I wish I had a great inspiring story about why I started running 16 years ago -- that I was overcoming some great life obstacle, where I could share with you my story of Great Epiphanies as I crested hills, or that I was raising money for some awesomely altruistic cause, each drip of sweat a testament to my dedication.
But here's the truth: it was 2008, my pants did not fit, and I was too broke and busy for another solution.
Running the Pittsburgh Marathon is hard. Giving yourself a Terrible Towel to Wave in the final 2 miles makes it dang harder because then EVERY yinzer is going to scream at you to wave it. Lesson learned.
Yup. I call myself a feminist and I desperately try to focus my Tiny Overlord (my toddler daughter) on the thoughts in her head and her strength and bravery in her body versus some number on a scale. I TRIED (still do) not to think about weight. But the fact of the matter was I had just returned from a year-long stay in Budapest, Hungary where I had been teaching English through the Fulbright Program. Now, Budapest is a kick-ass city and Hungary a beyond cool place, but one thing its traditional cuisine is not is very light: delicious csirkepaprikás (paprika chicken) swimming with buttery noodles and topped with a big scoop of sour cream; palacsinta (crepes) stuffed with meat or cheese and layered with a thick smear of sour cream; and my all-time-ever-favorite post bar food lángos, which I won't even try to translate but just explain as a big ol'circle of deep-fried potato bread, crispy on the outside and pillowy soft inside, usually served rubbed with lots of garlic, a heap of grated cheese and, of course, a blanket of sour cream (yeah, they are really into that -- I even had a Hungarian colleague known to eat it straight from the container, like yogurt, at lunch. But I digress).
Then, there was the fact that it's got an amazing -- if still way underknown -- wine region, plus a whole array of awesome, quirky "ruin pubs", which were often spaces no one quite knew what to do with post-Soviet times, so folks just took over and made into bars with plenty of found objects, where I could enjoy said lovely local wines (or beers, or their fire-to-the-belly brandy, pálinka) at about 1/10 the cost of the D.C.-area bars I had left behind when I came over. And that is not even mentioning the whole cafe culture (hanks Hapsburg-era culture, let them eat cake indeed!)
Because why not drink beer in a Trabant -- nothing like Szimpla Kert!
And I was in my 20s. And single. And working the least-stressful job I had ever had.
So, let's just say, it was a year of (fun) overindulgence. When a glass of delicious rose wine there was less than a Metro ride back home, it was too easy to say yes to just one more. And then that one (or ok 4) more made it all that much easier to have that 2 a.m. lángos, just one more time ...
When I came back to the D.C. area to start my Serious Grownup Professor Job in northern Virginia, then, I found myself staring at the packed-up work clothes from a year before mostly straining at the waist. And looking at a bank account that I had drained down to about $20 taking one last awesome trip around the Bosnia and Croatia (no regrets there -- travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer), so I was not in the market for a new wardrobe, or an expensive gym membership. As I was telling my buddy J. about my worry that while I had enough "respectable" clothes that fit to get me through the lingering heat of swampy No.Va. September, I would be adding safety pins by the time a fall chill set in, she offered to start running with me, saying it was her surefire way to get back in.
Before then, I had hated running: I had been overweight as a child, and the memories of being ridiculed as huffed and puffed through gym class's required mile run were enough to make me associate it as a punishment. Now, yet again, here came some body-shame-induced call for it.
But the pants. They weren't closing. So, I agreed.
J. took me on her usual loop -- a pretty 4-mile route that went from our shared Arlington, Virginia neighborhood to cross the Key Bridge into Washington, then skirted the Kennedy Center along the Potomac River before cross the iconic Memorial Bridge to get back home. That first day out, I stopped, gasping and fully convinced that yup, running WAS torture and cursing myself for not just buying damn stretchier pants. All the while, I was looking at J. with awe: she seemed to actually be ENJOYING it.
Still, gasping though I was, I was taking advantage of this hour of friend time: J. was also a much more seasoned teacher than I, so I really need our (very breathy) chat about my own new-job foibles while trying to run. So I came back the next week. And again, until it became a pretty solid weekly routine.
I know it took months, but I remember the first time I made it the whole way around the loop. I was elated. And I was hooked.
Being a teacher can often feel like being expected to be ever-available: especially where I teach – the open-access two-year public college system – there seems to be a pull to always do more, with less … and expectation that the Good Teacher can somehow magically overcome all other manner of structural inequalities to save her students (which is total bunk, but bunk that gets in your head). Running, however, was a place where I was unreachable to anyone but me. I started running more often with J., more often alone, more often with other friends. It became my release and my cheaper wind-down than happy hour, which while I still enjoyed, was decidedly less affordable in the DMV region than back in Budapest.
I started to see if I could go further. A half mile more. Then more.
