How to Fall in Love with Running

Hello, everyone, and welcome to A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest. In this sports episode, we’re going to discuss how to fall in love with running. Thanks to Canban, the oral-care brand that takes part in the intimate side of your life, for sponsoring this episode. Canban focuses on oral-care technology, creating something distinctive with every breath so that every confident expression and intimate interaction can feel special.

I want to say at the outset that I only recently began to love running. If you’ve listened to the dozens of sports episodes I’ve made over the past several years, you’ve probably noticed that I rarely discuss it. Even though I like exercise, I have never said that I like running. At most, I would say that I knew I needed to run or hoped I could run more, but I didn’t enjoy it.

What I want to discuss is how I came to love running. Before that, I want to explain why I disliked it for such a long time. I hope these feelings can also help people who want to pursue a healthy lifestyle but blame themselves for hating running and being unable to love it. Don’t blame yourself.

Running as an examination

To begin with, I think it’s simply very difficult to fall in love with running within the Chinese education system. We know that boys have to run 1,000 meters and girls have to run 800 meters. For the vast majority of people, this may be their entire conception of running before they leave school.

Looking back now, at least for me, there was no way the 800-meter test could have made anyone love running. It combined every condition that makes people hate it. An 800-meter run is neither easy aerobic exercise nor a pure sprint. It is an extremely uncomfortable middle distance. If you’re not physically fit, you can’t just sprint the whole thing as if it were 500 meters, and my sprinting speed was slow anyway. It requires you to maintain close-to-maximum intensity for a short period, so what your body typically feels is that your chest is exploding, your throat hurts, your legs have been filled with lead, your mind goes blank, and on the final lap you want to die.

I could never fall in love with running because, during that period, running was an exercise in comparison. I remember that in the 800-meter test for the high-school entrance examination, apart from the three specialist athletes in our class, I could actually place near the front. I was even regularly asked to run the 800 meters and the 3,000 meters at our school sports meets. But I hated running and was afraid of it, because to me, running meant enduring pain. Running was pain management. My entire understanding of it was that I was competing with my classmates to see who could endure more pain. I knew that as long as I could tolerate more than they could, I would get a good result, though of course I couldn’t outrun the specialist athletes.

Within an exam-oriented education system, that mentality may even be unavoidable. To me back then, getting a good exam result also meant enduring pain. As long as I did more practice questions than everyone else, even when I knew they were completely pointless, then whoever could tolerate more boredom, work harder, and sleep less would get the better grades. I was trapped in that framework of exam-oriented education.

Normally, I had no time to exercise. Then suddenly there would be a physical-fitness test, and someone, the PE teacher, would drag me over to run. Being dragged over to run meant competing with my classmates to see who could endure more pain. No one ever taught me how to run. No one taught me what pace was, what heart rate was, how to adjust my breathing, or what an aerobic zone was. In my experience, the teacher would simply pull you over and make you run.

In middle school, running was a test suddenly thrown in front of me. The school would notify us that there was going to be a physical-fitness test. We didn’t have to run ordinarily, and we didn’t need to know how. Then one day the PE teacher would say, “All right, come on. All the girls in the class are doing the 800 meters.” The only ability I could draw on was not athletic ability; I didn’t have any athletic ability. All I had was the ability to endure.

My body would begin sounding the alarm, and all I knew was that I couldn’t stop. My lungs would start to hurt, and I knew I couldn’t stop. My legs would start aching, and I knew I couldn’t stop. My vision would go dark, and all I had to do was not stop.

Running became a process of fighting against my body. My body would constantly tell me, “I can’t do this. I feel awful. I need to stop.” Meanwhile, there would be only one voice in my head: “You cannot stop. If you stop, you lose. If you stop, you’ll humiliate yourself. If you stop, you won’t get the points. You won’t get an ‘excellent’ rating.”

When you’re inside an exam-oriented education system, you’re very familiar with this feeling. It doesn’t happen only when you’re running. At many other times, too, you experience this feeling of confrontation and of desperately forcing yourself to hold on. So when I ran, it came naturally. I was still a teenager then. What did I know? All I knew how to do was force myself to keep going.

At the time, I wasn’t running. I was suppressing my body. I wasn’t cooperating with it; I was treating it as something that had to be subjugated by my willpower. If I absolutely had to call the running we did in middle-school PE classes a form of running education, then it didn’t teach us how to use our bodies. It taught us how not to listen to them.

