use of the word “jogging.” Not me. “Jogging” was still faster than lying in bed. Plus, if it had said “running,” I’d have imagined sprinting and been intimidated. “Running” reminded me of my previous failed attempts. Jogging implied ease and comfort. My couch-potato body and easily frightened brain liked this. “Just a little jog,” I told the dog. No need to panic.
We went for our little jog. Like the first week, I thought of the people in their houses possibly laughing at me in my oversized T-shirt and spandex bell bottoms with the dog walking beside. But I pushed the thoughts away and continued, challenged, but successful.
After the first day of week two, I again needed a nap, but on the second day, I didn’t. I went home, changed into regular clothes, since I barely broke a sweat, and went on with my day. After the third day, I had more energy. This surprised me. In my previous running days, when I ran before work, I’d have to close my office door and take a power nap before starting the day. What I was doing now seemed completely different. I was still napping on the days when I wasn’t exercising, but it was an improvement. My friend Kim had called running “fun.” I almost agreed with her.
Despite my success, I still had to talk myself into every workout. Feelings of dread plagued me, while a tyrannical inner voice mocked. “Look at you in your ‘workout’ clothes, pretending to exercise. Save yourself the embarrassment and play computer solitaire instead.” Rejecting those voices and working out anyway renewed my sense of self-esteem and accomplishment. I almost enjoyed it, especially once we had finished.
After I completed week two, I was ready to tell Ed. By then, he and I had been married for almost two decades. Ed, my best friend and confidant, has the brains and motivation. I have the harebrained ideas. When I decided we should move to New Mexico so I could study writing with Natalie Goldberg, Ed eagerly accepted the challenge. When I wanted to turn our basement into a meditation studio, Ed moved the furniture. And when I wound up in the psych ward on the weekend after our first wedding anniversary, a surprise that might have made other men flee, Ed didn’t falter. Through pastels, piano lessons, dance classes, dog training, and weird diets, not to mention enough types of therapy to fill an encyclopedia, Ed remained by my side. Still, I feared telling him because of how much I value his opinion.
He and I sat in our galley kitchen, at the rectangular table, eating the Italian sausage and lentils he’d prepared. Thankfully, he loves to cook. If he didn’t, we’d starve. I open cans, operate the microwave, and wash the dishes, but because of my inability to focus, when I cook, the fire alarm usually goes off. Once, I even warped a pressure cooker. Ed prefers I not cook so I don’t ruin his expensive pans.
His long-sleeved, red button-down matched his brown and red oxfords. The red collar against his clear, fair skin made it glow. He’d rolled the shirt cuffs up, exposing his muscular forearms, which flexed when he reached for his fork.
I looked out the picture window to our tree-lined street where I’d been secretly jogging. Our oak had begun to bud, pushing the previous year’s leaves onto the still brown grass.
“I started running again,” I said.
As Ed knew, I’d run before, but never stuck with it. Once in high school. Once in college. Once during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and for a few short weeks in 2008. In high school, I ran to lose weight. None of my high school pictures show me even slightly overweight, but I thought of myself as enormous. I pounded down the road thinking, This sucks. Band practice and daydreaming about boys were more important.
In college, I ran with my friend Priscilla up and down the brick streets of Athens, Ohio. The Appalachian hills were daunting. I gasped for air and didn’t love it. I hated my body for not being able to travel along the ground swiftly. When a bout of suffocating depression struck, I abandoned everything not related to academics. I graduated and went on to law school, but stopped running.
In the late 1980s, while practicing law for a small firm, I sat at a desk all day, feeling fat and disillusioned. I decided to run up the hill near my house. I made it halfway before I needed to walk, but when I reached the top, I ran again. This time, I felt the joy and kept running for a few years. I ran on the track at the health club and, with our two dogs, through our suburban neighborhood, dodging neighbors’ golden retrievers and small children.
When Ed and I got together, we moved closer to my office, and I ran around a nearby park. I lost weight and felt fit. I also lifted weights and, for a time, thought of myself as healthy. But some internal switch flipped. I was not yet diagnosed as bipolar but was likely hypomanic. When I grew dangerously thin, a therapist suggested treatment for eating disorders. I continued running, but with no joy, and I dieted compulsively. Running swung from something I enjoyed to a dangerous obsession. Eventually, the flat, numb, hollowed-out emptiness of depression took over. I had never expected to run again, and I doubt Ed thought I would either.
I turned to face him. His bright blue eyes were soft and hopeful. Too hopeful.
“Not far and not fast!” I added.
I told him about Kim and Fiona, then explained the kitchen timer and how the dog and I alternated jogging and walking.
He set down his fork and clasped a handful of his more-salt-than-pepper hair the way he does when he’s thinking. This tilted his head and made his jaw look even more square.
“Do you have a goal?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It just feels good to be moving.”
He released the handful of hair, picked up his fork, and continued eating.
“Don’t be a runner,” he said between bites. “Be an interval trainer.”
Ed’s humor tends to be dry, so I waited to make sure he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t. He’d recently read several articles about the effectiveness of interval training and the importance of starting slowly.
I smiled and nodded. He hadn’t said I was too old or fat or that running would ruin my knees. In the past, when asked why I quit running, I’d say “I blew out my knees.” In truth, I gave up from exhaustion. What I was doing now—easing into it, using intervals, running slower than I thought a human being could—bore little resemblance to my running days of the past. Ed sensed that.
He’d seen me try so many diet and exercise regimens that he probably had to guard against hoping that jogging might help my weight and depression. He may have thought it was another phase, like that of the mini-trampoline gathering dust in the basement. My mother had given it to us after it had become a clothes rack at her house. I’d bounced on it religiously for six weeks before the activity grew so boring, I gave up.
I took his lack of questions not as a failure of interest, but a silence caused by his reserved nature. No comment was akin to approval. Plus, he knows how even praise can spin my mind, morphing it into pressure. His stoic encouragement gave me the propulsion to continue.
But the morning I was to attempt week three, I woke thinking, “I can’t.” In this third week, the training plan doubled the time I jogged. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep.
My first few seconds of actual consciousness had been fraught with terrifying projections: me in a black dress at Ed’s funeral or a veterinarian plunging the fatal needle into Morgan’s forepaw. Next came a litany of unpleasant memories: my niece struggling
