You’re not alone. And trust me, and science, your feelings won’t last.
I have a confession: I hated running for years. In fact, I may have been on my high school’s track team, but I hid behind the giant high jump mats during the two-lap warm-up because I DID NOT WANT TO RUN even two laps. I hopped in a sprinting event once in a while but mostly stuck to jumps. Distance running? Are you kidding?
The younger me—the beginner runner—said “No way!”
The summer after my senior year in high school I was training to try to walk on to my college volleyball team and knew we had to run a timed mile. Since I hated running so much, but loved the beach, I headed to the coast to force myself to run. The first few times, I forced myself to run to just one lifeguard tower. I think it was a half mile. I was miserable. (But, at least I was at the beach!)
I kept going back to the beach.
I made it a little further each time I set out for a run. I learned to run on the hard-packed sand at low tide, which proved a smooth, even springy surface. I learned that I loved running at sunset, and eventually started racing the sun, trying to get to the next pile of seaweed before the sun completely sunk below the horizon. I learned that after the sunset, when the sky as still light enough to see but the air was cool and magical, my body settled into a new gear: a runner’s gear. And before I knew it, by the time I headed to college that September, I loved running. I craved it. I was a runner.
Science tells us that it takes one to four weeks for new runners (or athletes of any sort) to see the benefits of cardiovascular adaptation, which is your cardiovascular system getting used to your new efforts (running). Note that one week is very different from one run. And that the fourth week will feel different from the first.
During those first few weeks, our bodies get more efficient at blood flow, and our muscles start working more in tune with our cardiovascular systems. From weeks four to eight, even more gains occur. And by week eight, our body’s become fairly well adapted, though improvement in all systems continue.
“Effective aerobic exercise has been shown to elicit adaptations at both the molecular and macroscopic levels,” says a study republished from StatPearls in the National Library of Medicine.
A study published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology states that, “Cardiovascular adaptations to exercise occur through structural, functional, and molecular changes that enhance cardiac efficiency…The type, intensity, frequency, and exercise duration significantly influence CV [cardiovascular] adaptations. These factors interact to determine exercise’s physiological responses and long-term benefits for CV health.
”You know that running is good for you. Perhaps that’s why you started. But it’s consistency and faith that your body is working towards adaptation every time you head out that will, eventually, make you hate running less. In fact, running can even start to feel more good than bad.
You’ve likely heard of the “runner’s high,” that euphoric state of being achieved by some runners after 30-or-so minutes of steady state running. The runner’s high doesn’t hit all runners who run 30 minutes straight, and it doesn’t hit some runners all the time. But the state of less anxiety—euphoria, even—is our body releasing endorphins and endocannabinoids to make us feel good. As the Marathon Handbook (Thomas Watson) put it, the runner’s high is “Mother Nature’s way of taking care of us when we’re under physical stress” and it comes from our ancestors running all day to catch dinner.
I’m guessing my primal instincts kicked in all those years ago after consistent jogs at the beach, and when that sun set below the horizon and I felt a euphoria take over where I’d previously felt…well, terrible, was my body having adapted to running.
Stick with it, and you’ll get there, too. If you don’t get to a “high,” you’ll at least get to less hate, and more enjoyment. Put in the work, and you’ll be rewarded with, at the vary least, the thought that, “this running thing isn’t so bad.”
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