That is why I disliked running for such a long time. Whenever I thought about it, my throat could remember that rusty taste. I could remember the feeling of my chest about to explode, and the feeling of everyone standing beside the track watching while I had to grit my teeth and charge across the finish line. Running was not freedom. Running was a continuation of exam-oriented education. It was simply enduring pain because someone told me I had to do it. What possible reason did I have to like it? Just as I completed every other exercise by drilling practice questions, when it was time for the 800-meter test, I would go to the track and suffer for three minutes. That was my original understanding of running.

Later, after I went abroad to study, I still didn’t fall in love with it. Once I was overseas, I tried many sports. Of course, I was bad at all of them. I played floorball, squash, rowed, played tennis, and tried all sorts of other sports. The events that appear on Chinese athletic fields and in Chinese PE classes would be grouped together in the United States under “track and field,” or athletics. I even spent an entire semester on the track-and-field team, and track and field was still my least favorite of all sports.

My reason for hating track and field in the United States was somewhat different from my original reason for hating the 800-meter physical-fitness test in China. Running was still painful, but you also run in other sports, and they contain plenty of running. I hated track and field because competitive judgment was the sole standard by which it was measured. When you’re on a track-and-field team, it’s the same as running the 800 meters in China: unlike with other sports, there is no way to enjoy the process, because only the result matters.

To be honest, I was terrible at every competitive sport I played. I never made a varsity team. My level was that of a benchwarmer who was just there in the background. I wasn’t good at any competitive sport. But even when you’re a total beginner, you can enjoy other sports. When I played tennis, for example, although I wasn’t good, I could occasionally hit a clever shot, right? I could still play a pretty decent rally. When I rowed, I wasn’t the fastest. In fact, I was consistently the slowest person in our boat. But even as a beginner, I could find a shared rhythm with the boat, the water, and my teammates.

And what did I know about the rules of sports? With floorball, I was just playing chaotically. Sorry, I admit it. Even if I was playing a little chaotically, I was learning the rules through that chaos. There was competition, strategy, and a changing situation. You felt involved, as if you were playing a game. The process was worth enjoying. I could say that participation was what mattered.

But in track and field, participation cannot be what matters. It’s extremely cruel. You can only be judged by the final speed, by that number. You have to be measured. No one cares how I feel during the exercise. They care only about my result. I hate the feeling of being evaluated by numbers. Results, rankings, scores, benchmark lines, the threshold for “excellent,” and the threshold for passing: that is the entirety of track and field. Your body is an examination paper. If you run fast, you are good. If you run slowly, you are bad.

Amid that kind of comparison, you cannot possibly enjoy the process of running. You cannot fall in love with something that reminds you every single time that you are not fast enough, not strong enough, and not good enough. Thinking about it now, people who can fall in love with running under those conditions may love only the feeling of victory. I think it may be possible only because they are winners. But is it really running that they love? Isn’t it victory?

At this point, someone may say, “Oh, so you only disliked running because you never won.” That’s true. I never once came first. Although I was often dragged into track competitions, my results were always [unclear in the recording]. I was always somewhere in the middle, or even near the bottom, on the slower side.

Why was I constantly asked to compete? Maybe because I was willing to endure pain. Everyone who took part was willing to endure pain. But I hated running. The thought of it frightened me. That was my relationship with running for a very long time, more than a decade. Even though my classmates saw me as someone who would be asked to enter track competitions, and even though I ran a great deal, I simply didn’t like it.

I once watched a video by an American content creator who brought together thirty professional athletes from different sports and had them compete in physical fitness. Of all those professional athletes, the ones best able to endure pain were the track-and-field athletes. That was exactly consistent with my memory of talking to the fastest runner on our American track team, a Black girl. She told me that running track was, for her, a process of enduring pain.

In other sports, pain is diluted by the sport itself. Professional athletes in other sports have to make judgments and coordinate with teammates. Their attention has many outlets. Compared with athletes in other sports, track-and-field athletes have a stronger capacity for enduring pain in its pure form because their attention has nowhere else to go. They confront pain without cover, without distractions, and without a plot. When you run 400 meters and the lactic acid explodes through your body over the final 100 meters, no strategy can save you. When you run 800, 1,500, or 3,000 meters and your cardiopulmonary system reaches its limit, no teammate can run one extra step on your behalf.

Track and field is cruel. In my view, this way of running is cruel. It is a head-on confrontation between the body and a number. Can you put on another burst of speed when your body begins to collapse?

