The Thing That Finally Made Running Click for Hua Hsu

A conversation with the author and journalist about secretly crushing miles, the gear he can't stop buying, and training for his first marathon this upcoming November.

Welcome to the HEAVIES Feelgood Routine, a series that talks to cool, interesting, and creative people about how they design their busy schedules to accommodate good habits.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a text from a homegirl with a link to a new IG post from our mutual friend Hua Hsu: 

“Whoa, Hua looks good!”

Not even two seconds later, my wife looked up from her own regular doomscroll:

“Whoa, Hua ran a marathon? He looks good!”

(Technically, it was a half marathon, but the point stands.)  

I first met Hua—New Yorker staff writer, English professor at Bard, coolest dad in Brooklyn—a few years ago after we had our kid, and he graciously gifted us an elite pile of handmedowns. A bit later, I interviewed him for GQ on the occasion of his genre-expanding memoir Stay True, which went on to become a best-seller and gobbled up nearly every notable distinction under the sun, including the Pulitzer Prize. 

Hua is also one of the most fun people to talk to, in tiny part because we are perhaps the only two people in New York City who inhabit the Venn circles of “UC alumni who thought they were cooler than all the other Asians” and “writes professionally,” and because of his appreciation for rare, slept-on stuff: old magazines, albums, clothes. I DMed him to see if he’d be up for talking about becoming, in his words, a cursed “runner dad” cliché; if gear was maybe his gateway drug into the sport; and if this journey was at all triggered by Murakami’s running memoir. (It wasn’t; the book was fine, we agreed; but it did provide a half-marathon time for him to beat.)  

Hua Zoomed in from Italy, where he’s currently in a writing residency located in what appears to be a haunted castle, and will soon begin training for his first 26.2-mile marathon in November. For the race, he’s raising funds for CHiPS (Community Help in Park Slope), a wonderful local organization whose mission is to ameliorate food insecurity in the Park Slope/GOWANUS community. He’s a little shy of his $5,000 goal so help him out if you can.

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…for the monthly cost of a single dirty iced-chai latte. Onto the chat.

Chris: So when did your secret running transformation actually begin?

Hua: I appreciate you asking me to do this because I feel like my wife is the only person I talk to about this stuff, and she's so tired of it at this point. But last year I had to do a physical, and I convinced myself that I could just cram for it by exercising a lot for two weeks. I feel like I've always wanted to have some sort of routine but it's just too hard to play, for example, tennis in the city; it requires an event planner to even schedule something. 

I always thought running seemed like the easiest thing to get into, but also the dumbest thing to get into. I figured it would provide the most immediate help at offsetting whatever I had done to my body in advance of this physical. Tons of parents at my kid’s school appear to be runners, so one day I asked this mom, Hey, where do you actually get running shoes? 

What sneakers did you start out in?

I used some cool Flyknits that I bought 15 years ago. But she recommended a store that was nearby, Brooklyn Running Company. The people there looked at my feet and were like, “You should definitely not be wearing Nikes, first of all. They're too narrow. You really should be wearing shoes with stability.” So they recommended these ugly Hokas, which I begrudgingly bought.

I did not get the numbers I wanted at my physical, but I was stuck with the shoes.

So when did running start clicking for you? When did it become a regular thing?

This was maybe December or January. I just kind of continued running, and I don't think I liked it that much. The thing that finally made it click for me is when I tried running without any devices.

I wanted to try running without my phone, and I have an Apple Watch that I could sync up with my AirPods to listen to music. But for whatever reason that day, I could not get them to sync. And so I sat outside my front door, trying to sync my headphones with my watch for like 40 minutes. My wife opened the door and was like, “Why are you still here? You left 40 minutes ago. Also, your phone has just been playing Spotify on and off.”

So I decided that I was going to run without any music at all. Music is just so important to how I move through the world that I was really worried that I would last maybe five minutes and come home. But for some reason, not listening to anything made me enter this… void. It made it much easier to run for a long time and not have to think about anything. 

A lot of serious runners I’ve talked to also don’t listen to music. Like, with a phone you're always fiddling with playlists, skipping around. It’s kind of a distraction.

With music, I was just too conscious of the passage of time.

How often were you running when you were just starting out? And what does your running schedule look like now?

When I was cramming for the physical, I tried to run every day. There was no logic to what I was doing. I would just go and run until I was as exhausted as I could get, which didn’t take that long.

Then in January I decided to set some arbitrary miles goal for the year. I think the game changer for me was realizing that I was only doing it for health, so I just needed to get to a specific heart rate, and that heart rate was actually much lower than I naturally want to run. 

That makes sense.

Yeah… I did not need to bust my ass in order to get in the optimal heart rate zone for what I needed. I would occasionally ask another parent who was a runner, and they would say, “You actually don't need to run as much as you are running in order to reap the benefits that you're looking for. Why are you running so much?”

Mostly, it’s nice to not be on my phone. It's nice to just not think. My mind is just a machine for my body or whatever the metaphor is. I’m just trying to not fall over.

So what made you decide to attempt a race?

I randomly Googled “brooklyn half marathon” and signed up for the first one that I could find, and that was in April. And I thought, “Okay, that'll be my goal. We’ll see if I can do this.” 

Signing up for the half changed a lot for me, because all of a sudden I realized that it wasn't wise to run six miles a day, that I should actually be more strategic about exhausting myself. That's sort of where I'm at now.

And now you’re running a full marathon…

Yeah. I'm doing the marathon in November and I bought some book that explains the right way to approach it, the right training plan. 

