I was a chubby little girl with asthma and no belief in my own body. I remember jogging with my mom once, maybe twenty meters, before breaking down in tears because I couldn’t do it. My chest hurt, my face was red, and my brain locked in a sentence I’d carry for years:

I will never be able to run.

Middle school soccer didn’t help. I was always last in line. The heaviest girl. The slow one. The one painfully aware of her body existing. I tried out for high school soccer not because I was confident, but because I was fed up. I wasn’t going to stay that girl. I didn’t have speed, but I had something else. A quiet, inexplicable endurance. Growing up chubby kind of gives you that. A mental toughness you don’t ask for but somehow earn.

Practices were brutal. August heat. Suicides until our lungs burned. But I kept going. Eventually, I became the one who could finish the drills without stopping. The fastest. The steady one. And for the first time, I thought:

maybe I can.

Fast forward. Post-graduation life. Running became something I only did when I felt like I’d eaten too much. A chore. A correction. I could barely do a mile. It felt like being twelve again.

Then came a heartbreak. Weightlifting couldn’t quiet the ache the way I needed it to. So I started running. Not for my body…for my mind. I’d run when I felt sad. Anxious. Overwhelmed. In old soccer shorts and flat New Balance 550s. Sometimes crying. Sometimes blasting music. Sometimes in silence. Sometimes just talking to God. Somewhere along the way, running stopped being punishment and started becoming prayer.

My body hurt. My mind hurt. So I ran. And when the run ended, my body relaxed…and so did my heart. That was the key.

In September, I started dating a runner. Motivation found me. I trained. Slowly. Quietly. Listening to sermons and the sound of my own breath. Learning endurance. Learning surrender. Learning that God meets you in long, monotonous miles too.

October 4th. 6am. Seattle. I cried in the car thinking about twelve-year-old me…the one who said she’d never be able to run. Then I pinned on bib #18 and lined up for a half marathon.

It was a brutal course. Back and forth. Hills. Loop after loop. But I’d trained for this; not the map, but the mental toughness. The boredom. The discipline. The choosing to keep going.

The last two miles? I sprinted. Old high school soccer songs blasting. My body moved on instinct, not reason. Then I crossed the line.

13.1 miles.
1 hour 56 minutes.
8:55 pace.

I could.

Now it’s November. Some days I feel like a runner. Some days a beginner again. Some days two miles feels impossible. Some days five feels holy. But that’s the thing about running; it never gets easy. You just learn that if you can do two, you can do three. And if you can do three, maybe one day you’ll do thirteen.

Running didn’t fix my life. It gave me a way to breathe through it. To move forward even when everything in me wanted to stop. To trust that endurance is built slowly, painfully, faithfully.

And maybe that’s the lesson.

Not that I became a runner.
But that I became someone who finally believed she could