[Guest post] A new shirtless brother

(Andy wrote in with his recent 'conversion'... He dispensed with the safety top in double quick time too. Welcome him, brothers and sisters 🤗. Like he says, it's about enjoying your running.)

Growing up as a chubby kid, being shirtless was one of the last things I'd ever do in public. Even at home, I never showed my bare chest to any of my family members. For pool parties, tubing events, or beach parties, I always had my shirts on. In my youth, as soon as I formed my identity and started thinking (~5 years old), I never took off my shirts in public.

Then when I was 16~17 years old, I lost lots of weight. My adolescent hormones definitely helped, but I also wanted to be in decent shape for the first time of my life. So I ran a lot, every day, around the neighborhood and school. I finally got a teenager runner's body. However, although I gained enough confidence to at least show a bare chest when changing to PE clothes in the locker room, I'd never take my shirts off in public.

Fast-forwarding my story, now I'm 37 years old. Over 20 years from high school, I've gained lots of weight and lost all that for like 3 times. Every cycle, I learned that I had to work out a lot harder as I got older, and by the 3rd time I lost weight, which was in 2019, I decided to break this cycle. So far, for two years, I've been maintaining well and losing more fat while gaining muscle through weight workouts. But I still wouldn't take my shirts off in public.

I hadn't been consistent with running. Since 2019, after my 3rd cycle of gaining and losing weight, I was able to maintain my weight without running. But I could not forget the runner's high, the breeze over my face, and just the good refreshing feeling after you complete the loop. Plus, I got more ambitious now with my body shape that I really wanted to get rid of those couple inches of persistent love handles. I knew running is the key, so I started running again last week. All those good memories of running immediately returned and I enjoyed every minute of it. But I realized that somehow the weather felt a lot hotter than before.

Maybe global warming, or just me. But taking political subjects out of the context, I couldn't explain why, but I just felt like it was just too hot to run. I've run in August plenty of times in my life, and yes, every time it was sizzling hot. But somehow something was different this time. I ran for 3 days with shirts, and I couldn't enjoy running anymore. So on the 4th day, after passing a half point of the loop, I took my shirts off. That's when I suddenly got a boost of refreshing energy, as well as a bit of embarrassment, and started running again to the completion without stopping. It felt great, but I was also super conscious of other people's glimpse of me, that I just wanted to finish running. But in the end, inside my car, I was so proud of myself and decided to try the next day.

And the next day, I got out of my car, leaving my shirts inside the car. I put my music on and started running. At first, I was so embarrassed, so I skipped all my warming-up routine and just started running. After running for a mile or so, I've realized two things - 1. No one really cared about my body, and 2. I stopped caring about what others think of my body. I was drenching and breathing hard that I was just too busy focusing on myself to finish the loop. As the runner's high started kicking in and feeling the nice breeze all over my body, I told myself I'm never going back to running with shirts (unless the weather will freeze me to death).

So it's been about 5 days, and I'm proudly running with no shirts. I've passed a couple of acquaintances, and although at first I was a bit embarrassed, I convinced myself to think like I'm at a public swimming pool or so. And I'm using this as my motivation to work out harder to stay in shape. I'm not trying to say that people with bad body shape shouldn't run shirtless. It's just that everyone has a different comfort level to get shirtless, and for me, I like my current shape to get myself shirtless. When I look at other runners, whether shirtless or not, it's not their body shape I care, but more about how fast they are or how good runners they are.