I’m the only person I know who is currently training for a marathon. The only example I have of other marathoners are the polished running influencer vlogs that clog my social media feed. “Come run 21k with me,” the caption casually suggests. Cut to a beautiful girl with a perfect body in her clean apartment at 5 a.m. putting on a $1,000 matching outfit to go for a sunrise run. At her mile check-ins, she’s smiling and barely winded. And after running a half-marathon, she’s hardly broken a sweat.

This is not anywhere near my running experience. I wake up at the crack of 8 a.m. grumpy, sore and unmotivated. I take my time racking up the energy to run, and once I’ve looked in the mirror and asked myself, “What else are you going to do for the next two hours?” I get ready. My running wardrobe isn’t glamorous like the girls on Instagram with their Gymshark brand deals, Nike AeroSwift running short collections and Oakley sunglasses.

I don’t have expensive running gear. I don’t wear a running watch or own a $150 hydration vest. I don’t have a pantry stocked with energy gels and electrolyte drink mixes. But somehow, I’ve survived a half-marathon and six weeks of marathon training. That’s all to say, running doesn’t have to be expensive and polished to work.

On running mornings, I put on the same Nike sports bra I’ve worn since freshman year of high school. I select one of my three identical pairs of Amazon brand $15 biker shorts and choose a top from a pile of mismatched shirts — an Athleta little girls section extra large long-sleeve, my mom’s 20-year-old hand-me-downs or a cotton T-shirt that has sat untouched in my pajama drawer for months. After I’ve tamed my scruffy haircut into a relatively put together up-do and stuffed it all into my REI sale section running hat, I lace up my filthy Hokas, the only thing in my getup that I’ve spent a decent amount of money on.

I make an effort to look nice in my everyday life, but running is my time to be disgusting. Within a mile I have pit stains, and with my luck it’s probably raining, so my shoes are soaked and squelching with each step. I see so many girls online running to coffee shops for their morning workout, and it baffles me because my presence in a cafe post-run would be horrifying and impolite. So I find it a bit irritating when influencers preach that running doesn’t have to be boring as they film themselves grabbing a latte and a pastry in their cute matching running outfit with not a sweat stain in sight.

This standard of looking cute while working out is partly what caused my gym baddie exodus. I was deeply invested in gym TikTok — I had the Gymshark outfits and the sleek hairdo — but no matter how “put together” I was at the gym, I always felt judged. I suppose this is the phenomenon recently coined as “gym anxiety.” I’ve been working out in gyms since I was in middle school, so I always felt comfortable in these spaces. But once I was exposed to the world of gym influencers, I began to feel like I was under a microscope. And now, whenever I go to the gym, I feel extremely uncomfortable and watched.

When I started running, I felt freed from the judgment of my body, my clothes, my sweat stains and my level of fitness. People can only perceive you for a few seconds as you pass them by, unlike at the gym where I’m heavily aware of eyes on me. While at the gym I’m worried about what people are thinking of me. When I’m outside running, it feels like no one exists but me. It doesn’t matter that my outfit is old and ugly or that there’s a line of sweat bleeding through my hat, because when I’m running no one sees me.

So I’m pushing back against the running influencers. The gym was ruined for me once it became trendy, and I refuse to let running be ruined. However, I would like to acknowledge that while there are a lot of influencers who romanticize running, I’ve also seen accounts popping up that normalize the less glamorous sides of the sport. There are slow running accounts and body positive running accounts, and there are “influencers” who also have full time jobs.

I haven’t seen this much diversity in the gym influencer accounts, which mostly exhibit extremely unrealistic standards — both for appearance and lifestyle. The online gym community is very physique-focused, whereas the consensus among the running community seems more fitness and joy oriented.

That’s all to say, the online presence of runners isn’t all bad, but I fear it’s headed in the direction of “Gym Tok.” When I was lifting obsessively, my only goal was to be physically perfect. With running, I don’t think about the effects it will have on my body. I run because it gets me outside, it gets me moving first thing in the morning and it makes me feel accomplished and strong. I run because it makes me happy, and that’s honestly the first time I’ve been able to say that about exercise. So this time I won’t let the unrealistic online expectations of my sport ruin the joy it brings me. This time, I’m embracing being imperfect.