Member-only story
Running Fueled My Eating Disorder
What happens when your new healthy habit actually makes you sick?
Running set me free at age 40…until it put me in a new kind of cage
“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” — Richard Lovelace
I was a latecomer to that vast and wonderful world of running.
As a painfully non-athletic kid, you couldn’t have paid me to run a mile. I was slow, awkward and usually picked last for team sports, so anything resembling gym class made me both miserable and anxious.
I occasionally exercised on the road to adulthood, usually if I wanted to lose weight. Nothing really stuck, partly because I had been told by doctors in the 1980s that I shouldn’t run because of my fibromyalgia.
Two days after my 40th birthday in 2012, I walked into a CVS to buy a pack of smokes. I walked out, for some reason still unknown to me, with a box of nicotine patches. That was 6 1/2 years ago, and my days as a smoker seem like a distant memory.
A day or two after my last cigarette, I decided to check out our office gym. Someone recommended the Couch to 5K running program. And I was, quite literally, off to the races.
