I started running during the pandemic. The throws of a graduate program and rising racial tensions around the globe guided me to the rural trails of North Carolina’s state parks for comfort. I stayed running, however, because running taught me something about freedom that no textbook ever could. I am a Black woman and a psychologist. When I run, I carry two inheritances at once. One is ancient: the memory of movement as ceremony, as prayer, as messenger work, as endurance that belongs to Africa and to Indigenous peoples across the world. The other is brutal: the American history that punished Black movement, that named our urge to flee captivity a mental disease, that turned running away into a crime the state would hunt down. My body remembers both. So each time I lace my shoes, I am holding joy in one hand and vigilance in the other, moving through a world that says both you are free and you are not.

Long before split times and finish line photos, people ran to connect land, spirit, and community. On the African continent, movement has always been more than transport. Think of messengers traveling by foot across the savanna and forest. Think of dance and drumming that braid body, breath, and belonging. In East Africa, endurance has cultural meaning, a craft taught by elders and terrain. Across the Atlantic, Indigenous nations in the Americas sustained communal foot races and ceremonial runs that linked villages and affirmed their relationship to place. Running is an old language. Movement carries knowledge.

As a psychologist, I recognize this as embodied memory. Culture is not only in the stories we tell, but also in how we move, breathe, and pace. Repetition becomes ritual. Ritual becomes identity. When I run, I feel myself speaking an older dialect of self, one that says the body can think and the body can remember.

There is another memory that lives inside my stride. In 1851, a physician named Samuel Cartwright published a claim that enslaved Africans who fled bondage suffered from a disorder he called drapetomania. The cure he proposed was obedience and punishment; any enslaved person who was caught running would be severely........

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