From the outside, my story looks like a straight line. Obese for most of my life, shut away from 24 to 28, then walking, then running, then marathons. The kind of before and after people like to share.
It wasn't a straight line. Looking back, I didn't stop chasing the hit. I swapped it.
Food was the first one. Large amounts, fast, often in a kind of mindless state. When I started walking, I found something else. Endorphins. Energy. Feeling alive in my body for the first time in years. It was real, and it saved me. But it was also a new hit, and I went after it the same way I'd gone after food.
Walking became running. Running became marathons. Marathons became ultras. Ten years of "no pain, no gain". I was fit, and I was running on empty. A one-track mind, a bit like a robot. Relationships broke down, and I kept training.
And the food didn't simply go away. Disordered eating swung the other way, and there were periods of anorexia. Overeating and restricting look like opposites. For me they came from the same place. Control. Escape. Something to do with the feelings I couldn't face.
Tap to swap the habit. Watch what stays in the middle.
There's a name for this: addiction transfer. One compulsion gets swapped for another, and the thing underneath stays exactly where it was.
The hardest part is that some swaps get applause. Nobody stages an intervention for a man who runs too many marathons. People tell you how well you're doing.
The plaudits from events and the chasing of times always brought comments, and a drive to be better and faster. The goal was always to beat the last event. To show up in shape, and basically keep hurting myself. Much like the obsessiveness of eating past being full.
I'm not saying the running was a mistake. It gave me my life back. But it took me a long time to see this:
Changing the habit isn't the same as changing what drives it.