a fit body. When they see a masterpiece, they see a complete painting. When they see a mountain, they see the top. They don’t see that a fit body is the result of a daily commitment to the gym. They don’t see a masterpiece that didn’t just start with even a single brush stroke but showing up over and over perhaps to art school. They don’t see that anyone can scale a mountain if they are willing to start at the bottom and take a step, followed by another, then another. 

I was at Chapultepec Castle in Chapultepec Park, here in CDMX recently. There was one mural that I had the pleasure of seeing completely alone. No one else entered the room, as if to give me my own private viewing. It’s by David Alfaro Siqueiros, and it was huge. Paintings, especially large ones, are best viewed by standing back, but I walked along the mural and examined the brush strokes. There must’ve been thousands of them. It was hard to believe a painting of this size started with a single brush stroke.

There are definitely days in which my heart asks my body to run another minute and the answer is no. It’s a discerning task to figure out if my body has had enough today or if it’s my ego telling myself not to achieve the thing I want. This shows up with weight lifting too. I don’t love hip thrusts or biomechanic squats, prescribed by my trainer and still not my favorite. I then convince myself to set up and just do one set. Or even just one. This is how I distinguish laziness from fatigue. Usually, my body can indeed finish the exercise. Sometimes not. And that’s okay.

Either way, on the days I can’t or don’t, I forgive myself. Because whether I push myself to take on that extra rep or exercise isn’t the point. Determination is a long hall effort. I want to see the results of long term efforts and one minute or even one day don’t make or break my efforts in the grand scheme of things. But, I do know that if I beat myself up for not going the extra mile once, the likelihood that I will go the extra mile later is unlikely. 

When most people mess up a perfect fitness record, say, not showing up for a few days after being consistent for a few weeks, they feel so bad that they stop showing up altogether. Paradoxically, in attaching to the feeling that they “messed up,” they ultimately do.

A critical part of success when it comes to anything is compassion and forgiveness. And then, the drive to try again tomorrow, or next week, next month, or whenever it is that you’re ready to dust yourself off and try again. 

People are so afraid of failure, they don’t realize failure is largely in perception—many things are either an opportunity to improve or a failure depending solely on how you see it. Forgive yourself and try again tomorrow and you’ll literally never fail.

The crux of success is largely just not giving up. Most successful people are nothing special except for their knowledge of this fact.

In May, after going particularly hard on my runs and mixing back in uphill walking which has its own benefits, I hurt my right knee. I felt it only when I finished the run. We were in Sayulita, Mexico, my home away from home. I limped to the jiu jitsu academy a few blocks away where my husband was training that day and where my friends, who had a golf cart, were watching him. They gave me a ride back to our Airbnb. 

I kept hoping the knee injury would fade into the background but eventually we rented a golf cart of our own to finish out our trip to Sayulita. Between the hills, the cobblestones, and my knee, it was the only way to enjoy the remainder of our trip. 

When I arrived back to my home in CDMX, I immediately hired a physiotherapist, Nicole from Roots Physical Therapy and Wellness in CDMX, the best I could find. The issue, it turned out, was not with my knee but my hip. My overall anatomy was a bit off. I’ve always known I was flat footed, but I had no idea that it was because the muscles around my hips are weak, causing additional pressure on my knees. The exercises we started doing were not for my knees but in strengthening my hips and glutes. 

It was a long, humbling road. For one, I thought I already was exercising my gluteus maximus and gluteus medius. And second, I did not like the exercises, but my ability to go back to running was contingent on them.

To be honest, I almost gave up. I asked myself how important running was to me, and if these exercises, which had to be done consistently and with increasing difficulty, were really worth it. 

I hadn’t really finished answering the question, but I kept doing them in the meantime. My life coach once told me, there are two types of “I don’t know.” There’s an “I don’t know but yes to finding out,” and there’s an “I don’t know no to finding out.” One I don’t know shuts the door on possibility, while the other opens it. By continuing the exercises, as I asked myself the question is this worth it, I essentially told myself I don’t know but yes to finding out. 

I didn’t really know why people out there just don’t do things that are in their best interest even if it takes just a little effort each day until this moment. After this, I felt a lot of empathy for those people. It can be hard to not give up when something feels so hard. 

But I kept going and before I knew it, arches started to appear in my feet as my gluteus medius began to engage more and be able to hold my lower body the way it’s supposed to. I had never seen arches in my feet and I still look at them in wonder. Nicole was right about everything.

Nowadays I’m relearning to run. Heck, I am relearning to walk. There are muscles in my feet that are newly being used in a way and so my feet are constantly sore as the muscles must develop. It isn’t easy.

But I know if I keep going I will arrive to where I want to go—I will get there, wherever there is. I will run again. And maybe, my runs will be better than ever before. Because, like the run itself, I stuck with the day in day out practice of self improvement. Each day I asked myself to go the extra mile for myself, just once. It turns out, as long as you follow your path, you’ll always end up where you want to be.