Then, my then-roommate A. suggested we try a fun Christmas themed 10K, and I shocked myself by loving running for over an hour in freeze-y, sleet-y weather, laughing as I took pictures with fellow runners, strangers turned friends, in their costumes.
Then, I did my first iconic DC run: the Cherry Blossom 10-miler. Sitting in the sun, smiling as I thought about the sheer joy of running through the pink blossoms sans the tourist crowd, I decided I could add 3.1 miles more, and succesfully ran a half in Virginia beach before I decided to return to the recently revived half-marathon of my hometown, Pittsburgh, with E. and G., two co-workers from my graduate school days who turned into deep friends. G., famous for procrastination, signed up too late to get a spot in the half marathon, and so decided to do the full one. When he finished, he assured me with time and good pacing, I could do it too.
Nearly every weekend that summer, we ran together. G. introduced me to the Galloway method, and we used a modified version of his timing splits (7 minutes run, 2 minutes walking) and I found I could slowly add more and more miles past that 13.1 that had seemed so challenging just weeks before. We’d finish in restaurants, amazing the waiters with our post-run appetites (and occasionally getting stares when we did things like double-order a breadbasket meant for a whole table). When I ran that first marathon, the Marine Corps Marathon, he chased the route to cheer me on three times. And when I passed the mile 25 marker, and I could actually see my own neighborhood in Arlington and know that – really – I was going to make it home, I was going to be a marathoner, I cried. Tears and sweat in equal measure, I pushed up the very-steep final hill just past mile 26 and melted in a puddle of pride. I did not look at my time, or what I looked like—my joy was such you would have thought I had won the dang thing.
G., always pushing me to new heights
But I am Type-A. I am a product of a society where everything from trash bags to sunscreen is sold with a side of body shame. And so, even though I knew the best benefit of running was the way I felt – the fact that no matter what ridiculous new policy or training I was told to accept, or wild student excuse for plagiarism (really, someone found your essay and put it online? They must have stolen your laptop?), or bad date (oh please, let’s begin the date by making fun of both immigrants and working-class people, despite my online profile saying I TEACH MULTILINGUAL WRITERS AT A COMMUNITY COLLEGE…), a run always made me feel better, I could not help but let the competition and push-push-push nature keep me from staying in that happy pride puddle of the first marathon.
Over the next eight years, running then meant one half marathon in spring, and a full in fall. I started printing out schedules, dutifully checking them off like so many other things in my Type-A planner. After years of avoiding the scale for fear of pushing myself back into the disordered eating of my teenage years, I started clocking in and . Started looking at other runners on the trails who could pull off their shirts to reveal tight abs without a trace of wiggle and wondering whether I was a “real” runner. Kept pushing myself for more while doubting I was really one of them.
I kept up that push-doubt-push routine until the Spring of 2020.
Yup. That spring: a then-mysterious virus was beginning to circle the globe, just as I was preparing to joyfully announce, after a devastating pregnancy loss, that I was finally expecting. Pre-vaccine and pre-any-kind-of-scientific understanding, all I was told by my OB was that I needed to be super-duper careful: preggo people already have less-robust immune systems, so with a wiley new virus on the loose, I needed to basically seal off. I did not so much as enter a grocery store for 9 months, and fortunately, in September of 2020 — still months before vaccines arrived – our Tiny Overlord arrived with everyone healthy.
Though this was a new kind of happy pride puddle – so much more intense than that marathon finish – it was also a terrifying and confusing time. I suffered from postpartum depression and anxiety. I had low milk supply that resisted every set of wake-up-at-2-am-power-pumping, special tea, oodles of "lactation friendly" foods lists and countless visits to the lactation specialists -- and when I found that pretty much everything, even the dang formula bottle, created a sense of shame for not being able to produce enough, that anxiety spiraled further. Every baby advice book (gifted when we were all so sure this thing would just blow over far before Tiny Overlord would arrive) told me to seek extra help from friends and family that I couldn’t get in our “new normal”. Suggestions like “Call your girlfriends to watch the baby and get some me time” had to be replaced with “hey, want to sit 6 feet apart in my apartment’s courtyard while I wiggle the baby and shout greetings?”
I was cleared to exercise after 8 weeks by my doctor, but I had stopped running altogether about halfway through my pregnancy, when Tiny Overlord (who was, and is, a 99th percentile sized kiddo) got so big my back hurt too much. As fall dragged into a still-locked-down-ish winter, though, I was feeling trapped in a routine of never-more-than-2-hours-sleep-at-a-time and the walls of my suddenly-too-small apartment, so I started cautiously adding a 30 second jog here and there on my daily baby stroller walks. I had no idea of distance or speed, but I just knew those little bursts made me feel like more than a (failed) milk machine. Made me feel like, well, a person again.
