I Built My Whole Identity On Being Good At Things, Then I ‘Failed’ At Running

I hate running, so naturally, I signed up for a 10K race. If this sounds contradictory, that's just an average Tuesday in my brain. A few months ago, I agreed, half eagerly, half anxiously, to train for the Nike Melbourne Marathon Festival 10K. The idea of running for fun felt absolutely alien to me. Yet there I was, lacing up my shoes at 7 am in the dead of Sydney winter, complaining to my best friend on FaceTime and wondering what on earth I’d gotten myself into. Spoiler: the two months that followed were painful, disheartening, yet empowering, and full of grudging epiphanies about identity, and why anyone in their right mind would run when no one is forcing them.

On my first training run, I got overtaken by a five-year-old in jeans; this also occurred on my second and third runs. Humbling, to say the least, my ego didn't really appreciate that. As a former competitive figure skater, I’m used to gliding and leaping into an axle on ice, not tripping over my own feet on pavement. Years ago, I trained for a minimum of three hours a day, six days a week, chasing perfection with clean toepoints and loops in sparkly costumes. Now, at 29, I was a sweaty beginner, panting through a jog. The mental whiplash of this made me want to quit every time I felt slow or struggled. After all, if I wasn’t immediately good at running, why do it at all? That toxic perfectionism voice was louder than my shoes on the concrete.

I hung up my skates in my late teens after thirteen years of competing, due to a very slow burnout. I truly thought I’d made peace with leaving professional sport behind, but training for this brought back feelings I hadn’t confronted. As a skater, my identity through my child and teen years was completely tied to performance, always defined by medals and scores. Without that, I felt unmoored. So when I started running and wasn’t immediately great at it, it hit a nerve. Who was I, if not the high achiever?

During training, I had a chance to speak with Nike Run Coach Lydia O’Donnell, who gave me some advice that I'd heard before but never really listened to. “Tying your identity to an outcome or a performance can be dangerous, as nothing in life is guaranteed. It’s important to know who you are without success or sport, and carry that authenticity of your true self into your passions, like running,” she told me. In other words, I had to learn to separate who I am from how well I run. That hit hard. I’d spent decades defining myself by podiums and personal bests.

Let’s be honest: my first attempts at “joyful” running were not exactly brimming with joy. I was frustrated with my pace, annoyed by side stitches, and my ADHD-fueled brain was bored. (Have you ever tried having 100 intrusive thoughts while also gasping for air? Highly overrated.) But Lydia’s point about identity made me rethink why I was doing this, as well as many other things in my life.

Growing up South Asian, the idea of pursuing sport “just for fun” was pretty much nonexistent. In my family, and many like mine, sport was something boys did, ie cricket, and something girls could dabble in until school and “real life” got serious. I was an anomaly for dedicating my teenage years to figure skating. Still, there was an unspoken understanding: if I was doing it, I’d better excel. There needed to be a clear purpose (trophies, titles, maybe a path to the Olympics) or else… why bother?

That mindset lingered long after I left the ice. Signing up for a 10K with no goal beyond finishing felt ridiculous. I wasn’t trying to win or set a record. I was doing this for myself, without really any bigger purpose, so what on earth was the point? I asked Lydia how women like me, who grew up viewing sport as a luxury or a phase, can unlearn that mindset. She told me something beautifully simple:

Hearing “if you have a body, you’re an athlete” gave me chills. It made me think of all the times I’d felt I didn’t belong in the sports world once I wasn’t a champion skater. But here was permission to still see myself as an athlete in a way that never made sense to me before. Every kilometre that I logged was triumphantly against the idea that movement has to have a higher purpose or prestige attached.

Confession: I hated every single part of running. Not just the start, not just the middle, all of it. The burning lungs, the aching legs, the mental spiral. But the one thing I did love? Being told I was doing a good job. Every time I dragged myself out for a run, one of my biggest supporters in life, who knows just how much I despise not being good at something right away, would tell me how proud he was. And listen, the praise kink is real. Like, really real.

Sure, the endorphins helped. I felt a little less feral afterwards, a little more present. But let’s be honest: that minor mood boost wasn’t enough to get me lacing up again and again. What did? The fact that I said I was going to do it. And so I did. Probably not the most inspiring reason to keep showing up, but sometimes sheer stubbornness is underrated.

I admitted all of this to Lydia, and she didn’t flinch. “Running is hard, that is why we love it. Everybody finds it hard, no matter how experienced or fit you are… Lean into the hard. The more you do it, the more you’ll start to enjoy feeling challenged. This is where the love of running is found,” she told me. That reframed everything: struggling didn’t mean I wasn’t cut out for it, and in fact, we seem to have gotten too accustomed to instant gratification; this was and is the one thing in my life that didn't give me the optimal end result immediately, and that in turn was good for me.

But the big thing is, I didn’t actually run the final 10K. The day before race day, I had to pull out. My back and shoulder injuries flared up; I’d been travelling constantly, was overworked and overtired, and in my gut, I just knew I wasn’t ready. And to be totally honest, a part of me felt relieved. I’d been pushing through discomfort for weeks, both mentally and physically, but this time, my body flat out said no, and for once, I actually listened.

Was there guilt? Yes, a lot. But mostly, there was a weird sense of peace. I didn’t run the race, but I still got something real out of the process. What this whole thing gave me — beyond Nike gear (including the Vaporfly 4s, which made me feel faster than I was, purely by delusion) — is that it shifted how I see myself in relation to movement. Before, the default was almost always avoidance. Not because I was lazy, but because I genuinely didn’t believe I could. Now? I know I can. And that subtle shift, from I don’t want to to I know I can, has completely changed how I show up in my day-to-day life.

Since the training regimen, I'm more likely to go on a walk now, even when I don’t feel like it. I’m more aware of the difference it makes to my brain when I do something, anything, that involves moving. It’s like I went from feeling like I couldn’t be fully human to suddenly feeling like I could. Not because I ran 10 kilometres, but because I just tried.

Will I ever become someone who loves running? Probably not. Runners still seem like a very specific breed of people. But now I get it a little more. I get why you’d keep doing something hard just to see who you are on the other side. And while I didn’t run the race, I did change how I think about movement, about health, and about myself.

As a South Asian woman, as an ex-athlete, and as a neurodivergent control freak trying to chill the fuck out, this whole thing showed me that success doesn’t always look like crossing a literal finish line. Sometimes it looks like opting out with grace, sometimes it looks like walking instead of running. And sometimes it looks like just believing you can, even if you don’t. Yet.

The writer travelled as a guest of Nike.