When I was on the track team, I once asked that Black girl, the fastest runner on our team, “What does it mean to be a track athlete for the school?” She was a specialist athlete, while I wasn’t. She said that, for her, track and field meant learning to identify pain, manage pain, and treat pain as part of the competition.

But I also know plenty of other serious athletes, and to them, competing is not painful. It can even be joyful. My own athletic ability is ordinary, but I have many close friends who were good enough at sports to make varsity teams at American universities. Xiaohua, for example, was on Yale University’s varsity field-hockey team, and before that she was captain of the ice-hockey team. In my understanding, competitive sports bring other people pleasure, or at least not pure pain. Even as a beginner, I was filled with joy when I played those sports because my attention was dispersed among many different things.

Running could not give me that pleasure. When running becomes pure competition, it is the ability to continue issuing orders to your body while your body is suffering and protesting.

After all this groundwork, you can understand why falling in love with running represents a considerable achievement for me, and why it makes me feel extremely happy and proud.

A word from Canban

Thanks again to this episode’s sponsor, Canban. Your desire to express yourself and the condition of your mouth are closely connected.

I’m someone who often gets right up in people’s faces to make my point. When I get excited talking about a subject I care about, I bob my head and lunge backward and forward in front of them. I also always grin broadly in photographs, showing two full rows of teeth. So I care a great deal about oral health. Whether you have the confidence to open your mouth and speak, and whether you have the confidence to laugh openly with other people, will affect your entire state of being.

Canban has sponsored a sports episode of A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest before. Since then, I have continued using its zeolite whitening toothpaste. The key ingredient is zeolite particles, a third-generation abrasive. The problem with many traditional whitening toothpastes is that although they do whiten your teeth, the abrasive sensation is too strong. You may feel that your teeth have become astringent or even sensitive.

Canban’s zeolite particles, however, are a food-grade ingredient with a spherical structure. Put simply, they can gently polish away extrinsic pigments on the surface of your teeth, including coffee, tea, and tobacco stains, without aggressively grinding down your teeth. Someone like me, who has to drink coffee and pu’er tea every day, can very easily develop yellow teeth. I also have to have my picture taken, so yellow teeth really are a detail I care about. What I think is best about this toothpaste is that it doesn’t create the artificial whiteness of bleaching. Instead, it restores your teeth to a more natural, clean state.

Another very important issue is breath. For many people, the source of their anxiety isn’t their teeth but odor. Fresh breath affects the distance between people, especially when you have to spend a long time in meetings, meet strangers, record programs, or socialize. If you think you have bad breath, you become a little afraid to talk to people. At the very least, it would reduce my confidence in getting right up in someone’s face and delivering my whole spiel, only for them to say, “Your breath smells a little bad.” All your momentum would vanish in an instant. If you tell me I’m foul-mouthed because I like cursing people out, that’s fine. But if you say my mouth literally smells because I have bad breath, that is not okay.

In addition to whitening, the toothpaste can physically adsorb odors. Your mouth feels very fresh after brushing, and it can stay virtually odorless for half a day or more. I think it is very well suited to people who talk for long periods, heavy coffee drinkers, and people who stay up late. The overall formula is also relatively gentle, with no added alcohol, bleaching agents, or other irritating ingredients.

If you’ve recently been troubled by yellow teeth, coffee stains, tea stains, or bad breath, you can give it a try. We have also prepared an exclusive Xiaoyuzhou offer for listeners of this episode. Click the link in the show notes to claim a coupon and make a purchase. In addition, we will draw two listeners from the comments section to receive a set containing Canban zeolite whitening toothpaste and a long-head toothbrush.

Stop watching pace

After that lengthy explanation of why I disliked running, what I want to say is extremely simple, with no nonsense involved, and everyone who loves running will immediately agree with me.

The sole reason I fell in love with running is that I stopped paying attention to pace and started paying attention to heart rate. It is that simple.

Later, I talked to two people who run very fast: Jiang Sida and his manager, Qin Ling. Those two are really damn fast. They can run a marathon in under three hours. In all those photographs of Jiang Sida running so fast, his photographer Qin Ling is running ahead of him taking the pictures, right? So Qin Ling also runs very fast. They told me that running is fundamentally about controlling your heart rate.

Let me first explain the reasoning behind that, and then I’ll share how I stopped paying attention to pace and forced myself to focus exclusively on heart rate. It was not easy for me. It didn’t happen naturally, and it took me a considerable amount of time. Running was something I needed to learn.

