For a while, I was worried I’d lost it. I’d lost the bug. Anyone who considers themselves a runner (of any ability) knows exactly what I’m talking about. The bug. It gets inside you and the only thing you can do is feed it. Feed it with training, racing, competing, and – yes – lots and lots of carbohydrates.

When I first caught the bug, I was a 17-year-old high school senior.  To be honest, I started taking cross country seriously for the same reason that motivates many high school boys – a girl. Little did I know that while my relationship with the young lady in question would come and go within a year, the inadvertent relationship I would develop with long distance running would stay with me – in sickness and in health.

And indeed, there were times of sickness and times of health. Through stress fractures and conference championships, anemia and half-marathon victories, the bug stuck with me and I stuck with it. I couldn’t seem to give it up. No setback proved irrecoverable and no triumph garnered a feeling of true completion. It seemed that the bug was with me for life.

But these past few months, I noticed an unsettling feeling. In May, I ran my last race in a Tufts University singlet, winning the Eastern College Athletic Conference Championship 10,000m. And then, I did what I usually do in late-May/early-June: I stopped running.

For competitive runners, this is a fairly common practice. Taking time off between seasons can be the perfect mental and physical break that the mind and body need to hit the ground running when the training for the next season begins. For some people, time off is Christmas for two weeks – freedom from the daily grind of training to relax and play video games all day. But for some of us – those who’ve got the bug bad – these weeks can leave one listless and frustrated. All the time and energy usually spent running in literal circles ends up causing the mind to run in metaphorical circles, trying to rationalize your new, self-imposed sedentary lifestyle. “Am I taking too much time? I’m taking too much time. Am I losing too much fitness? I’m never going to be able to run again.”  I often find myself filling my time off with other athletic activity – hiking, climbing, cycling – to satiate the bug’s unquenchable thirst for movement for those few weeks every year.

But this June, as I prepared myself for a few weeks of inner turmoil, I found myself distracted. My life was a whirlwind of change – graduating from college, moving out of my house at school, and then passing a few last days seeing family and friends before leaving the continent for a summer with STRIVE. Somewhere in all this movement, the bug was buried. Two weeks passed. Then three. It took me that long to realize that my normal time-off-neurosis had been absent thus far. Instead of my usual jumping at the bit, it was more a simple feeling of routine – as if the stars and seasons dictated it – that finally laced up my shoes and kicked me out the door.

I wrote it off as no more than that distraction, that my life had had too much going on during those few weeks. And so, I kept running. But it still felt different.  I was just going through the motions, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t have that same fire in the belly that got me out of bed to run at 5am on a busy day to make sure I got in a full day’s training. The bug was still missing.

And it continued like that for a couple of months. STRIVE came and with it brought the joy of running – running with great people, running through beautiful places. But I could tell that I was just running, not training. I ran to hear about the STRIVErs’ days; I ran to go see the German Shepard puppies near the next kilometer marker on the River Road; I ran to laugh about it all with Nic. It was joyous and beautiful, but it wasn’t what I knew. It wasn’t what I was used to.

At this point, I realized there was something wrong, that the bug wasn’t there. As I said my “adios” to Perú and STRIVE and headed to Quito, I thought that maybe I was still just too distracted, too busy, too exhausted for the bug to show itself. Maybe, some time settled down would do the trick. But then I thought about where I was and these new feelings I felt towards running: that running could simply be something I did for fun. I thought about a life without the bug, without the competition, without the 140 mile weeks. And it scared me a bit.

When I arrived in Quito, I found myself with a new bug – the unfortunate kind that so many travelers pick up in developing nations. My running was crippled to a few miserable, slogging miles, with the remaining feverish hours lying in my new bed, until this new bug and new bed finally claimed all of my time.

But as quickly as it had come, this nasty new bug left and I woke up that Tuesday morning with a strange feeling, an urge that I hadn’t felt before. And so, I put on my STRIVE singlet and I ran to the Parque Carolina. And I ran fast. With every breath, I exhaled sickness and exhaustion, and inhaled desire along with the (mildly polluted) Andean air. I finished that run, walked up the stairs, and I knew it was back.

While the physical bug left me thin and weak, the bug filled me with strength and motivation. It wasn’t only that I was settled down, less distracted, whatever other excuses I had made before, but with STRIVE over for the summer, I realized that I had something to run for, something bigger than just myself. That listless feeling, that “why am I doing this? Why am I going through these (remarkably difficult) motions?” feeling, had started after I took off my Tufts uniform and, until now, there was no replacing that elephant constantly pushing me to do it for the team.

But after this summer, after lying in bed sick, I had the time to step back and realize that, while there will always be a special place in my heart for that elephant, I still have so many reasons to run. Reasons like the two thousand students at Bernardo Tambohaucso Pisaq whose lives we can change; like the dozens of high schoolers I meet every year with whom I get to share the beauty of this continent and its people; like the friends and family who’ve shown support since my very first steps.

And so, the bug is back – if it was ever really gone. I think, if anything, this summer has taught me that the bug – for me – has always been less about my own personal satisfaction, and more about what I can accomplish for the letters on my chest – from CA to CSU, Skidmore to Tufts to, finally, STRIVE.  Without the singlet, without those letters, without truly caring about what those letters represent, running may be just a pastime. But when that bug finds a team – a cause – worth the miles of trials, worth the injuries and the victories, there’s no stopping us.