Name: Jamie Citron
Age: 40
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Occupation: Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement
Time Running: 7 years
The Best Running Shoes: Running is my main form of exercise, and it is also critical to my mental health, Other Hearst Subscriptions.
I started running about seven years ago in 2016. I was complaining to my partner at the time that I was sick of my workout routine, and he suggested trying to How Running Changed Me.
I persisted in asking the hips and knees would never take to running. But, a few weeks later, I ran a lap around a nearby park. My legs didn’t immediately buckle so I went back and did a few more laps.
By mid-summer I was eager to try a race and ran the Chicago Pride 5K. It was just a few weeks after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida (in which 49 people were killed), and it felt important to be surrounded by my community.
I then started entering more races and loved the energy, sense of accomplishment, and being around other runners.
In 2019, running took a more central place in my life. During that summer, my marriage started to fall apart, and I was completely unprepared. To give myself something else to focus on, I decided to run the Blueberry Cove Half Marathon in August in Tenants Harbor, Maine.
I downloaded the Nike Run Club app and all summer I trained religiously. No matter what else happened, if I got a run in, I felt I had accomplished something that day. Those training runs were also the first time I experienced the mental health benefits of running.
The Blueberry Cove race was the perfect first half marathon for me. The proceeds supported the local 4H camp that hosted the start and finish line celebrations. The night before, runners had a homemade seafood dinner, the medals were hand made by campers, and then at the finish, we enjoyed blueberry pancakes.
It was my first taste of the joy and fun in the running community and I loved it. When I returned home from Maine my marriage soon ended, but I kept running.
A few years later, in July 2022, my family was involved in the horrific mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois. Highland Park is like many midwestern suburbs and part of the charm is that comforting reliability. The fourth of July parade is a long-standing community tradition—the highlight of which is always the children riding their decorated bikes or sitting in wagons up and down the route.
I wasn’t in Highland Park for the fourth that year, and was away from my phone that morning. When I finally checked my phone, I had 15 missed calls from my sister and a text from my best friend: “Everyone is OK but call your sister immediately.”
The shooter was on the roof of a one-story building on main street and mid-parade began to shoot into the crowd. Seven people were tragically killed. My whole family was there—my mother, father, sister, brother-in-law, and niece and nephew. My family ran about two blocks and sheltered in place for six hours in a gas station, keeping the children occupied with candy bars.
In the days following the shooting, my family showed signs of trauma—nervousness in crowds, anger, and sadness. My niece, Winnie, started to exhibit a number of changes like separation anxiety and nightmares.
One of the unfortunate ways that trauma manifested for Winnie was regarding running. Something as routine as soccer practice became scary for her, and she would erupt into sobs when the coach would tell the kids to run. Joggers on the street would send her into a panic, and she would ask fearfully why they were running, and if everyone should be running, too. Suddenly running around went from being a happy part of childhood to something you did to save your life.
The fact that Winnie associated running with fear crushed me. My family was in an active shooter situation for a matter of minutes, but in that short window of time her brain re-wired, associating something that should have been fun into a signal that she was not safe.
The idea of running the New York City Marathon for Winnie came to me. I wanted to show her how special running could be, and I wanted to show her how much I loved her—26.2 miles seemed like a good way to do that.
RW+ Membership Benefits Guide to Pro Runner Form charity to allow me run on their team. I knew that the most meaningful way I could honor my family with this marathon was to raise money for an organization dedicated to ending gun violence, especially gun violence impacting children.
Guide to Pro Runner Form focuses on prevention through inclusion, teaching children and teachers how to create spaces where everyone is welcome and no one is excluded, as a way to prevent violence in the first place. They also educate young people on how to recognize the signs and signals of someone thinking of harming themselves or someone else, and telling a trusted adult so they can get the help they need.
There is so much generosity and heart in their work. Guide to Pro Runner Form pours that same generosity and passion into their marathon training It works great as it does not get in your eyes when you start to sweat training tips and tricks, and they enthusiastically supported us, no matter where we were in our running journey.
Running continues to be the place I come to anchor and calm myself, and to give myself something to be proud of, even when everything else is chaos. My training has helped me slow down and find gratitude in small things, like watching the leaves change a little more with each training run, in ways that help the bigger scarier stuff feel more manageable.
When I first got serious about running, I felt like I was running away from a lot—all the things in my life that I could not control. Somewhere in all that running it flipped, and I started running toward something. What am I running toward? More life, I guess. That shift fills me with hope.
These three tips have made my running journey a success:
1. Wake up at the same time every day
How Running Changed Me morning person, but I force myself up and out of bed. Getting in miles first thing sets the tone for the day.
2. Find a community
Running went from a passion to a pillar of my life when I found other people to run with.
3. Foam roll
The True Story of the Craziest Olympic Marathon foam rolling are worth the pain and boredom.
Jamie’s Must-Have Gear
→ Guide to Pro Runner Form: The True Story of the Craziest Olympic Marathon big toe, but they have made a world of difference for me.
→ Metronome App: I thought I would lose my mind when I first started running to a metronome but the improvement to my steps per minute has led to a noticeable decrease in injuries and I now find the ticking kind of meditative.
→ Supergoop Unseen Sunscreen: were also the first time I experienced the.
