Finally, I escaped the gravity sink of my hometown and shot off to university, a whole 20km away. Off to brand new residence halls, a sterile white room with a bed, a desk, a chair and a sink. Away from home and anyone I know to start a new life. Scary, lonely, but also liberating.

For the first few months, I didn’t go jogging at all. I was making friends with people who were in the same labs as me. I bought many thick syllabi filled with text, mysterious formula and graphs. There were lessons given by old men mumbling at, and supremely uninterested in, the crowd of students in front of them. I was no longer the smartest student in the room, not by a long shot. My year was 85% male, a change from my all-girl high school.

New town, Leuven - a pretty town with medieval origins, decorated with gothic and neo gothic buildings, twisty one way streets and green parcs. The campus of Heverlee where I spent most of my time, in contrast, was astonishingly ugly - charmless examples of uninspired brutalist architecture which might have embodied Science! Technology! Future! in the sixties, but now just looked drab. We spent hours navigating our way around those those echoey, top-heavy concrete buildings set in the middle of the flemish countryside.

In January of that first year we had mock exams. We had to study all the courses we’d had so far. I was surprised by the volume of knowledge we were supposed to ingest, big unfriendly photocopied volumes. I spent the two weeks of the christmas holidays reading the syllabi, trying to cram as much in as I could. I failed. It wasn’t enough. Reading all of it was the first step, but you needed to make the knowledge your own, to be able to serve it back up almost word for word, and juggle with the concepts as if they were old friends.

Life became more stressed and more inward focused - those exams had put the fear in me and I didn’t want to fail that first year. I’d started engineering because I wanted to know how stuff works, but also because it was known to be hard and I wanted to show “them” that I could do it. Failing that first year was not an options. I studied a lot more.

Somewhere around that time I started jogging again. Getting out and moving was a welcome change from the intense knowledge absorption, an escape from sentences that swam in front of your eyes and math that just didn’t want to make sense. I put my trainers on and meandered around the green paths of Heverlee.

At some point, as I was leaving the halls, I bumped into Inge, who was also living there, albeit in another wing. She explained she was into jogging, and suggested we run together, as it would motivate us both.

Inge hid an iron soul under her petite and friendly demeanor, and I started to run more often. Where I just ran on autopilot, she wanted to do more, better, faster, longer. She was competitive, and was into improving her personal best way before the concept ever occurred to me. She also became a fast friend, one I kept after my studies, and our runs were made more pleasant by our chats.

Especially during the exams jogging became a mental health lifeline. We ran every day. It was a steam valve and a change of gears, a way to remind ourselves that we weren’t just walking brains.

Inge and I both passed our exams, and the years followed each other. We setted into the yearly cycle and gained some confidence that we could see this through. We eventually decided to leave the echoey student halls to look for a house share, and joined a bunch of other girls in a nice terraced house with a garden.

Inge motivated me to participate to a few local running events, though I still wasn’t particularly competitive or taken by the concept. Under her influence I participated to a couple of half marathons, amongst other smaller events.

Those 5 years were a strange, closeted time, and in hindsight a mixed bag of experiences. University studies seem designed to push people’s brains as far as they’ll go, and while they have an effect on intellectual capacity, the process is grueling. Smart people aren’t necessarily nice, and I wasn’t very secure, having been the odd one out for most of my life.

But I found good friends, and learned that as an adult I had the choice of who I hung out with, a very valuable lesson. My friends, and running, helped to get me through all of it in one piece.