Nathan Schiller

In recent news, I started a running podcast. Or, more specifically, Inés Bebea started a running podcast, and Jaime Chien and I joined her as hosts, and, along with others, helped get it going. And it all went down in a pandemic.

The podcast is called “Let’s Get Uncomfortable,” which nods to the punishment that running can inflict on our bodies and our minds, as well as to the discomfort that may arise from questioning who is a runner, who gets to be a runner, who gets to run races, and whether it all has to be that way. Or, here’s how we officially describe it:

Conversations that probe how our athletic love affair with running can be a tool for change in 2020 and beyond.

So, we’re the hosts, but the podcast isn’t about us. It’s about our guests, about their programs and organizations, their experiences and ideas. They will represent a wide swath of the New York City running scene. Some may be well known to a larger audience, others may not be. Wins and PRs will have little or nothing to do with it.

Who is a runner? What is a runner?

As we’ve been working on this, I have been reflecting on my experience as a runner, though that phrase “as a runner” never feels quite right. I don’t think of myself as a runner, but as a person who loves to run, and the distinction’s important, because I did not always love to run.

What I loved to do was play sports, competitively and recreationally, though that too is a distinction that elides a certain reality—that many of my favorite memories of athletics are not high school soccer state playoff games under stadium lights, but intense pickup basketball games at the playground down the block or in the new gym at the JCC or on the upper ballfields at summer sleepaway camp, sports played with my friends, for fun.

As a kid, no matter how much energy I expended, I always had more. But I never thought about stamina in any sort of cardiovascular way. I wanted to keep moving to keep the games going. Even when I ran track for my two middle years of high school, I probably never jogged for more than an hour continuously. The idea seemed pointless, dreadfully boring.

After high school, I went to college. I ate way too much bad food, drank way too much beer, exercised exclusively for the social element, and felt my body grow its adult frame. In high school, I had always wanted to weigh more—to be bigger, stronger, faster—but no amount of lifting or dieting worked. And then, just as I was turning nineteen, those twenty-five pounds came quickly. Most were junk.

In the spring of sophomore year, a friend texted that we were doing the Chicago Marathon. I told him no way. But the seed was planted. I started running twice a day and found it hard to stop. That was more than 16 years and many, many long runs ago.

Podcasts are perfect for talking about running

Whenever I write about running, I face the compulsion to break into ten different tangents. This one idea reminds me of this race where X, Y, and Z happened, and that story is but an anecdote in chapter two of volume one of my running life, which is inseparable from my real life, and suddenly I’m drafting an autobiography.

Maybe running just lends itself more to conversation than to the written word. We get uncomfortable together on the road or the track or the trails, and it’s only natural to talk it through. A pandemic pulls the brakes, but that’s why we have podcasts.

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Art by The Orange Runner.