That may sound slightly counterintuitive because everyone probably assumes that they already know how to run. Compared with other forms of exercise, running seems to have the lowest barrier to entry. All you have to do is move your legs, and you’re running. You might think that handstands require learning. Advanced street calisthenics requires learning. CrossFit requires learning. Pull-ups require learning. Playing soccer requires learning. Everyone assumes there is no barrier to running: move your legs, and you’re running.

But after exercising for so many years, I want to say that I only recently learned how to run. I had to learn how to run before I could fall in love with it. Learning to run was the process of learning to control my heart rate and pay attention to it.

Before that, I first had to learn to stop paying attention to my pace. I had to abandon my focus on pace because pace is an external standard. Paying attention to pace seemed like the most natural thing in the world to me, but when you focus on pace, running turns into an examination.

I hated running for more than a decade because I treated it as a test. I would think, “Why is my pace lower than other people’s? Why is it worse?” I would pay attention to comparisons, rankings, improvement, and regression. Running felt like handing in an exam paper.

Because my fixation was excessive, or because my self-consciousness was too intense, the moment I started running, I would pursue speed. If you are more easygoing than I am and don’t have such intense self-consciousness, then you are actually smarter than I am. You may not even need to do what I did and specifically learn to abandon comparison before you can begin enjoying running. Needing to learn before I could love running was my own problem. I’m not as smart as people who can naturally refrain from comparing themselves.

Learning to pay attention to heart rate gave me a completely different experience of running. Pace is an external standard; heart rate is an internal one. Heart rate is the language of your body. Pace asks, “Are you running fast enough?” Heart rate asks, “What condition is your body in right now? Are you rushing too much? Have you entered a sustainable range? Should you make an adjustment and slow your heart rate down?”

Once I began paying attention to my heart rate, running was no longer about how fast I needed to go. It became about how my body felt at that moment and whether I could keep this body operating steadily and sustainably. Running changed from self-oppression into a conversation with myself. That is the sole reason I fell in love with running. There were no other factors.

I stopped paying attention to pace. I learned, and worked desperately hard to learn, not to care. I don’t care whether I have improved. I refuse to tell you my pace. Nor do I pay attention to other people’s pace. What is your PB? What the hell does that have to do with me? I’m not telling you what my PB is either. I don’t have a PB.

People online are constantly asking me what my PB is. A few days ago, I led a four-kilometer run for Imaginist and then posted about it online. The very first question in the comments was, “What’s your PB?”

I’m not telling you. I don’t impose requirements on myself. I don’t pay attention to other people’s speed either, and I’m not telling you what requirements I have for myself.

Thinking back on why I disliked running for such a long time in adulthood, even though there were no longer any 800-meter physical-fitness tests and I was no longer on a track-and-field team, my mind had retained the muscle memory left by sprinting in those tests and being on the track team. When I went running by myself, I would often send my heart rate soaring and push my body into an alarm state. I would start gasping. I would feel tired and panicked. My legs would feel heavy and my chest tight. Then I would think, “Oh, this is what running is supposed to feel like.”

In my memory, running was painful, so I thought I had to fight the pain. I mistakenly believed that what I needed to learn was how to overcome it, because that was what running meant. In reality, I was running at the wrong intensity. There was no need for me to fight that pain. What I needed to learn was not how to fight pain. I needed to learn how to change my mindset.

When I stopped focusing on my pace and began focusing on my heart rate, I discovered that the reason I hated running was that I had turned every run into a running examination, a miniature 800-meter test. Of course I hated it.

But when I focused only on my heart rate, I could keep it in Zone 2, meaning 60 to 70 percent of my maximum heart rate. Of course, the exact heart rate depends on your physical condition, sex, and age, right? So there is no particularly precise number that applies to everyone. This is also why I said at the beginning that controlling heart rate is something you need to spend a little time learning about.

After listening to this podcast, if you don’t know what heart-rate zones are or what Zone 2 is, you can look into it yourself and get a rough sense of your own Zone 2. There is no single standard or exact benchmark. Broadly speaking, however, you can also judge it by how you feel. The physical sensation of Zone 2 is that you can speak in complete sentences, but you cannot sing. A heart rate around that level is Zone 2.

For me, this was something I even needed to enroll in a class to learn. I am not joking. I mentioned this to Jiang Sida before. I told him, “I’m currently taking classes to learn how to run.”

In the United States, I took classes at a gym called Orangetheory. The gym offered a dedicated fifty-minute running class. When you attended, they would strap a heart-rate monitor to your arm, and the television screens in the treadmill studio would display the heart rates of every student in real time. Yes, the defining feature of the class was that it showed your heart rate, not your pace.

