Chapter 20
The Real Race
Chapter 21
A Real Runner
Chapter 22
Roller Coaster
Chapter 23
Sore Feet
Chapter 24
Taper Madness
Chapter 25
Earning My Sticker
Chapter 26
Taking It In
chapter 0.2
Epilogue
Conclusion and Resources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
My mind was trying to kill me again.
“Who do you think you are?” it growled as I squatted in a green porta potty four and a half miles into the Columbus Marathon. The sun shining on the white top bathed me in gray light.
The running partners I’d begun the race with that morning, and trained with for the past four months, had gone ahead without me. They would have stayed. I’d spent a mile convincing them to leave after I could no longer ignore my bowels.
Alone in the fiberglass cubicle, trying to avoid sitting down, I shivered with loneliness as I finished my task.
Mom. Dad. Jamey. All dead.
My ever-faithful husband, my sister, and friends, all still very much alive, were on the course, but miles away. Even the dog, my other regular running companion, was absent—at home—probably asleep.
This left me in treacherous company—with only my mind—forever critical.
Someone in the line outside knocked. I would have to carry my heavy heart across the pavement solo.
“I’m a runner,” I whispered to my mind. Then I pulled up my panties, opened the door, and ran.
Off the Sofa and into the Ravine
Five months before my forty-ninth birthday, I slouched on the sofa in my pajamas, squinting at my laptop screen. A high school friend’s social media post read, “Call me crazy, but the running is getting to be fun!”
I remembered Kim riding horses in high school, but neither of us had been athletes then, and we certainly weren’t now.
I read on. She had begun an interval training plan to run three times a week. The website suggested alternating sixty seconds of jogging with ninety seconds of walking for a total of twenty minutes. Sixty seconds sounded almost possible.
But depression clung to me like a shroud. It was noon on a weekday. As usual, I’d just gotten up and hadn’t showered in days. The simple act of walking Morgan, our yellow Labrador, around the block often proved too difficult.
A few minutes into browsing Kim’s interval running schedule, an extra-long burst of hiccups reduced me to sobs. I cried until they passed, closed the laptop, and went back to bed.
Still, her running posts nestled like seeds in the back of my consciousness. Later that week, Kim posted, “Week one finished!” Infected by her glee, I remembered the pleasure I’d had when I’d run short distances decades before. A seed sprouted.
Around the same time, Fiona, a writer friend from London, also took up running. She loved buying “trainers” (sneakers). Her emails reminded me of my first trip to a running store, decades earlier, when I’d scoffed at the price tags to hide being intimidated by the options. Fiona also talked about how running felt and the glow after. She is younger than me, but she’s not a youngster. The seed grew.
***
Shortly before I saw Kim’s post, I’d begun to have a recurring dream. My body gently rocked as I floated down the road through Griggs Reservoir, a wooded park along the Scioto River, near our central Ohio home. My arms, bent at the elbows, swung by my sides. A breeze grazed my face. It felt like flying. The rhythm lulled me back to sleep when I woke from nightmares. There was no anxiety. I wasn’t breathing heavily. Relaxed and happy, I was just moving through the bright green world. I was dreaming of running.
***
One March weekday, inspired by the daffodils bursting through the soil of the winter flowerbeds, I returned to the running website. “This might kill you,” came the familiar voice in my head. I recalled Kim and Fiona’s smiles. Sixty seconds of jogging hadn’t killed them.
A wise part of my mind thought exercise might energize me, while a deep animal instinct tried to protect me by scoffing. “You’re old and fat. People will make fun of you and you’ll die of heart failure.” Most people have these competing voices. Mine are just louder.
Drawing strength from the flying and floating sensations of my dreams, I wrestled tube socks over my flabby calves, sweatpants across my wide hips, a long-sleeved T-shirt and hoodie over my thick belly, and a pair of trail shoes, the closest thing to running shoes I owned, onto my swollen feet. Ed, my husband, was at work, so he didn’t see my unwieldy outfit.
Morgan circled and nearly knocked me down when I opened the closet where we kept his leash. I would need his support.
I picked up a digital kitchen timer and went outside.
Most of the residents of our maple and sycamore-filled residential neighborhood were at school or work. Even if they were home, they probably weren’t looking out the windows of their 1950s ranch houses.
Still, I imagined the neighbors not only watching, but laughing if they saw me try to run. I steered the dog toward Donna Ravine, a secluded street down a hill along a creek, where the houses sit far back on wooded lots.
***
Once I felt safely hidden, I set the timer for sixty seconds and bounced tentatively in my trail shoes.
The small white timer in my sweaty hand was a welcome friend. It had carried me through years of mindfulness meditation periods and decades of the ten-minute “writing practices” I’d learned from author Natalie Goldberg. Perhaps it would serve me well again.
Morgan sniffed, peed on the newly sprouted leaves of a shrub, then stared into the distance.
“This is gonna hurt,” I told him.
My mind had replaced the floating feeling of my dreams
