Return to Running: The Whim of All Whims

I hadn't run in six years. After following three whims and three months of training, I'm three weeks from my first half-marathon.

I’m running the United NYC Half Marathon on March 15th, 2026. Three weeks from this moment in time.

I’ve discussed it in various places here — on my Notes, a brief mention in an essay, a little bit here and there in some other corners of the internet.

But I haven’t taken the time to run through (pun intended) what brought me here, how I’m feeling about it, and why this is even happening. This has been partially intentional, but also not.

I am very aware of my predisposition to sharing things before I do them, only to see the momentum I’ve built die down. I was so afraid of that happening with such a long-term goal that my first month of training was done essentially in secret, with no one but my husband and one friend knowing my big plans.

After a month, I slowly opened up but didn’t share many details. After another month passed, I started to share a few little details about a few runs, but not much else.

And now, I’ve been training for three months (and have only been back to running for four). I have three weeks to go, and I’m finally ready to put my thoughts down. Writing about something makes it real, and I think that up until yesterday, a small part of me still doubted my ability to run this half. But yesterday, I ran over 11 miles and felt great doing it. When I finished that run, a wave of knowing that I am ready washed over me. I know I’ve got this, and in the words of Olympic Gold Medalist Alysa Liu¹: “That’s what I’m fucking talking about.”

This confidence is hard for me to come by. I don’t really tell myself that I can definitively do a lot of things, and instead, there’s a tiny part of me that’s always waiting for myself to fail. If I’m on a roll with keeping up with the laundry, I know I’m one weekend away from that crashing down. If I’m building up a writing streak, I’m waiting for the busyness of my life to slowly edge that out.

And over the last three months — with each sickness, tiny hip or shin twinge, busyness at work, or days (weeks!) where the weather was below-freezing — I kept waiting to find the proof I couldn’t do this. To realize that the distance set out in front of me was too much, too soon, and that it overall wasn’t for me. I could defer and run next year, I could DNS, I could show up and plan to walk part of it.

None of those are true failures, for what it’s worth, but it’s not the goal I set out for.

Yesterday’s run showed me I could. Yesterday, I traversed the longest distance I’ve run to date, weaved in and out of crowds up Flatbush and on the Brooklyn Bridge (including a protest on the bridge, where I got whacked in the face by a flag), gained over 600ft of elevation and dodged puddles (unsuccessfully) and dog shit (successfully, as far as I know).

Yesterday, I decided to change my route mid-run, once I was already in Manhattan, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the Brooklyn Bridge again (which added another 1.5 miles to the 10 I’d planned).

Yesterday, I ran what felt like a conversational pace but ended up running below my ‘goal’ half pace (and ran a negative split). I have no choice but to believe I can do this.

I have no choice but to trust myself, trust my training, and trust my ability to commit to long-term goals. Scary!

This is not the first time I’ve signed up for a half-marathon. In 2019, when living in San Francisco, I signed up to run the SF Half — but a bout of bronchitis knocked me down, and I couldn’t quite find my footing to get back to training. Between the summer of 2019 and the fall of 2025, I’d go on to run about five times. A move back east, a global pandemic, a few new jobs, a wedding, a baby, three layoffs. I told myself running was part of my old life. So what happened? How did I find myself back here?

Sometime in 2025, I decided to commit to walking outside every day for at least 30 minutes. The goal was two-fold. One, to force myself to move a bit, even when movement felt tough. And two, it made me get outside every day.

Working remotely, there are times when it can hit 7pm, and I realize I haven’t seen the outside world. It’s probably not surprising that with the winter we’ve had on the East Coast this year, I’ve been slacking for a while. But for a good chunk of 2025, my walks were a part of my daily life — something I protected.

I started this before my layoff this summer, though some of the hotter days we encountered made it impossible to get a full 30-minutes outside. This continued through fall, where the walks became longer as I was grateful to no longer be in the thick of summer (and perhaps knowing this would be a particularly tough winter, too).

Sometimes, the walks were easy to get in — I’d drop my kid off, pop in my headphones, and stroll through my neighborhood or Prospect Park. Some days I was able to take a leisurely lunch break and actually get away from my desk for a bit — something I don’t do often enough.

