I finally understand why people keep going back to an ex who was never going to be emotionally available to them. Not in an abstract, I-get-it-in-theory way. I understand it because that is exactly my relationship with running.
Let me explain.
In 2024 I was living a completely normal life. Then I got introduced to running, ran my first 10k, and something switched. I started feeling actual joy from it, the kind that gets addictive fast. I began restructuring my days around it, then my plans, then my weekends. I started calling myself a runner. Then an athlete, which still feels like a word I borrowed from someone more qualified. Life was the best it had been in a long time, almost like being on drugs.
Then January 2025 happened, and the months after it. I found out I’d been living with something called patella alta, where your kneecap sits higher than it’s supposed to. Every attempt to run hurt. For over three months, every attempt to walk hurt too.
Eventually my physio cleared me to run. I ran. The pain came back mid-way through a hilly trail race in Kodaikanal.
I remember that moment with a clarity I wish I didn’t have. I wanted to cry so badly. But there was no race support anywhere near me, and I knew that whatever my knee was doing, I still had to get myself down that hill. So I descended, in pain, crying, because crying was one of the only options available to me right then.
After that, I was back in physio for four months. Then I started running again. And then, as you have already guessed, I was back in pain right after.
That was the point where I gave up. Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way you stop texting someone back.
Then a friend suggested I try one more time, with a different physio. I travelled 2000 kilometres to see this physiotherapist, because at that stage the distance felt like the least unreasonable part of the plan. Three more months of physio. And then I ran TCS World 10k, a race for the first time in a while without pain.
And there it was again. That high. Immediately, the old feeling started brewing in me, the one that says you could get better than this.
But something else was brewing alongside it, which was new. A voice telling me this was a mirage. That I’d be back on crutches sooner or later, and the only real question was when.
But this time I had done it differently. I put serious work into strengthening. I was in the gym enough that I was lowkey identifying as a gym girlie, which is not a sentence I expected to write about myself. I did my first triathlon, more about that soon. I even started training for a half marathon.
And then I felt the slightest twinge in my knee, and I went to the darkest place I’ve been in months.
I spent that entire day reimagining my life. Not thinking about it, reimagining it. I told myself this just wasn’t the life for me, that I had to give up running and sport, that I had to stop making it my whole personality. I got as far as actively wondering what I’d make my new personality instead, which is a genuinely strange thing to find yourself doing on a random Friday. It was one of the worst days I’ve had in the last seven months. It made me so emotional that it felt less like giving up a hobby and more like giving up the will to live, and I know how that sounds, and I’m saying it anyway.
The next day I woke up and ran 6km.
I gave it one last chance, again. And for all six of those kilometres, the only thing in my head was: is my knee okay. Half the run wasn’t running at all, it was an interrogation. Is the pain back? Was that pain or just a feeling? Am I pushing through something I shouldn’t be? Is this how it started last time?
Every time I hit pain, I go back. Every setback, every point where I genuinely needed a break from this sport, I go back. There is something so addictive about it that it overrides the fact that it has done mostly bad things to my body.
And this, I think, is exactly how my friends who keep going back to their terrible exes feel. They’ve always told me, you don’t get it, Charu. And they were right, I didn’t.
But I’ve been in an anxious-avoidant relationship for a while now. Running doesn’t text back. Running has never once been emotionally available to me. And I can’t give it up.
I’m basically Rashmika Mandanna, guys - just not for a narcissistic man 😭