The cherry blossom buds began sprouting outside my window. I started grabbing 10 minutes, 20 for myself between Zoom teaching and baby-wrangling and trying to finish my damn dissertation before the baby started walking and I couldn’t corral her with a playmat while I coded data or analyzed sources anymore. I’d get outside, inhale that air, then walk fast, maybe jog. I’d add a few more short bursts. Sometimes a whole minute. Then two.
Still, this wasn’t REAL running, I thought.
Spring warmed even more. We all got a vaccine and breathed a bit easier. I started seeing more friends. Picked up a well-loved but very functional jogging stroller from my friend E. who had accompanied me on so many half-marathons in pre-parent-landia. I remembered my favorite trails. I started using outdoor run-walks on the Peloton app. Even with the honking-big stroller, I’d find myself getting those blissy-buzz moments I used to: the wind on my face, the fresh air, that feeling of zippy adrenaline.
But of course, I wasn’t really a runner anymore. I felt I could barely claim that title before, and now I couldn’t even do 5K, right? My mile times could easily be bested by a fast walker.
I get by with a little ... ok a lotta ... help from my friends: G. getting me back out again
Summer came. My other half needed to return to his native Spain for eldercare needs, and to see the widowed father he had not been able to greet for more than a year due to COVID. I was left alone with a 9-month old. I decamped to my native Pittsburgh, and I found that the still-early wakeups (6 am on the dot) meant one silver lining: I got to get out before the heat and run circles around my parents’ small neighborhood without worrying about cars.
But that still wasn’t really running, I thought. My old marathon self would have laughed at the slow shuffle, the idea that I was proud to hit 2 miles, instead of 26.2.
And so it continued. Sometimes I ran, sure, but I did not feel I was a runner anymore.
My belly – which never got that tight abs look I so coveted – was decidedly super squishy. I’d still sometimes get weird pangs from my C-section scar. And I could not begin to keep any routine, especially when I had to return to some in-person teaching before I could even find daycare, and life became a ridiculous balancing act. I was mama, I was “professor,” but runner? Not in this body, I thought. Not with these short mileages and these slow times.
Then, Tiny Overlord began walking. It took her awhile to get the hang of it, but once she did, she moved really quickly to running. On one glorious late fall day, I remember watching her realize she could catch up with her papa by running. As toddlers do, she was running with that wobbly little wiggle run, her perfectly chubby little legs coursing over the park while she giggled with unabashed joy. When she fell, she got back up, more excited to try this newfound trick than worried about her bumped knees. When she reached her papa, she grabbed his legs and beamed up at him with her half-toothy, half-gummy grin.
As I cooed over her, and told her how fast fast fast she was, I realized I needed to be saying the same thing to myself. No one would look at their giggly toddler and tell her “that wasn’t really running because you’re slow” or say their stumbling first jogs aren’t “real” because they are short and uncertain. But man oh man, we are good at doing that to ourselves.
So that is where I am now: I am a runner. A pretty slow and uncertain one. One who is just figuring it out. But also one who sometimes gets those same bursts of unabashed joy as Tiny Overlord, just happy that my legs can do this thing – and that’s where I am trying to stay, day by day and jog by jog.
There’s lots of running writing out there on the Interwebs that are about how to best your time and get in running shape and optimize nutrition and make it into Boston (or whatever elite race) it is. That is cool. That is just not here.
I am here for those of you who sneak in the 20 or 15 or even 5-minute jog just to grab your sanity back from the brink.
For folks who squeeze their tiny slice of “me time” running in between elevenity-billion other things and slam a blazer over their sweaty sports bra to take their next Zoom meeting.
For those figuring out how to keep Tiny Overlords happy enough in a jogging stroller that they can take that slightly-longer trail.
For those whose bodies are creaking in new and interesting ways, or who are struggling to focus on what said body can do instead of how it’s not living up to some idealized fantasy.
For anyone who just feels good when they move their body a bit faster than normal over ground and there’s some wind and fresh air.
You found a park behind your office and sneak out for mini-jogs, only changing your shoes but still wearing your work clothes because your boss has you thisclose to very much not quiet quitting but rather loud outburst Icanttakethisanymore quitting? Hi and welcome!
You used to run as a kid or admired kids who did run and you think you’d never be one but the other day you had to run to make that train or plane or bus and huh, it felt good and you were thinking maybe you could do this? Cheers friend and welcome!
You’re a runner. I’m a runner.
Look, there’s been people for decades telling us we’re not. Maybe you’ve also heard someone say that the 10-minute mile is slow when that seems like flash-speed to you. That “slowpokes ruin marathons” and plodders don’t belong.
But plenty of (smarter, IMHO) minds remind us that all bodies that want to run, that have joy in running, can and that simply starting is winning.
You’re a runner. I’m a runner. Everybody, and every body, who likes that feeling of moving with some speed, is.
I hope you’ll keep jogging on with me!