Other days, it felt more difficult. Deciding whether to walk or to write during nap time, bringing my husband and kid along with me for a walk after daycare pickup. Sometimes it rained. Sometimes I just didn’t want to be outside, but for about two months, I did it anyway.

One cool Saturday in October, something strange happened. It had been raining all morning, and it was one of the first days that truly felt like autumn.

I looked outside after putting my kid down for his nap and noticed the rain had stopped. My weather app confirmed — no rain for at least an hour. I started to get dressed for my walk, figuring this would be the best time to get out there. But instead, without much thought, I started getting dressed for a run.

The idea of starting to run again had been swirling around my subconscious for a few weeks at this point, but it didn’t enter my conscious brain as something I could (or even wanted to) do. I can’t quite pinpoint exactly what it was, but likely a mix of the influence of walking amongst the runners in Prospect Park, of a few YouTube videos I clicked on that forever changed my algorithm to favor ‘running content’, of the twinge of nostalgia I feel each spring and autumn for my time living in San Francisco (where the weather is essentially spring or autumn all year round, and what I think of as perfect running weather).

I grabbed my 5-year-old running shoes, downloaded the Runna app, and set out for a 2-mile walk-and-run interval session in the Return to Running plan. It was hard. It started raining within five minutes of being outside, and I could’ve turned around as soon as the first drops of cold rain hit my hat-less head. But I finished that run, felt good, and immediately checked my calendar to see when I could run next.

I tried to fight it, but I knew I was back. It felt harder than I remembered, I was slower than I remembered, new parts of my body hurt, but I knew right then and there that I wanted to continue running. I could run twice a week, I told myself. That would be enough.

my first three runs on strava + shots from the first rainy day

I went on two more walk/runs that week, and then fell sick with my first cold of the season. The fever and fatigue had me bed-bound for a few days, and the chest cold that lingered kept me off my feet for another week.

I could’ve stopped there, but instead I hit the ‘restart’ button on the six-week plan that promised to have me 5K-ready by the end of it, by the time the mucus cleared.

On another whim (in what I can only see as a series of whims), I typed December 6 5K Brooklyn into Google, and found a race that started in Prospect Park, less than a mile from my house. I signed up right away.

My first week felt so good that I immediately upped my plan to include three runs a week (on top of the three days of strength training I’d been maintaining for most of the year). I’d run before work started during the week and during nap time on the weekends, and committed to doing so, even in rainy weather. I started figuring out how to dress as the temperature dropped further. I bought a used down running vest from Mercari and invested in a few pairs of running-specific leggings. I bought a new pair of running shoes — the same style I wore six years ago, after a gait analysis.

I went on a work trip to Florida and relished running alongside the beach (and surprised myself by keeping up the habit while traveling). I’d go to daycare dropoff underdressed for the weather so I could run right after, to maximize my time before work. I thought I’d have to skip a run during my writer’s retreat — the beautiful Catskill property was situated along a very busy interstate — but ended up running up and down the long driveway instead.

I hit every planned run during Thanksgiving Break, sacrificing other nap time activities more often than usual.

And then, a week and a half before the race, I got sick again.

With each skipped run, I felt a nagging feeling. Of course I can’t do this, I thought. There’s no way I’ll be ready now.

Despite not feeling ready, I got better just in time for the 5K. I hadn’t run in over ten days, but I knew I had to go and prove this to myself.

Because the other thing that happened in between work trips and writers’ retreats and DIY Turkey Trots?

On what I can only call the whim of all whims, I put my name into the lottery for the NYC Half Marathon, fully expecting the odds not to be in my favor, and ended up getting selected.

I knew I had to show up to this 5K. My only goal was to run the entire thing, which I wasn’t even sure I could do now, but I knew I had to try. So, on a chillier-than-usual early-December morning (hello, foreshadowing for this entire winter), I made my way into Prospect Park and completed my first race in six and a half years.

And yes, I ran the whole thing.

It wasn’t my fastest 5K, but it wasn’t my slowest either. I crossed the finish line, grabbed my bagel and hot cocoa, and walked home.

