How the Best Lessons I Learned During Racing and Endurance Training Sabotaged My Dating
The first time my body involuntarily began shivering and crying during physical intimacy, I felt betrayed. How dare it respond without me consciously willing it! I was 36, with over a decade of hookups—many lubricated with Pinot Grigio or bourbon. That spring evening in 2014, after running my fastest half marathon, I was celebrating with a runner I’d lusted after for a decade. I applied the same strategy to the hookup I'd learned as a teen running cross country: disconnect from my body’s sensations to push through discomfort, anxiety, and “this doesn’t feel right” feelings to “win.”
My high school yearbook quote, “The body achieves what the mind believes,” served me while running, but the motto did me a disservice in my dating life.
While I was a slender high school freshman, running and winning came to me easily. But as my body changed throughout puberty and my mind became more self-aware and critical, racing became harder. I remember telling my parents I felt like I was trapped in a bubble–that space between dreaming and waking where I couldn’t will myself to move faster. My father, suspecting I was holding back my sophomore year, told me that unless I puked or passed out at the finish line, he didn’t think I’d put it all out there. And so, I started dropping to the ground at finish lines—depleted of everything. My reward was his praise, despite my visible suffering. I wanted to please my father and my male coach.
But it wasn’t just the dynamic I had with them that encouraged me to press through discomfort and ignore what my body was telling me. I grew up in a culture praising the iconic images of Julie Moss collapsing before crawling across the 1982 Ironman finish line, Uta Pippig winning the 1996 Boston Marathon with excrement and blood dripping down her leg, and Kerri Strug landing her 1996 Olympic gold-winning vault routine on torn ligaments. As a college student of the 90s, I’d been taught I could earn anything I wanted with enough effort and focus: good grades, athletic records, a successful job, and even the hot guy on the soccer team.
The mindset that made me a tough runner taught me to ignore my body’s boundaries and disconnect my mind from my body at a young age. Then I unconsciously transferred the “skill” to adult hookups. The risky ones with semi-strangers matched the adrenaline rush I got from racing. My dopamine-seeking ADHD mind found the nice guys who were transparent about their feelings utterly boring.
For years, I would use dissociation to distract myself from the incongruous feelings of excitement and shame while getting naked with men in hopes of “winning” their attention—to prove myself as desirable. Nothing felt worth winning unless I’d suffered.
The shakes wouldn’t happen again for three more years, but when they returned, they came more frequently and often started with simple kissing. When I warned one date before getting physical, he responded, “That’s sexy.”
It was not sexy. It was a wake-up call after a decade of dates, situationships, and hookups with perfect-looking Peter Pans in Boulder.
“It’s your body responding as if it’s been abused,” my therapist told me during one session. “Slow down and listen to your body. It’s tired of feeling discarded.”
One day, I assured my therapist as I was walking out the door, I’ll figure it out. “No, Amanda,” she responded. “You will never figure it out. You have to feel your way through it.”
She suggested we do somatic work, the “How does this memory feel in your body” kind, paired with talk therapy. My entire being resisted this work. I would never have made it through grueling interval workouts on the track, run up mountain trails, or crossed marathon and Ironman finish lines if I had paid attention to the heavy weight of my legs, deep ache in my gut, and pre-puke metallic taste in my mouth. I had become adept at dissociating—often externally by listening to music or internally by repeating mantras in my head.
We started in small doses. In sessions, I recalled in detail the scenes where I had had the shakes. I paused to sense where in my body I was feeling tension during the recollection and what the tension had to say I had previously ignored. The voices of fear, anger, shame, and disgust arose. I was surprised by how exhausted I felt after each session. But slowly, my awareness and my stamina to explore the voices grew. On future dates, when my gut sensed disingenuity, for example, I listened and ended them early. I gave myself permission to slow down and feel into experiences with men to determine if I was numbing out to play the game or if my body wanted out. I describe the steps toward reconnection with my body in more detail in my book When Longing Becomes Your Lover.
I value the grit I learned through decades of endurance training, but I now see the equal value in being able to tune in to my body—especially to listen to and trust what my gut is telling me.
In the fall of 2018, I found authentic love with a trail-running, long-haired drummer from Long Island living in Boulder. The first time we made out at his place, my body responded with the same shakes, and when he expressed concern he’d done something wrong, I explained my pattern. He didn’t bolt. He listened with curiosity and was willing to slow down. Over time, I began to find comfort in the certainty of his consistency and transparency—it felt safe, not boring or suffocating. I was neither trying to win him nor afraid of losing him. The relationship flowed–like the levity in the runner’s high I’d been seeking for decades. It’s been eight years, and we still run the trails of Boulder together.
Amanda McCracken is a freelance journalist, running coach, TEDx speaker, and the host of The Longing Lab podcast. She is the author of When Longing Becomes Your Lover: Breaking from Infatuation, Rejection, and Perfectionism to Find Authentic Love: A True Story of Overcoming Limerence. Based in Boulder, Colorado, she loves running local trails but also traveling with her husband and daughter.