Charlotte pastor treating her first marathon as a celebration: ‘I deserve to love my body’
Taylor Pryde Barefoot seems to have no problem whatsoever maintaining her composure as she talks about her years-long personal struggles with disordered eating, with body dysmorphia, and with finding a healthy way to enjoy running.
Only while conjuring up a memory of a total stranger does the 29-year-old pastor’s eyes begin to well up with tears.
It’s a memory from earlier this year, when Barefoot had just started training for this Saturday’s Novant Health Charlotte Marathon — and when she, on consecutive runs, crossed paths with the same woman. On one particular day, upon seeing this fellow runner for a second time during the same run, Barefoot stopped her to ask if she was training for something.
“The Charlotte Marathon!,” the woman told her. “I’ve never run a marathon before.”
“Me either!,” Barefoot replied.
“Well,” the woman said, “you’re way faster than me.”
“You’re doing amazing!,” Barefoot encouraged.
Barefoot, the pastor for young adults at Myers Park United Methodist Church, chokes up quickly as she remembers the encounter, and gives this explanation when asked why thinking about it is making her emotional:
“I was having a hard run when I ran into her, and … she was someone that kind of inspired me to stick with it. ... And she’s someone who lived in a larger body, too, so (I was thinking to myself), You could have been someone who believed you couldn’t run a marathon and you’re doing it, and I believed that I couldn’t run a marathon for a different reason, and we’re both doing it.”
On Saturday morning, Barefoot — and, she hopes, that woman (who she never ran into again) — will traverse 26.2 miles during the Charlotte Marathon along with roughly 1,750 other people who have roughly 1,750 unique reasons for running.
This is Barefoot’s, in her own words.
Sports were a really big part of my life from a young age. I played soccer, hockey, lacrosse and eventually started running during my junior year of high school. At first, it was all about having fun. I didn’t take it too seriously, but had a lot of fun being on a cross country team.
During that time, I could wear sports bras or swimsuits and never wondered how I looked. I just didn’t care. I wasn’t thinking about running as exercise; I just was always active. I wasn’t thinking about my food intake; I ate when I was hungry. I mean, honestly, probably very similar to how men typically think about food and fitness. But I was fast enough to get a scholarship to run at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan — which is where my teammates started being like, “Oh, you’re so skinny. Look at your six-pack.” That was the first time I’d been in an environment that was more prone to thinking about food and body weight and running.
By sophomore year, I definitely prized my thinner friends. I had come to believe thinness was a peak of beauty and athleticism. I mean, the fastest girls on our team lived in really thin bodies. Thinner than mine. So it was hard to not think, like, I’m not really getting faster. I’m actually pretty stagnant, if not getting slower. One of the ways people do get faster is by losing weight.
I had teammates and close friends who had eating disorders so severe that they ended up hospitalized. Even so, I started thinking about food differently myself. I really struggled to eat before races, and I kind of chalked it up to nerves. I would always say, “Oh, I run better when I’m hungry.” It got to a point where if my stomach didn’t rumble before a race, I was worried. I didn’t have a binge-purge cycle and my body looked healthy and I remained in a stable BMI, but it was definitely a restrictive pattern in the early parts of the day — and then afterwards I just ate whatever.
After graduating from Aquinas, I went to grad school at Duke Divinity in Durham — which is super-hilly. It’s a miserable place to run. And it’s hot. I’m from Michigan. I am not built for the Southern heat. So I was like, I don’t think I’m going to be a runner here. But my academic program was pretty high-intensity and stressful. And when I stopped running, I was thinking about food and weight in an unhealthy way all the time. The combination of the academic stress and the body negativity made it so I was not doing great mentally.
But one day I stumbled into a yoga class offered at the college. It’s important to note that yoga is something I considered myself very bad at. I’m extremely inflexible and was unable to do many of the poses. I’m not used to doing things I’m not good at, so I really struggled with getting into yoga. But the teacher was using compassion-based yoga and she said, “The only way to be bad at yoga is if you forget to breathe.” And this yoga instructor quite honestly saved my life. She taught me how to treat my body with compassion, to rewire my inner critic, and to accept my body in whatever state it showed up in that day. I never used yoga as a form of “exercise;” it was always more of a mental and emotional practice.
I took a three-year break from running and healed my relationship with exercise through yoga. During these three years, I also learned about intuitive eating — essentially just the idea of eating when you’re hungry, and understanding your hunger cues, and not having food rules, or scarcity mindsets around food.
