I didn't come to running. Running came for me, on a cold morning in early 2025, while I stood on a pavement in the city cheering for my friend.
She was running her first half marathon. I was following by metro, jumping off at different stops to catch her at cheering spots, waving a sign I'd made the night before. Between stops, I was walking fast, climbing stairs, nothing more. And I was exhausted.
When she crossed the finish line, 21 kilometers later, she looked alive. Not just relieved or proud, though she was both of those things. She looked like someone who had found something. And I remember standing there, winded from the cheering spots, looking at her, and thinking: I cannot keep living like this.
I couldn't keep living like this.
I was 39. I weighed 115 kilograms. I had been in and out of depression for years, moving less and less, shrinking from the version of myself I wanted to be. The world had told me, in small ways and large ones, that certain things weren't for people like me. Running, certainly, wasn't for people like me.
I decided the world was wrong.
I didn't hire a personal trainer. I didn't join a running club, though I looked for one and found that most assumed a baseline I didn't have. I bought a Garmin, downloaded a beginner plan, and started in January. My nutritionist helped me think about food differently. My friend, the one who ran that half marathon, ran beside me when I needed her and ahead of me when I needed to learn to go alone.
The first time I ran 500 meters without stopping, I cried. I didn't tell anyone. It felt like too small a thing to share and too enormous a thing to contain.
In May 2025, I ran my first 5k. It took me 40 minutes and I was last in my wave. I didn't care. I had run 5 kilometers. A year earlier I couldn't have imagined it.
In September, my first 10k. In April 2026, I crossed the finish line of the Berlin Half Marathon. 21 kilometers through a city that had no idea what that morning meant to me.
The finish line doesn't know what it took you to get there. But you do.
In between all of that: more than 30 kilograms gone. Depression, largely beaten. A relationship with my body I didn't know was possible. Energy I had forgotten I had. Confidence that comes not from looking a certain way but from knowing what you are capable of. I trust myself now in a way I didn't before. When things get hard, I remember that I have already done hard things. I have the data. I have the medals. I have the blisters.
My pace is 7:30 per kilometer. On good days. On hard days, slower. The internet tells me, in comment sections and through algorithm-selected content, that this is not really running. That there's a threshold, somewhere around 6:00/km, below which you don't qualify. That what I'm doing is "just jogging." That I should "speed up" before I call myself a runner.
I've spent time being hurt by this. I won't pretend otherwise. Even after everything, the noise still got in. That's the insidious thing about comparison culture: it doesn't care about your story. It only sees the number.
But here's what I know now, on the other side of 30 kilograms and a half marathon and a life I love more than I did before: my pace is the least interesting thing about my running.
What's interesting is the cheering spot. The woman who couldn't walk between metro stops without getting winded, who watched her friend finish something impossible and made a quiet decision that changed everything. That woman runs now. She runs 22 kilometers on her long runs. She is training for the Berlin Marathon in September.
She is slow. She is a runner. Both of these things are completely true and neither one of them cancels the other out.
That's why The Unpaced exists. Not to make slow running acceptable. But to say, clearly and without apology: the finish line is the same line for all of us. It doesn't move for the fast ones.
If you're still on the course, you belong on the course.
Run your own race.