Running -- Where am I finding my identity?

For about a month-and-a-half I have been working through a running injury. The injury has proven to be one of persistence and, at times, very painful. The official name of the injury is “Illiotibial Band Syndrome” or ITBS. It is an injury that is caused when the IT Band that runs from your hip to our knee becomes inflamed and rubs over a bone in the knee causing it to become twisted and scarred. It is a fairly common running injury and is not “serious” in the sense that it will require surgery. However, what it does require is patience...I tend to struggle in this area.

Even more than this, though, I find myself struggling with something much deeper than the itch to go out for a run. In order to explain I need to tell a bit of backstory.

When I left for home from school following the 2005-2006 school year I weighed between 275 and 280 pounds at my heaviest. The final twenty-five to thirty of those pounds came in the previous school year when I decided to stay home and enroll in classes at a local community college in Kansas City. The story goes that my brother and I had a coupon for Pizza Hut that gave you a medium pizza and 16 chicken wings for $10. We had one copy of this coupon, however our delivery driver never took the coupon so about 3 times a week we would order a pizza and chicken wings. Weight gain quickly followed. Well, one day while watching an episode of The Simpsons, in which, Homer was trying to get on disability by being “morbidly obese” I realized I had a problem. The weight that Homer needed to reach in order to be considered morbidly obese was 300 pounds. I realized that even if this was a made up number, I had no business being so close to that weight. I made the decision that night that I would do something about my weight.

The next day I drove out to the track at the high school I graduated from, dug the closest shoes I had to running shoes out of my trunk, and started running. I didn’t have a plan, a goal, a coach, or really even much motivation beyond not wanting to be considered morbidly obese. That day I ran one mile...and it sucked! I remember rounding the last turn on the track thinking my chest felt like it was on fire, my legs felt like they were jello, and that I would be puking my guts out as soon as I stopped, but I pressed on to finish that fourth lap. After I had walked a lap, caught my breath, and stabilized my wobbly legs I felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. I returned to that track everyday that summer. I eventually increased my distance to two miles, then to three, then started running a trail after finishing my two miles on the track! Nothing would stop me from running that summer. By the time I was ready to head back to school in the Fall of 2006 I had lost 50 pounds in three months! The sense of accomplishment was insane!

Eventually, a funny thing happened. Instead of making myself get out and go running, I began to want to be out doing it. I began to love it! I couldn’t get enough! Running became my time to relieve stress from the day (or previous day) and where I would spend time with the Lord. When my dad passed away in the summer of 2007 it was my way to cope when things felt too heavy to bear. Running became part of my life, my identity. By the fall of 2007 I had lost 100 pounds. For the first time in my life I truly felt confident in my own skin. It was a great feeling.

Now that you know more about the backstory of how running has become a part of my life, it should make understanding this next part a little easier.

When this injury first appeared I thought it was something that would require me to be off for a week or so and then could go back to business as usual. As I began to find out more about it I realized that it was not going to be that easy...not even close. As time went on I began to feel myself slipping into a sort of depression. You see, I had wrapped up so much of my identity and different aspects of my life into this one activity that not being able to go out and do it drove me crazy. The only thing that was going to fix my knee was treatment and rest...a lot of rest. As I started to think more about the time when this injury sprang up I remembered it was at about this time that I had asked God to break me down completely. I asked that He take control of my life. Bare with me here, but I feel that this is part of His process. Taking away the area of my life that I was putting so much of my identity made me put my attention on Him. It was during this time that I began to feel God move in me stronger than ever before. Don’t get me wrong, I still hate that I can’t run and am probably overly self-conscience about gaining weight because I can’t run, but knowing what God is currently doing in my life outweighs all those feelings!