The Happy Runner by David Roche

Author:David Roche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Human Kinetics

4

It’s Not All Puppies and Unicorns

If happiness were truly a choice all the time, this book could be a lot shorter. It’d not only be pocket sized, it’d be one sentence. We’d read you the chorus of the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and then we’d all celebrate. We got it! Yes, it seems like a good plan to not worry and to be happy! Then, we’d all share high fives and ride off on our pet unicorns.

Oh crap. There’s a problem. The only unicorns are horses with paper towel dispensers strapped to their heads. This isn’t a fantasy land. In fairy tales, all the endings are happy. In the real world, that only applies to Addie dog at dinnertime.

This book is all about zooming out and finding a framework for unconditional self-acceptance in your running life. Sometimes, though, that is impossible.

Have you ever been depressed? Had an anxiety attack? Felt like the whole world was collapsing in on itself and that your heart wanted to leap from your chest? We both have. Chances are that most of you have had experiences like that too.

For the first couple years, our coaching focused on the first few chapters of this book—supporting people in their happy runner journey, mostly by telling them they were awesome and perfect and their dirty running clothes smelled like a field of wildflowers in springtime. That all changed when a pro athlete joined the team in 2015. She was a mental health expert, and she said the questions we provided were incomplete.

She changed everything. And she did it with just two words.

The final question we ask used to be a catch-all designed to probe what makes an athlete tick: “Is there anything else a coach/friend/confidant should know? Nothing is off-limits, and all is confidential.”

Through that question, we heard about running stuff like fear of racing, self-loathing from slow runs, dreams of one day being the best in the world. Sometimes, we heard about more personal stuff, like childhood trauma and miscarriages. But that question only elicited deeply personal responses about 20 percent of the time. “Alright,” we thought. “That seems about right … maybe?”

Actually, we’d soon learn, it wasn’t right. That question wasn’t enough. The pro athlete asked us to add two words at the end. “Any demons?”

The floodgates opened. Nearly everyone had their struggles to share. The people that seemed the happiest sometimes had the scariest pasts haunting them with each step in the present. Almost everyone could have written a book about what they had overcome. Fear of death, difficult marriages, sexual anxiety, insomnia, not liking dogs—the answers flowed in, often accompanied by heaps of insecurity. And so many of the athletes thought they were the only ones that had these feelings.

We aren’t mental health professionals, so we couldn’t provide expert assistance on most of the topics. But what we could provide is a listening ear. We could try to destigmatize it all in their own heads, talking to them about therapy or medical help or other support when needed.

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