Then a friend of mine, Zhao Yufei, who is the ultimate king of the grind, found out I was taking a running class and made fun of me. I call him the king of the grind because he pushed himself all the way to having the highest GPA at Peking University. He said that when he was at Shanghai High School, it was especially terrifying: as soon as you reached the top of the stairs, there was a similar large television screen continuously displaying the rankings of every student in the class. We complained in a previous podcast episode about how terrible that mechanism was because it made it impossible not to compare yourself with others.

When he heard that I was taking running classes, he mocked me. He said, “Now that you’re an adult, you even have a television screen continuously displaying heart rates when you run. Aren’t you still turning running into a grind? You’re the running version of the king of the grind.”

But I told him that the class was actually extremely useful in teaching me how to run, precisely because I was learning how not to compete in that way. I was learning how not to grind.

In that class, the screen was extremely useful for someone like me. The moment you started pushing competitively, when you unconsciously began forcing yourself and drove your heart rate too high, the color on the screen would change from green to red. Then all the other students in the class would discover that you were an idiot, because you were pushing competitively, forcing yourself, and driving yourself into a bad level of intensity: an unsustainable intensity that would exhaust you very quickly and prevent you from running for an hour. That is bad. It is wrong.

Look at how stupid I am about this. I actually had to attend a special class to learn how not to force myself. To learn to run, I needed a large screen to display my heart rate and constantly remind me: “You cannot run too fast. You cannot force yourself. You cannot run long distances at an excessively fast pace. If you want to run for an hour, you cannot send your heart rate into its maximum zone. Don’t pursue speed.”

There’s a common saying that life is a long-distance race. What that means is that life is long. Pursuing short-term speed is meaningless because you will very quickly drive yourself to exhaustion. If you want to keep running, you have to let your breathing deepen instead of gasping for air. You have to feel as though you could keep running indefinitely. Although your breathing is growing deeper, you should not feel unable to catch your breath.

Because I’m an idiot, an idiot who very easily pumps herself up, my dominant feeling from time to time is, “This lady is going to charge forward with everything she’s got,” rather than, “I could keep running indefinitely.” I constantly enter a state of going all-out against myself. That feeling demonstrates that I didn’t know how to run. I needed to learn how to sustain the feeling that I could continue running indefinitely.

Truly learning how to run means not suppressing your body, oppressing it, beating it down, or exploiting it. It means beginning to understand your body, learning to converse with it, and not making it sound the alarm.

The significance of falling in love with running is that, after I learned to control my heart rate, I discovered: Wow, I can actually keep running. I can breathe while I run. I can think. I can look at the trees beside the road. I don’t have to feel as though I want to die. Instead of my main experience being that I have to fight that feeling, I can remain within the activity of running for a very, very long time.

The purpose of my run is no longer to finish it as quickly as possible so that I can escape that state. I have discovered, to my amazement, that I can continue being in that state of running, and that it’s actually rather comfortable and enjoyable. That required me to learn how to understand and control my heart rate rather than focusing only on speed, trying to finish the thing as quickly as possible, and then saying my task was complete. That isn’t what it is.

Falling in love with running means falling in love with the process of cooperating with your body.

Making the body a friend

Running is not about proving anything. It is not about proving how fast I can run, how long I can endure, how incredible I am, how much pain I can suppress, or that I am the queen of willpower. Running is not about gritting your teeth and forcing yourself to hang on. It is not pain management. It is not punishing your body. It is a conversation with your body. Truly.

I have always enjoyed functional training and strength training because I felt that running and functional training were different things. If you listen to my podcast, you know that I genuinely enjoy training my body’s physical capabilities. I am constantly discussing flexibility, strength, and balance. The vast majority of exercise-related content I discuss on the podcast is actually about functional training.

To me, functional training means learning how to control the body: Is this movement powered by the glutes, the lower back, the hip joint, or the back? Whether it is flexibility training or strength training, it makes me pay more attention to my body.

I enjoy functional training because when I practice push-ups, push-up variations, or handstands, for example, I know that you cannot force your body. You cannot order it around. When you first start, you simply cannot perform those movements. You can issue all the random orders you like, but your body will not obey. Your body simply will not listen to you. You have to pay attention to it.

In these forms of functional training, the body has its own structure, limitations, and inertia. You have to understand them little by little. I have discussed a great deal of similar material in my sports podcast series. I have said that, at the beginning, I had very little strength, essentially no strength, and saw myself, relatively speaking, as someone with better flexibility.

