One day when I was in my no-running purgatory, I clicked on the Instagram story of a runner I follow. She’d made a short selfie video of herself running down a street in Brooklyn. I watched for about 15 seconds and then I burst into tears.

Until I couldn’t breathe like that I didn’t know that part of what I love about running is breathing like that. The way your breath moves into a pattern that weaves into and around the pattern of sound your feet make on the cement. The way you can talk if you have to, but your words are punctuated in all the wrong places by breathlessness.

So yesterday morning while I was running, I didn’t just nod and smile to the people I passed. I didn’t just say “morning” to the two crossing guards I saw, the teenager nefariously slinking out of a back door of the high school, and the mom walking her two kids to school. I said, instead, “hi!” (“Hi” is incredibly difficult to say when you’re exercising, because it takes breath to get that H out).

I said “I hope you have a great morning.”

And maybe I sounded like an idiot, but I don’t care. Because I was out there in the cold November morning, before the sun came over the mountains and then after, when it bubbled over a low canyon and I had to put my sunglasses on.

I was cold and my fingers were freezing, but I was breathing like that—breathing like a runner. Because I was running.

Walking more than running, still, but still: running.

Through the very last of the fallen leaves, which are now slippery instead of crunchy. Past crossing guards, through a fortunate green light on a busy road, along the grass still crisped with frost. Right into the sunlight.

I missed it.

I missed it, and not just because it helps me maintain my emotional balance and my tenuous grasp on a barely-acceptable weight. I missed it for what I love, and for learning what I love about running but hadn’t really put into words.

Like, I love running when I’m some odd, unbalanced fraction into the run that is more than halfway. Like 5.5 miles into 8 miles, .6875 the way finished, and I realize: I’m tired but I’m OK, I’m strong enough to finish. I’m strong enough to finish strong.

I love the feeling of compression on my thighs, the smoothness of a running tank when my hands brush across it.

I love adjusting my socks just so, putting my running shoes on after slipping in my orthotics, and double knotting them.

I love the way I’ve grown to instinctually know when I’ve gone a mile, even without looking at my watch.

I love spotting another runner running toward me, getting closer, nodding to each other when we pass.

I love the way that miles add up in my Strava record, and how no matter what number you start with, maybe a twelve-minute mile run three times a week, you can always get faster, you can always add more miles and more repetitions.

I love getting to a point where I am exhausted, and I don't think I can run one more step, but there's still a mile left, and despite the exhaustion I keep running and finish the last mile.

I don’t know how long this will last. Already it feels like the blessed magic of the cortisone shots is starting to wear off. I keep remembering the despair I felt, when the first orthopedic doctor told me to stop running. My husband said “maybe you’ll get over it, maybe if you stop running you’ll find other things” and I told him what I knew: no I won’t. My two months of not-running taught me that I need to run. And the joy that I feel now that I am running again confirms it.

I won’t get over it.

I won’t get my endorphins somewhere else, like that doctor told me to.

It is this: running. This is what I love. My breath in my lungs, my body moving this way. And I will do whatever I can to keep running, so I can hear my breath and feel that joy.

It is still my favorite way to move, and I suspect it always will be.