When I moved home to Mill Valley after seven years away, I Googled “running club near me” and emailed the first one I found in the search results. I asked if I could run with them on that Tuesday. Someone got right back to me: “Tuesdays are track workouts, which are usually reserved for paying members, but hey, come on down!”
I craved the satisfaction of post-run accomplishment that’s always helped me through transitions. I’d arrived home only two days earlier after selling my furniture and leaving my marketing job in Chicago. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Chicago; in a lot of ways, I did. But I’d started to miss my roots. I wanted to live close to my family. I missed going to the grocery story with my mom and being around people who knew me beyond just the things I told them about myself. So I came home.
But writing job applications and taking phone interviews from my mom’s kitchen countertop left me restless and asking existential questions, as if suspended between childhood and the rest of my life.
Running had always kept me motivated and grounded. It had helped me through my awkward-turned-exciting first weeks of high school, when the other freshman girls and I sang Jason Mraz songs on the school bus back from beach runs, giddy from adrenaline and the presence of older boys. I was never invited to parties in high school, so I’d spend weekends on trails, running to the beach and forgetting that it hurt to feel excluded. Then, in college, I was invited to parties at the cross-country captains’ off-campus houses. We’d take shots and play Truth or Dare, ending the party by midnight because we had to wake up for practice.
“We’re all still figuring out who we’re gonna be when we grow up,” he said.
At 25, I found that the job search exacerbated the echo chamber of questions that had been plaguing me: How do I find a career that’s meaningful to me? What fuels me? How can I derive meaning in life while also impressing the people I love? Why do I care so much about impressing the people I love when I know they’ll love me no matter what?
Unlike the thankless slog of applying to jobs or trying to make friends as an adult, the rewards inherent in running are immediately intoxicating—the dopamine high I got from running had a way of flushing out fear.
Back to that Tuesday. Full of angst and covered in spandex, I drove my mom’s car over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Kezar Stadium track. I spotted a half circle of men and women in sweat-wicking shirts. I hovered on the tracks’ outskirts, uncharacteristically shy, until a skinny man with peppery hair waved me over and introduced himself. He explained the day’s run, which would wind through a series of trails I had run through years ago in the county-wide 5K my high school hosted every September. I nodded along, antsy to get going.
The group took off, spreading out across paces as friends caught up with each other. I asked get-to-know-you questions that elicited answers like “software engineer at Uber” or “software engineer at Lyft.” I met architects and city planners, teachers and new grads, surfers and people my parents’ age. In a city overridden with twenty-somethings who use lots of filler words and talk frantically about IPOs and other acronyms I know even less about, it was refreshing to run alongside a motley crew of strangers, my pace steadier because of their presence.
“I’m on an adult gap year,” I heard one man say, his voice rising above the pounding of feet. “I’m working on getting good at guitar and running,” he explained.
I cut into the conversation. “I’m on an adult gap year too,” I told him. “Well, more like a month. I hope it doesn’t take me a year to figure out what I want.”
“We’re all still figuring out who we’re gonna be when we grow up,” he said.
The guy continued to tell me about how he was a helicopter pilot and had spent a few years working in insurance. Maybe I was pinning a lot on this stranger. Maybe it was the adrenaline and endorphins that caused my legs to speed up as my thoughts began to slow. But I was calmer. This guy was letting big life questions take the back burner while he enjoyed a run. It felt good to be in his presence.
Running through the Bay Area feels like running through my childhood, anchoring me to a time when I had known what I liked and what fueled me — when I didn’t think twice about the long-term repercussions of being myself.
As we cooled down with a few more slow miles toward the ocean, we passed the art museum where my first friend had his bar mitzvah, and where I wasn’t able to muster up the courage to ask the boy I liked to dance. We ran past the vacant lot across the street from my middle school where we’d played capture the flag for hours, staining the pants we were growing out of with grass, mud, and wild blackberries. Running through the Bay Area feels like running through my childhood, anchoring me to a time when I had known what I liked and what fueled me — when I didn’t think twice about the long-term repercussions of being myself.
When I’m not running, I worry almost constantly. I worry about falling behind my friends: managers and medical students and people with live-in significant others. I worry about the gaping presence of loss that’s a side effect of making choices; how moving home to San Francisco meant that I’d left behind the life I’d made in Chicago, where I had friends and was on texting terms with the clients I managed at the startup that I’d settled into. When moving forward means making memories of the experiences that anchored me, life can feel scary and daunting.
As we neared Crissy Field, I picked up my pace, flanked by new friends who were years into a meaningful career, or running off the anxiety of a job they hated, or trying to figure out what’s next, like me. All of us moved forward, breaking down our bodies through strain with the knowledge that tomorrow, we’d be stronger.
Each time I’ve returned to run with my running club, I hear someone else asking the same questions I’m asking. And they aren’t closer to an answer than I am, even if it looks like it from the outside. I thought that adultier adults would have better, clearer answers, that they could impart their wisdom and help me find clarity as I typed out cover letters.
But I’m learning that applying to jobs, getting rejected, sweating through runs, and asking open-ended questions isn’t just the collective tedium that’s practice for the race. It’s the whole point. I’d hate to spend my life searching for answers if it means missing the joy in not knowing what’s next.
