A friend once asked me whether she had a drinking problem. “I have to have three glasses of wine a day!” she said. I laughed. Only three? “But I have to have them.” I told her I drank 10 glasses of wine a day, and then we both laughed.
We were bloggers at the time, living in New York, in our 20s. Drinks after work were standard, nothing to think twice about. But her comment lodged in my mind. Is it the needing and not the number? The itch? Of course you have to have them, I thought at the time. It’s wine. It’s perfect. What else is there to do in this life? I drank wine every day, even as an increasingly loud voice in the back of my head suggested I was maybe a bit out of control. Maybe stop for a little while, it said, but I wouldn’t.
“Do what you love,” the advice goes. “Follow your passion.” I was like, Okay, so am I supposed to be…a sommelier? Sobriety seemed irrelevant. I knew only a few nondrinkers, and almost none of them up close. Quitting alcohol seemed like a boring and extreme way to address what felt like a delicate, private, almost romantic ensnarement. One with barely any downsides (hangovers, weight gain, bad skin, blackouts, vomiting, hand tremors, constant apologizing, nothing too serious). I don’t need to quit drinking, I thought. I just need to figure out a way to keep the part I love and cut the rest.
But then, in my 30s, I did quit drinking. One morning in May of 2016, I woke up and wanted to stop. I sat on the side of the bed in the musty little rental I had found in Cape Cod (where I had fled New York in an effort to supposedly find myself after leaving a beloved blogging job) and thought, I don’t want to do this anymore; I want it to be over. The drinking myself into a stupor, the same depressing routine every day. I want to be done with the whole thing.
The miracle was that not-drinking turned out to be easy. I know this is not true for everyone, but it was true for me. I read Stop Drinking Now by Allen Carr, a book I’d ordered on a whim several months earlier—a friend had spoken highly of Carr’s quitting-smoking book—and it helped me see drinking in a different light. Giving it up felt like stepping out of an unflattering outfit, as simple as that. I was done with it and on to the next.
The hard part came when I tried to figure out what to do with myself instead. I found I didn’t have any hobbies. I had been a compulsive worker, a compulsive drinker. I wasn’t sure now—still in the moldy little rental on the Cape, suddenly lingering in cafés in the mornings, un-hungover, discovering so many new hours in the day—what I actually enjoyed.
I know this is a common feeling—you quit drinking and suddenly feel naked. Who am I, what do I actually like? First I plugged the gap with murder thrillers. I also knit (I’d taught myself while drunk) and passed a lot of sober nights making “scarves” while watching hair-brushing ASMR videos on YouTube, the clicking, sliding needles and sleepy speech creating in me a kind of drunkenness-mimicking trance. And I already loved coffee, but I took that to the next level, turning my morning café visits into a kind of reverse bar-going experience. Hours at the bar at night became hours in a café each morning. To prolong my visits, I’d bring a journal, and pretty soon I was spending two hours every morning writing and drinking coffee. Then I started sketching too, and eventually the writing and drawing turned into cartoon panels, a comics-style journal, something I still do now. Eventually I started publishing the comics on Instagram, and then I quit my job (I’d gotten a job again) to publish them in a newsletter.
And then I found running, which didn’t have any obvious roots in my pre-sober life. I’d never been athletic and had mostly been intimidated by exercise. I’d gone for one run in my 20s—half-drunk, after encouragement from a long-distance pseudo-boyfriend—and felt like I’d barely survived, my face on fire and my lungs burning.
But after abandoning Cape Cod for Brooklyn again (I wanted to make a new life, and find a husband and start a family), I’d gotten hooked on a barre class near where I lived. I liked its blend of intensity, femininity, and mindlessness (you do exactly what a teacher says, as well as you can). This lasted until the pandemic hit and the sessions went remote. I tried one class from my little kitchen, using vinegar bottles as weights, and knew it wasn’t going to work for me, so I joined an online running group that a friend had invited me to. I intended to log my daily Prospect Park walks as runs but then one day tried actually running—bursting into a trot across the grass so that no one could see me—and was amazed to find I actually liked it. “A pain I want to feel again” is how I put it to myself. After that I kept punctuating walks with trots until after a few weeks I was jogging all the way around the park—a little more than three miles—without stopping. Four months after that, I was running 40 miles a week (six five-mile runs, then a longer one, logging everything on the running app Strava), which isn’t recommended, but I didn’t have a lot else going on. (I was publishing my comics newsletter, but that only took a few hours, and the rest of my day was pretty open.) I was also high on how much I loved running. Plus I had no pain or injuries. (Those would come later.) I remember the first time I ran twice around the park, I thought, I can just keep going. I don’t ever have to stop.