During that process, I had to realize that the great flexibility I had at the outset imposed many limitations on my body. For example, it made me more prone to injury. If your body is naturally very stiff, you are actually less likely to get injured. When it comes to protecting yourself, having naturally poor flexibility is in fact an advantage.

If you are very flexible, you can easily lose control of your body. Without the necessary muscle, you cannot pull yourself back. You may extend yourself and end up overstretching. That was me learning to converse with my body.

I had never understood running that way. I thought running was not a conversation. I thought running meant, “Faster. Faster still. Push, push, push. Don’t stop.”

That is precisely why, for a long time, I genuinely enjoyed functional training, strength training, flexibility training, and balance training, while treating running as a confrontation with pain and as nothing more than physical depletion. Falling in love with running meant that running, too, became a conversation with my body.

Of course, you train different things when you run. Running primarily trains your cardiopulmonary capacity, not your muscles. It is not strength or flexibility at the level of the muscles. Unlike deadlifts, squats, rows, or handstands, it does not require you to feel a specific muscle generating force.

But running still requires a kind of feeling, a capacity for perception. It requires you to understand the signals your body is sending. Why is your heart rate rising so quickly? Did you sleep badly? Are you under too much stress? Is the weather too hot? Is it too cold? Did you start out too fast? Has your breathing become disordered? Has your breathing started to fall out of rhythm? This requires a strong capacity for perception.

When you step back and think about it, every sport ultimately requires you to learn how to breathe. In tennis, you have to learn how to breathe. In handstands, you have to learn how to breathe. In running, you have to learn how to breathe. Learning to breathe is very difficult, yet you have no choice but to know how. Every sport ultimately returns to breathing. Truly.

A few days ago, I spent four hours in a car with the writer Yang Xiao, traveling from Beijing to Hebei. We talked for all four hours. Because he plays tennis and I practice yoga, everything we discussed during those four hours was really about how to learn to breathe. The two sports we practice are both fundamentally about learning how to breathe. If you don’t know how to breathe, you won’t know how to serve. If you don’t know how to breathe, you won’t be stable in a handstand.

When you run, you need to observe whether your cadence is too low and whether you are once again using willpower to push your body forward instead of allowing it to enter a rhythm through breathing. In the end, whether it is strength training, running, or any other form of exercise, it is fundamentally not about issuing harsh orders to your body. It is about establishing a negotiated relationship with your body, grounded in perception.

What strength training taught me was not to force my way through a weight with the wrong movement. Of course, most of my strength training is bodyweight training. Bodyweight training requires you to listen to your body because your body itself is the weight you need to push up, pull up, and support. It is not an external block of iron.

Recently, running has gradually taught me to listen to my body in the same way. I should not force my way through a distance at the wrong heart rate. In these different forms of exercise, whether strength training or cardiopulmonary training, the body is not the enemy. My body is not something I need to defeat or fight. My body must become my friend.

I cannot humiliate it. I cannot punish it. I cannot exploit it. I need to know where I am right now, what condition I am in, how much more I can tolerate, and whether I should continue or slow down.

I am allowed to slow down. As long as I can keep moving forward at a speed my body can accept, then no matter how slow it is, that is a victory.

Running is not about forcing my body to drag me to the finish line, after which I’m done, lying on the ground and falling apart. It is not about feeling relieved that I won’t have to run again until the next physical-fitness test. That isn’t what running is.

Running means that my body is willing to keep moving forward together with me. My body is my friend. I need to travel with it. I need to travel with my body all the way to the end of my life. So it must become my friend. I must learn to make my body my friend, and I must learn to listen to its voice.

Having said all that, I believe you can agree that I have fallen in love with running. I enjoy running. Don’t come and ask me how fast I can run. I’m not going to tell you. But I believe that anyone who genuinely loves running will hear everything I’ve said and smile knowingly. We are all friends with our bodies. I have finally learned to become friends with my body while running, too.

Finally, thanks again to Canban zeolite whitening toothpaste for supporting this episode. I hope everyone can love their bodies in every respect, pursue health, and care for both their physical health and their oral health.

We have prepared an exclusive Xiaoyuzhou offer for listeners of this episode. Click the link in the show notes to claim a coupon and make a purchase. In addition, we will draw two listeners to receive a set containing Canban zeolite whitening toothpaste and a long-head toothbrush.

That’s all for today. See you in the next episode. Bye-bye!