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Transfem Trail Guide #3: The Power of the Tempo Run & How to Be Calm When the Internet Says You Should Be Scared
2025-10-13
There are days when the harshness of the larger world lays itself bare before you: election night 2024 when my downstairs neighbor cheered after Fox News called the presidential race; September 2025 when the church of my childhood filed a motion to remove transgender people as a protected class; the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing when all of social media united to say… “actually transphobia is good?” These days pulled me out of my body and left me feeling numb and alone. The world wants us hidden or gone, and there is nothing I can do about it. At least, that’s what everyone on the internet said. And in a sense, the internet was right—nothing I could do or say would alter the choices of corporations, countries, election results, or that guy I ran with a couple times in 2019. So what then? When the world is so surely organized against you and your existence, why does it matter if you get out of bed or turn off your phone? Is there any way to find peace? I mean…I’d recommend a good therapist for sure. And I’m all for hot baths and journaling, a comforting meal and a favorite sweatshirt, or a long conversation with someone you love. Those strategies work for a lot of people, but I personally believe in one particular cure: the power of the four mile tempo. Tempo runs exist in a weird liminal space between easy and overwhelmingly hard. Push too fast up front, and the final few minutes will feel like a race. Go too easy, and you’ll forget that this was meant to be a workout. The key to the tempo run is being in tune with your body’s signals. Pace and heart rate will vary so much between sessions and workouts that the tempo run can’t be dictated by external data. No, the tempo run is about internal communication—grounding yourself in your temporal reality and responding to whatever signals your body conveys. A few weeks ago, when I was emotionally spent, I discovered just how effective the tempo run can be. It had been a really challenging weekend. The Michigan church shooting had happened only a few hours before I left for my long run, and I was still in the middle of sorting through that bucket of emotions. Everything felt *hard.* 12 miles seemed like a long way. I ran easy pace barely faster than a hike, and doing my scheduled tempo any faster than a shuffle was surely impossible. I gathered myself during an unnecessarily long bathroom break a few miles into my run, and I decided to try running fast anyways. Who knows, maybe it would help? I didn’t know at the outset how effective tempo running would be at pulling my mind—which was spiraling down a hole dug by global political violence and exit poll data—back into my body. But it worked incredibly well. I found that although my mind was tired and discouraged, my body wanted to be heard and acknowledged, lived-in and challenged. A tempo session was the thing I needed. It helped me remember that I was somewhere I love, doing the thing that I love, and being the person I love to be. My mind left the spiral and returned to my breathing, to the placement of my feet on the trail, to the smell of the juniper, and to the sense of living in a real physical world. All that said, I’m well aware that for many, being placed back in your body isn’t always a good thing. A little over a year ago, prior to beginning gender-affirming care, running would make the pain of my gender dysphoria so much worse. The effort to run would successfully ground me in the present moment, but honestly, I wanted to be anywhere else. To me, dysphoria was centered in my physical reality, so I found relief by escaping out of the physical world as much as I could. I’d binge podcasts and YouTube videos. I’d lie in bed for hours daydreaming until my back hurt. I don’t believe escapism at that level is particularly healthy, but I agree wholeheartedly with Tolkien when he wrote the following. “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.” This idea—that escapism is both rational and healthy—fits my lived experience. I know how badly the present can hurt, and I respect choosing to mentally escape in those moments. But in our digital world, a world where we’re constantly grappling with international tragedy and anonymous opinions, the pain is often entirely removed from our physical reality. The pain emanates from the abstract. That’s where tempo runs come in. If the source of your stress or pain exists outside of where you are or what you’re doing, tempo runs may be the thing you need to bring your sense of self back into yourself. Hopefully then, you will remember that you are safe, happy, and free to do the thing you love as the person you are. Federal politics and college roommates be damned, they can’t take the tempo run away.
