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​Update: I Don't Actually Hate Running Now​
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My book I Hate Running and You Can Too recently celebrated its fourth birthday, and I have for a while now felt like I needed to get something off my chest:

I don’t really hate running.

I did write that book, but the title was supposed to have a heart in place of the “a” in “hate,” which it did, on the book cover:

But you can’t put the heart into book title databases, and you can’t actually pronounce the word “h♡te,” so if you googled the book, or mentioned it to a friend, you’d have to say “hate.”

Which was kind of how I felt about running in 2019 when I was writing a book proposal for it—but only kind of. I mean, I procrastinated running, sometimes dreaded running, but I wouldn’t say I hated it that often. I certainly didn’t hate it as much as Red Sox fans hate the Yankees, or as much as some people hate cilantro, or mayonnaise.

I just thought it was a sort of clever title. Like yeah, I kind of hate it, you might kind of hate it too, but here’s how you can convince yourself to do it, which might eventually and paradoxically make you learn to love it.

Two illustrations from the book (on pages 152 and 153):

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I found out last week that I Hate Running and You Can Too earned out its advance, which does not mean it’s a bestseller. But most books don’t earn out their advance (depending on whose stats you believe, only 25-30 percent of books do). I got a small bank transfer last week, and a $10 gift card to Chipotle, which my publisher sends to all authors whose books earn out their advance. Actually, the gift card part isn’t true, but—not to brag—the bank transfer was enough money that I can go to Chipotle for lunch today.

When the book came out in 2021, I still had a very hate/love relationship with running—I had no problem going on podcasts to promote the book and talking about how it was hard for me to drag myself out the door to go for a run, but once I was out there and got warmed up for 45 minutes or so, I started to enjoy it. But I still didn’t, you know, LIKE running.

And then sometime in the next couple of years, I just started … not hating it as much?

Maybe it was because we had a baby, and I really couldn’t spend a whole morning procrastinating my run—if I was going to ask Hilary to watch Jay for an hour or an hour and a half, I had to get my ass out the door and get going. And then, when I did run, it was uninterrupted ME TIME (unless I was pushing a jogging stroller with Jay in it), so maybe I began to appreciate it more. Or maybe I finally did enough running that I didn’t feel right if I didn’t do it for a couple days?

Whatever happened, I started being grateful for it, instead of feeling like it was something I should do, like taking out the trash or flossing my teeth. Now, when I get to go run after a couple days off, it’s a relief (maybe sort of like finally flossing out something that’s been stuck in between my teeth?).

I flipped through the book a few weeks ago and remembered something I’ve kind of known the whole time: The title is just a title, an attempt at being clever in order to get attention—the book is really about how to approach something you find challenging or even too daunting to begin (maybe running, maybe writing, maybe the creative process, maybe something else). Sometimes you do dislike one of those things, but not quite enough to not do it. And maybe you do it enough that eventually you develop sort of a Stockholm Syndrome relationship with it.

Wow, I sound like a psychopath.

Anyway, people change, I guess.

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