Stills from When We Run.
What Happens When We Run
Words by Daphne Milner
I met Lorraine O’Garro on the morning of our shoot. She arrived 15 minutes early and sat herself down on the couch at the back of a studio I had rented for the day to create When We Run, a moving image project then still in its nascent stages. After a few moments of polite conversation — about the weather, traffic etc — we got on to the topic of exercise. “Being fit is being powerful, there’s no question about it,” she said. “It’s a lifestyle.”
For Lorraine, the uptake of regular exercise four years ago became a form of redemption in the face of painful loss. A way to reassert control over her body, to reconnect with her own physicality. Her fitness journey opened up a parallel path to emotional and mental freedom.
Lorraine’s story reminded me of the multiple discussions I’d had with my mum over the last few years, conversations about her own journey with health, wellbeing and fitness. In 2013, my mum was diagnosed with terminal kidney failure. Months of dialysis followed by an intrusive transplant operation meant a long recovery ahead and a lifetime of regular hospital appointments and ongoing medical monitoring.
My mum often describes how being diagnosed with late-stage organ failure disconnected her from the body she inhabited. And how that loss of faith in her body bled into the recovery years too. Running, she would say, was no longer for someone like her. It wasn’t until the pandemic, almost seven years after her transplant, that she started exercising regularly again — something that she claims has helped release her from the inevitable pandemic-induced anxieties and further health problems that the last 14 months spent shielding have brought on.
Stills from When We Run.
Both Lorraine and my mum’s testimonies speak to the liberating potential that can come from regular exercise. It’s a shame, then, that we so rarely hear the various backstories that motivate many women to stay physically active. Instead, a corporate wellness culture perpetuated by Goop and other sites like it feeds a particular narrative that fetishises active female bodies as if sex appeal is the only plausible objective. Fitness is all too often synonymous with thin, ambulatory bodies, wellness with impossibly exclusive standards of beauty.
When We Run is an exploration of the nuanced reasons that inform why three women choose to stay active. And in all three cases, aesthetics are an afterthought. Nileeka Bose, for example, runs her own Bollywood dance company, a deeply personal career choice closely related to her culture. The daily practice of Bollywood dance is grounding, Nileeka told me on set, it affirms who she is. “When I suffered from depression, dancing was my constant,” she said. “It became the only thing that kept me going through a really challenging period.”
Chandini Wilson turned to basketball at a young age to participate in a team and take on a larger sense of purpose and adventure only to later be underestimated on account of her gender. “Even now people look at me and think, ‘Really, you? A lady? Playing a sport that is mainly for men?’” she said. As if women can enjoy only the small number of physical activities marketed to them.
And so it remains a radical act for women to claim ownership over their bodies; to exercise on their terms for reasons established by them, not motivated by end goals or narrow aesthetic goals. At high-end gyms and expensive spas both fitness and wellness are packaged as luxury commodities sold to us at premium prices. But exercising and movement is a necessity — when we run we reset our minds and overcome our internal obstacles. In Lorraine’s words: “[exercising] is the difference between getting through bad days or not.”
Stills from When We Run.