running is magic

sunny barbee
Mar 20, 2025
5 min read

I wish I could say I knew this from the start. I wish I could tell you honestly that the first time I laced up my shoes to go run a whoosh came up over me like Cinderella when her fairy godmother had just magically dressed her for the ball. My squishy-ness round my middle, my sluggishness at 9am needing a nap already, my constant trying to justify that Poptarts were a valid lunchtime option: these were my motivation to get started running, but the last thing I felt back then was magical. I wish I could say that I laced up, bounced out the door and into a new way of life, that running was magic from the first moment, but... SIGH, this is a TRUE story, not a fairy tale.

Running IS magic. I stand behind that. For me though, running was sneaky in its approach, showing me teensy tiny little glimmers and shimmers here and there along the way. Until one day, I was running down a hill, on the same greenway I run along ALL THE TIME yet somehow, that day, everything had changed. Like one of those snapchat filters, only I wasn't me as a mouse or a cat but me as a runner. And suddenly, I realized I'd been transformed, I saw my whole world through a new lens, and I even declared, out loud, even though no one was anywhere around save some random rabbit scrambling outta my way, WHOO HOO, I'M A RUNNER!

I'll never forget that moment. It was super hot that day and I loved it. I was soaked with sweat and I didn't care. I threw my arms out airplane style and flew down the hill, a kid again, carefree, reveling in the glory that is me, drunk on the fact that my body can do this! THIS. In my 50's. (Also, this was MONTHS after I'd decided to be a runner, like MANY months. Almost a year of me sometimes dreading my run, making myself go anyway, believing...and sometimes forgetting to believe...that it would get easier, that I was bound to get stronger, of NOT knowing where these miles would take me, but going, and complaining about it often, anyway. Note to self: That's a lesson right there. It may take awhile. Keep going.)

It's so fun to look back and see what we've done, huh? Sure, in the moment, training can feel tedious. Just looking ahead on my calendar, seeing the miles I've got planned ahead of me, gets me overwhelmed occasionally. Trying to fit in all the pieces to the puzzle, heck just figuring out what those pieces are, is daunting sometimes. But...looking back? Seeing what I've done? SUPER fun.

When I look back now, I see those glimmers I was talking about, and how they all string together like fairy lights, twinkling all along my path. That finish-line feeling at my first 5k...I wish I could have bottled it and saved it like the magic potion it was. Doesn't matter that it took me 45 minutes to get there, I got there. Glimmer.

December, 2019. I set out to run 50 miles in a month, the most I'd ever run in a month, and I was not quite sure I could do it. But I did it. Twinkle.

The WHOLE first half of 2020: recovering from a stress fracture in my hip. TOTAL magic. Yeah, the whole breaking your hip thing is NOT at all fun, but oooh the lessons! And the learning! The time to study and read and understand what I needed to improve. Priceless. I'm SO grateful for those months. Glimmer, shimmer, shine.

I came back from that injury a changed person. DEFINITELY a changed runner. We live on a circle at the end of a rather short street, and I'm sure our neighbors thought I was crazy, hobbling down the road and back and down again, learning to walk steady again after all those months on crutches, then timidly trying to jog a bit, finally run/walking until I could full out run. Oh that moment when I got cleared from my doctor and was allowed to run again...I cried. (Tears of joy are a powerful magic.)

There's a sweet older man and his wife that live four houses down from us, and he's always out in his yard piddling around. He stopped me one day and I'll never forget what he said. He told me that he and his wife see me out running all the time, and they're always cheering me on from their window.

"You've really changed your life," he told me.

I think of what he said often, and I really think that sums up just how magical running has been for me. It's such a cliche, we hear it all the time, but truly running allowed me to change my whole life, physically, emotionally, mentally.

And the magic keeps coming. The best part? It isn't always about something I've done. Most of the time, the magic of running is in the details, the seemingly small stuff I might have missed in a car, the leaves swirling around me on a sidewalk or a hawk circling overhead, a cool rock painted and left for someone to find and then I'm the lucky one who finds it. Glimmer.

I believe so much in an everyday magic, that magic is everywhere, all around us, every single day, IF we look for it. In a sun setting just as we round a corner and run down the hill home. In the quite grace of a family of deer we pass on a trail. In the big beautiful shell we find in the surf as we run barefoot down an empty beach. Running has taught me so many things, but I think this is my favorite, that all I need to do to see some magic is to look for it, to lace up, get outside and to say to the universe, "Ok, I'm here now, show me?"

To, as Cheryl Strayed writes in Wild, put myself in the way of beauty. Words from her mother that stayed with her, and as soon as I read them that first time, I knew they would stay with me, too. Put myself in the way of beauty. Go outside and run. See what happens. Look for the magic. It's always there.

I could write all day long about all the ways running has brought more magic into my life.

*About how I went from feeling sluggish and squishy around the middle to feeling unstoppable and powerful.

*From dreading getting older to being excited about ageing up!

*The connections I've made, the community, the confidence, the fun.

*The knowing I can do hard things, the memories of races run with my brother and with friends, the gift of encouragement I've been given, the confidence that I did all those things once, and now that I'm starting over, I can do them again!