In 2019 my husband and I moved to Charlotte, and I felt like I was ready to try to get back into running. I started running with a friend regularly, and I was really enjoying it again. She eventually stepped back from running, and although I was anxious at first about the idea of running alone, I quickly fell in love with spending time with myself. I didn’t have to worry about anyone else’s schedule. I could go whatever pace I was feeling. I started being a more compassionate runner towards myself. I was like, I don’t have to run 8-minute miles. I can run however I feel, and I can stop and take a picture of a tree if I want to, because the leaves look pretty.
I ran a half marathon by myself through Charlotte on my 27th birthday, in 2021. I ran my second half marathon this past March, in Asheville. During my marathon training — even though all my training has been at around a 9-minute-and-20-second-per-mile pace, almost two minutes per mile slower than I did in college — I’ve loved the higher mileage because of the stress reduction, the way it boosted my creativity, and because it makes me feel more centered and empowered. And I was feeling excited about turning 30 this coming February. I was just like, You know what? I love where I’m at, I’ve healed, I’ve experienced so much joy and healing and meaning in the last couple years of my life. Who do I want to be when I’m 30? I was thinking how being a runner is a version of me that I’m really proud of. So I decided: I want to be the kind of 30-year-old that runs a marathon.
In the early part of my 20s, I was scared to talk about eating disorders and body image because I wasn’t someone who was diagnosed. I was not healthy mentally. But I was never sick physically. So I was afraid to talk about it because I had been around all these people who were experiencing it in much more intense ways. But at Duke Divinity School, I opened up about it in a class and my professor looked me in the eyes and said, “Taylor, don’t you ever stop talking about this. You are being given a voice, and a position of privilege as a pastor.”
I’ve talked about it with the youth group at our church. We did an intuitive eating group last year with older women at our church. I did a specific course of study related to eating disorders and body image during Sunday school. I’ve preached about the subject at various points. And one of the reasons why I’m so vocal is because I know how much better my life is since I decided to say, I deserve to love my body more than I currently do. I deserve to have a healthy relationship to food and to fitness.
Even so, I can still get triggered. Just a couple weeks ago, I saw a video on TikTok that was talking about how a lot of people training marathons will actually gain weight, instead of losing weight. I mean, I never went into training for a marathon to lose weight. But it planted enough of a seed where I was like, Wait, have I been gaining weight? It triggered that thought of, I’ve been running slower than I ever have. Oh my God, maybe I have been gaining weight. It was enough to have a spiral, and I told my husband that I was experiencing some body dysmorphia. Then two days ago, I told him, “Man, I’m so excited for this marathon. I feel great!” And he’s like, “Taylor, remember a couple weeks ago when you were not feeling good? You look literally the EXACT same.” When you’re in that spiral, it’s so insidious. When you’re out of it, it just feels so silly.
So I am not afraid to say to any man or woman, “Yeah, I have a disordered relationship to food.” Because as I talk about it, they’re often like, “Oh. Actually, maybe I do, too.” And I say, “Most of us do.” I just think it’s really important to just name it and create spaces where others can say, “Hey, I know we’re all dealing with this. It comes in different shapes and sizes for each of us. But there’s no way you made it to however old you are without fat phobia or diet culture messing with you somehow.” If we can normalize it, we can all be on healing journeys together.
Today, I’m not running to stay thin, or to look athletic. I now eat to run, instead of running to eat.
I also view running as a sport — and as a community — that has a lot of liberating potential, a lot of healing potential and a lot of joy potential. I experienced a tremendous amount of joy meeting some of my speed goals as a college athlete, but I think I will feel just as proud of myself running the slowest I ever have on Saturday.
But I think I’m going to be even more excited for the other people who are out there running the race. I mean, this will be a celebration for me, but I know everybody out there will be battling or celebrating something. Very few people run marathons that aren’t battling something or celebrating something, or being motivated by something powerful. And I’m excited to be around that.
Update: Taylor Pryde Barefoot finished on Saturday with an official Charlotte Marathon time of 4 hours, 44 minutes and 18 seconds. (In the results, she’s listed as “Taylor Pryde.” After the race, she told us: “One thing I’ve learned in running is no matter how your training has gone, sometimes there are just races that don’t go the way you hope. I struggled from Mile 16 on and had to grieve the race I dreamed of having. A friend jumped on the course with me when I was struggling the most and stayed with me until the last mile. It was a beautiful day of accepting support when I needed it ... and celebrating a race that met the goal I had set the whole time: to finish the race, not get hurt, and choose compassion when I need to.”
This story was originally published November 2, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