What is the training plan going to look like?

Run four or five days a week with a long run on Sundays. I also have the benefit of taking my kid to two extracurricular activities: One is exactly an hour away by foot, and the other one's exactly 40 minutes. And so if I can't run in the morning, I always know I have a little circuit I can use for two blocks of time.

When you run in the morning, are you doing breakfast beforehand?

I would love to know what the actual science is, because I feel like every now and then I'll Google something just to get a sense of what other people do. But my understanding is that there's no right way to do the morning run. I think I'll try and have a banana or something, but my main thing is if I know I'm going to run a lot in the morning, then I'll have a larger than usual dinner the night prior. So much of it is just counterintuitive to how I live because as a parent, because I'm often eating dinner at 5:30 p.m. 

Man, I feel you. Those are real parent-dinner hours.

When I was reading the marathon book, it said something like, “Try and eat an enormous protein-rich dinner at 9:00 p.m.” or something like that. Yeah, I’m not going to do that…

So you're accidentally doing intermittent fasting.

Yeah, I guess I am.

Has running changed the way you think about eating? Are you eating more consciously for performance during lunch or dinner?

I really should be. I have this fear... I think many people at some point thought exercise was synonymous with the idea of weight loss. But honestly, I don't think I'm eating enough for the amount I’m running. And so I need to kind of tweak the EQ on that.

But I don't want to run into someone I haven't seen in a few years and they’re like, “Bro, you're gaunt now.” You know what I mean? I don't really want it to be some sort of radical change. On the other hand, I still don't really know what a complex carbohydrate is. I think it's like beans, right?

It’s like rice.

But not white rice? Is white rice a complex carbohydrate?

It’s complex enough. I think one of the things I'm going to do with HEAVIES is start the pro-white rice lobby vs. brown rice.

I kind of assumed it's anything that's not a prepackaged cookie.

So what kind of running gear rabbit holes have you gone down? What are you wearing?

Gosh, this is such an embarrassing conversation. I wear Hoka Arahis. Online, they're very poorly rated but they're actually pretty perfect for my feet. When I first started out I was wearing an ancient pair of gym shorts, literally like 9-11 era, and the elastic no longer worked. For a shirt I just wore whatever college shirt I had from giving a talk. And then just normal Uniqlo socks. 

When I went to that Brooklyn Running store, the person asked me all these questions and I'm like, “Yeah, I'm a total idiot. I don't really know anything.” And then she brought out the Arahis and I thought, “Fuck these.” I’d come in not wanting to buy these shoes. But once she said that these were ideal for my feet, I was like, “Give me the worst looking pair.”

They were like highlighter, fluorescent yellow gradient into blue. Like, these aren't colors that naturally go into each other! And then she was like, you need socks because of blisters. And then she handed me a running shirt, and I was like, “Wait, did you even hand me anything? How is this so light?” So all of a sudden, after I went running with all this new stuff, I realized that one's feet did not have to be in horrific pain after running. And that so much of it is about lightweight material. I now appreciate the properties of moisture wicking.

[laughs] You were techy material-pilled.

I finally found a pair of Arahis that are less objectionable to me, so now I have multiple pairs in case they never make this colorway again. And I ended up buying a bunch of this one Arcteryx  shirt called the Cormac. You know what I'm talking about? 

I know exactly which shirt you're talking about. 

It somehow does all the things that it claims to do. It's moisture wicking, it's odor resistant, it's lightweight. It's actually a pretty remarkable shirt. And then I just have some sort of Nike shorts that I buy on Amazon, and each time I buy them, a different pair is sent to me. Sometimes they’ll have the liner with a pocket. Sometimes they won’t. And then I bought these other shorts by a brand called JANJI, because it sounded just like an Asian person I knew.

Do you have to do anything special for glasses stability? I remember my glasses slipping off my sweaty face a lot before I got lasik.

I usually just run with my normal glasses or my sunglasses, which are the wrong prescription. But again, I'm just so used to them at this point. They're not aerodynamic at all. With running sunglasses, I think I've decided that that's the bridge I won't cross…

Dude, I could very quickly see you going down a path that leads to vintage Oakleys.

No, no, I know… [laughs] I fully acknowledge that that's in play. Are you familiar with Satisfy?

Yuppp.

So I feel like I always have an open tab. And it makes no sense, because it’s not something I’d ordinarily be into. But they just put out some Oakleys and I was like… Those are actually pretty cool.

I spend more time than I'd like to admit looking for unusual gear, just odd brands. There was a moment after running the half where I turned to my wife with something from SSense, and I was like, “What do you think about this tie-dye running shirt?” And she's like, “Yeah, you should get it! You should reward yourself for doing this!” 

I’m like, “It's only like 350 bucks…” for something that you would only wear running. Which is funny, because when you’re actually running nobody is paying attention to what you’re wearing.

Did you cop the shirt?

I did not buy the shirt. But I definitely was looking on eBay one night for nineties Nike. And then I'm like, wait, the technology back then was terrible. It would be so absurd to show up wearing some performance wear from the past.

I’m excited for you to go down the recent-vintage Gyakusou hole. They have good pocket placement. 

I have this pair of running shorts with no pockets. I find them really baffling. Why would someone want shorts with no pockets? And then the brand came out with the “new and improved” line, and they were like, “This time, there's three pockets!” And I’m like, you're gaslighting us into thinking that there shouldn't have been three pockets to begin with…

As always, thank you for reading HEAVIES. Let me know in the comments if there’s anyone you’d like to see featured in this series.