And running is good. I don’t have to lie about it or hide it. It makes me happy, and it makes my life better. There are little parallels between running and drinking, though: I feel antsy, for instance, on days when I can’t run (that itch!). And I backpedal on the days I plan to rest—I’ll just go for a quick one right now and take tomorrow off instead. And I don’t understand the people—my friends—who run only once or twice a week. Why not more? Wouldn’t you want to do it every day?
I also fight about running with the people in my life. Or really just my husband. Who I met in part because of running—toward the beginning of the pandemic, I joined Bumble with a smiling running selfie and the bio line “newly obsessed with running.” (I also used the paid version where you can see who likes you.) We matched, and I pretty much moved into his apartment a couple weeks later.
Maybe as with drinking, from a distance my running habit looks like it’s all “together,” but up close the details are more of a mess, especially when other people are involved. “It doesn’t make everyone as happy as you think it does,” my husband told me the other day. “I have to make time to support it, so it’s not like there are no costs associated. Or that it’s a purely healthy, positive activity, when it becomes required to the degree it is with you.”
One of my most vivid memories of the first year of motherhood was sitting on the bed fuming as I waited for him to come watch the baby so I could run. We’d moved upstate from Brooklyn when I was pregnant with our first daughter and suddenly had tons more space—I’d text him from the bedroom where I waited with the baby, and he’d reply from his office in the garage. Rationally I knew his law career was supporting our family, but I also felt like he was, in some ways, genuinely ruining my life. I need this, I thought. Why are you doing this to ME!?
(Which also reminded me of the time an old boyfriend—a nondrinker, improbably—had encouraged me to give up alcohol for a week, and the fury I felt when we were out to dinner and all I wanted to do was drink. I sulked and stared at the candle in the middle of the table. You don’t know me, I thought. Who are you to keep me from the thing I love??)
And I still run. It’s more like 25 miles a week now, but I run through beautiful farmland, seeing wild turkeys and black bears, vultures and porcupines. I still knit, watch ASMR videos, draw, and read thrillers too. But running is different. My life hinges on it, even though I know an injury could take it all away.
Coming back from the birth of my second daughter, my second C-section, I experienced my first run as a wonderful thing—just as wonderful as I’d imagined it would be. Freezing February air, invigorating—exactly what I wanted. I knew I should take the following day to recover, but I couldn’t resist going out again. My knee felt strange, but I pushed anyway, thinking it might just go away (sometimes it does), but it didn’t, and then my foot began to hurt sharply enough that I had to stop, and I limped home, panicked.
My foot hasn’t been the same since, although the tenderness wears off after the first mile. And it usually only hurts while walking barefoot if I put all my weight down evenly (i.e., stand normally). I still run because I don’t really know what else I am supposed to do.
Sometimes it feels like with these habits I’m edging toward religious faith, or prayer, if prayer involved constant movement. Like I want to turn my mind off but also merge with something bigger. Which is the same thing I wanted in bars, with wine. Every so often while running I burst into begging or thanking. Thank you for this life, thank you for my children, thank you for my husband, for my mother…please protect my children. It feels like for a second I can suddenly see my life accurately, and the words seem to come out on their own. What would I do with those entreaties, those expressions of gratitude if I lived in a different time and place?
The other day I was running with my daughter Holly in the stroller, and it was hot and she was unhappy, but I ignored her and she settled down. We hit a patch of especially smooth road, the sun was shining, the crickets were chirping, the rhythm was perfect, and it felt like I could run forever. And I thought of how I used to not just drink but also smoke cigarettes and abuse Adderall (60 mgs a day sometimes, totally locked in!!!). And it’s tempting to feel like my sober self is whole and healthy. But then I also thought about how I’m constantly on my phone and can’t seem to control that, scrolling Instagram over Holly’s head, as well as while my toddler, Georgia, tries to talk with me. And all along my foot is tweaking from whatever’s wrong with it that I keep pretending isn’t happening, and I keep running even though I should probably stop, and Holly wants to go home, but I don’t want to stop.
Becoming a runner after getting sober is cliché enough that I googled it and found an Instagram post from an inspirational podcaster. In it, he outlines the ways that running is better than drinking (or how whatever good new habit is better than the old bad one). It started out kind of cheesy—“alcohol is a way out, running is a way in; alcohol constricts the mind, running expands it”—but then it got to me, and I was like, Yes, that really IS what it’s like. Running does tell the truth, running does beget acceptance. I scanned the comments, which were filled with “preach, brother”–type messages. But then, also: “Just because running is ‘healthy’ doesn’t mean that one’s relationship to it is.” Which I think is what I’ve been trying to say here. But what do you do with that information? How do you turn that off? Am I supposed to turn it off? I don’t want to. I want to keep going.
Edith Zimmerman is the author of the newsletter “Drawing Links.”