This Canadian Running x New Balance six-part series is following five runners to the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon. These women and men aren’t professional runners, they’re just passionate about the sport. Their stories are your stories: Each runner has come to the marathon with different reasons for running, different training methods, different running communities, and different goals. And each exemplifies the idea that Run Your Way can mean something different to everyone.
Toronto-based runner Honnesh Rohmetra spent much of his life feeling overweight and unhealthy, but a single moment of clarity changed how he saw himself—and his future. Before he started running, he’d have grand ideas about taking action on his health and life, but they were just ideas. Then, one day, he saw the quote, “We know, but we don’t act.”
“I had an epiphany,” he says. “If there is really a strong mind, it should lead to a strong body that can take on challenges. So, my experiment started as a way to know how much improvement can be done if you put in the work. After a point, it was no longer about me, it was about the human potential.”
And he found that potential on the run.
“Growing up, I was always told that I just had bad genetics,” Rohmetra recalls. “But really, I wasn’t taking care of my body. I was a very ambitious person, but I was putting all my effort into my work and my studies. So I used to get all the top grades, but I wouldn’t take care of myself.”
He studied philosophy and psychology, and that started him on his quest for understanding. Could he change? “I was reading that everything happens in the mind,” he says. “And I realized that if I really do believe what I’m learning in both psychology and philosophy, I need to show it in the real world. It has to translate to something real. So I started running.”
“When I started, I was so open to every experience, and I took guidance from everyone possible,” Rohmetra says. He jumped into group workouts and long runs, started doing community yoga classes and learned to strength train to support his running.
And he ran. A lot. “I would just say yes to everything,” he says. “After two months of me running, somebody asked me to do this ultra relay from Toronto to Montreal as a team. I signed up for that race, and that changed every aspect of my running, because that made me run all through the night in the dark and by myself in the trails.”
“I essentially was coached by the entire community,” he says. “I took energy from people around me. I’m really a very big, passionate member of the running community here in Toronto, and the people here motivate me so much. They believe in me.”
“To me, Run Your Way means that running is always such a beautiful, personal thing,” he adds. “You don’t need to compete with anyone. If you want to run here, run here. If you want to run on a track, run on a track. And if you want to run slow, run slow. I love slow running. I love fast running. There is no one correct way to do it.”