Later that night, I signed up for a 14-week half-marathon plan on Runna. 99 days to go.

I expected to keep up with my three-runs-a-week schedule, but quickly upped it to four, missing running on the days I wasn’t doing it. Week over week, my mileage slowly increased, my intervals got a little harder, and my ‘conversational pace’ got a little quicker. My long runs built on each other, and I entered the new year feeling like I was on fire.

I’ve since gotten sick two more times and have missed a few runs here and there, but overall? I’ve been reasonably consistent.

A few things helped.

First and foremost, I bought a treadmill. From the way the season had started (and having listened to my husband talk about the Farmer’s Almanac winter prediction since summer), I knew it was going to be a rough one².

I can almost guarantee that if I did not have the financial and square-footage capital for this purchase, my training would’ve been nowhere near as successful. There’s a good chance I would’ve deferred, or even have found myself forgoing running altogether.

Sure, I could’ve joined a gym and would’ve needed much less money (and space), but I know myself. Sometimes getting dressed and filling the water bottle felt like a massive barrier on the darkest, coldest, and snowiest days, but having a treadmill right there made it possible to overcome them. And sometimes, I had exactly enough time before work or during a nap to get just the run done. If I had to get dressed for outside first? I would’ve probably made about half of the indoor runs I actually did.

But I also changed my mindset — I started (literally) embodying the phrase it’s a (half) marathon, not a sprint. It’s winter. Bad weather is inevitable. I had a toddler. Getting sick is inevitable. I am human. Other human roadblocks are inevitable. I forced myself to zoom out and focus on long-term consistency over day-to-day perfection.

So, I decided to focus on a few things³. I committed to running all my long runs first and foremost, even if that meant moving things around. One week, I felt the familiar tickle of a cold coming soon. I ran six miles on the treadmill that evening (which isn’t advice I’d give anyone else), but it helped me feel consistent when I was out for ten days in January, knowing I had that long run under my belt.

Then, I mostly focused on my weekly mileage. As long as I was roughly in line with my plan, I knew I’d be okay. My plan had two taper weeks built in, and I used them to aid recovery during the remaining two sicknesses. Maybe sheer luck, but focusing on weekly mileage and being flexible allowed me to take the recovery days I needed.

My goal for this half is to more or less just run the whole thing (though I am accounting for one bathroom break), so the first thing I let myself drop or swap out was my ‘workout runs’ — hard intervals, tempo runs, or hill repeats. Instead, I would either skip them or swap them for easy runs, again depending on what supported my weekly goals. I generally followed the rule that ‘most’ of my runs should be ‘easy’.

I didn’t sweat a missed run here or there, nor did I freak out when I needed to rest. I started embracing paces that felt too slow to be productive, and trusted the process. A way of thinking that’s traditionally difficult for me, as someone who pays way too much attention to the details and treats most other marathons like sprints.

I found joy in the act of running itself. I found fulfillment in comparing my runs and seeing the improvements. I laid the groundwork, brick by brick.

All of that is what’s brought me to today. Three weeks out from my first half-marathon, filled with a confidence I’ve not found before.

I’m nervous, I’m excited, and I know I can do it.

So, what’s next? I’ll keep running. I’ll likely get my gait re-analyzed to make sure I’m in the right shoes, since I’ve learned a lot about cadence and form and all of that over the past four months. And because I have no chill, my second half-marathon is also on the books — I entered the lottery for the Brooklyn Half in May, and will be running that too.

I don’t know if I’ll keep doing races, if I’ll start training for my inevitable try at running the NYC Marathon, if I’ll take a break, or if it’ll be another six years. I’m trying not to make too many decisions about the future in this moment, and instead hold on to the big things I’ve accomplished already and the things I already know are to come.

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1. If you haven’t added all 17 minutes of MacArthur Park Suite to your workout playlist yet, may I ask why???

2. I could NOT have predicted JUST how rough it would be…but that is a story for another day.

3. This section is a little technical. If you don’t care about running, 1) I can’t believe you are still reading this, thank you; and 2) you have permission to skip the next three paragraphs.