American History Museum

Smithsonian in the Snow

Zane’s First Flannel

Zane generally forges his own path in life but once in a while he falls in line with his older brother or sister. Today he is following in his big brother’s footsteps, sporting his first ever flannel.

Zane’s First Flannel

Zane generally forges his own path in life but once in a while he falls in line behind either his brother or sister. Today he is following in Blaise’s footsteps, sporting his very first flannel shirt.

The Ragamuffin Carpool

Every morning I have the pleasure of driving two of the silliest six year olds in the world to school. One is mine and the other is his best friend. From the minute she gets in the car until the minute I drop them in the car loop, they are giggling in the backseat. When they return in the afternoon, they begin the giggles all over again. I am sure they are complete angels with no giggling while in school, right?

Old Dog New Tricks

Seven years ago, as I prepared to train for Ironman Austria, I hired my first coach.  I had my doubts about the relationship.  Up until that point, I had trained for six marathons and a couple of triathlons all by myself andquite honestly, it was going really well.  But I liked this guy and since he was already doing my sports massages it seemed natural enough to move onto the coaching level.

The problem is that I am not easily convinced that another person knows more about my body than I do.  And when he started pushing me beyond my comfort zone, I was not ready.  Physically, I am sure he was right. I was physically ready to push myself more than I had been.  Mentally, though, I just wasn’t there.

By mutual decision, we split.  He moved on to more willing athletes and I proceeded to DNF in my first attempt at Ironman. Still, I didn’t regret working on my own.  I was just not ready to work with a coach.

Then through a series of events that started with my rupturing my plantar fascia and ended with my watching this video, I decided to give coaching another chance.

Five months ago, I started working with Coach Jeff at PRS Fit and I have not regretted the decision for one minute.  The trick this time was simple.  I put all of my trust into Coach.  After speaking to him a couple of times, it was easy to do this and when he got me through almost two months of recovery without losing my fitness, I knew I was in the right place.

Having built up trust during those first months, Jeff has eased me into a program that is helping me to feel stronger and more able to meet my goals.  But the best thing I have learned through working with a coach is that I can trust another person to guide my training. Reading all of the magazines and blogs in the world will never give me the experience Jeff has had as a coach. So I have to trust him.

And I do.  Recently, as we were once again discussing the fact that this foot continues to be an issue, Jeff asked me for some video of my stride.  After analyzing what I was doing wrong, he told me we need to change my stride.  I am not sure that I have made it quite clear enough how rigid I am.  I don’t bend and when it comes to my body, I am a purist. I have never been one for fads in the running world.

But I trust Jeff and I believe him when he says that changing my stride will help reduce the injuries that continue to plague me.  This trust says a lot about Coach but I think it may say something about me as well.  I hope that what it says is that in the past seven years I have grown and matured.  That I am now smart enough to realize that I don’t have all of the answers.  Maybe that saying about old dogs and new tricks is just a little backwards.  Or maybe, I am not quite as old as I think I am.

The lesson I know I have learned though is that life is not static.  Things change.  We move on and what we were seven years ago is not necessarily what we are today.  Seven years ago, I may have had the world’s best coach, but if I wasn’t ready for him, then it wasn’t going to work.  Today, I am seven years older and I am ready to let go of what I thought I knew and trust that Coach Jeff knows more.

We Are Runners

I love the act of running – floating through the miles while drenched in sweat, my heart beating strongly, my mind wandering through subjects for the next week’s blog.  I love runners. The ones I meet on Daily Mile.Theones I see on our local trails.  The running moms I meet at my children’s schools.  But even more than the people and the act of running, I love the inclusivity of this sport.  I love that on any given weekend I can run a marathon or a 5-k with the “best of the best of the best, sir.”  And I love that those best of the best of the best are so approachable.  I love that runners like Ryan Hall and Paula Radcliffe who bring me to tears with their performances can admire the perseverance it takes for the back of the packers to be out there competing in the same sport.

My husband’s friend tells a story that I think is so indicative of this inclusivity.  A few years back when he was studying at Oxford, he was invited to a banquet honoring several past graduates of the university.  He had only just arrived at Oxford so he found himself at a table full of people he didn’t know.  Sitting to his right was a gentleman who struck up a conversation.  He asked our friend, “So, do you participate in any sport?”  And my friend proceeded to tell him how he jogged a little and participated in some local road races.  After he finished regaling this gentleman with stories of his favorite races, he asked in return, “And you, do you participate in any sport?”  The gentleman, replied, “I jog a bit.”  Maybe he would have expounded on the subject, but just then someone approached the podium and began to speak, eventually introducing the guest of honor that evening – Sir Roger Bannister.  Sir Roger Bannister, who happened to be seated, you guessed it, right next to my friend.

I love this story because it is just one of dozens of stories like it.  John Bingham tells one of sitting beside an elite athlete who had recently set the world record for the marathon.  This marathoner asked how he had done in the same marathon and after Mr. Bingham told him how long it had taken him to complete the marathon, this world record holder was shocked.  Not mortified but shocked and amazed that anybody could stay on their feet that long.

Over the years I have had the pleasure of meeting so many great runners – Jeff Galloway, Joe Henderson, Mark Allen, Bart Yasso – and without exception they were all so gracious.  Unlike the pro athletes we find in other sports, they didn’t act like their presence was a gift to me.  They acted like any other runner I have ever met.  They asked about my races and related stories about theirs as though we were two of a kind.   And though they are faster and stronger than I, they are right about that we are all runners.  John Bingham said it well, “If you run, you are a runner. It doesn’t matter how fast or how far. It doesn’t matter if today is your first day or if you’ve been running for twenty years. There is no test to pass, no license to earn, no membership card to get. You just run.”

I enjoy our local races. They are a great place try to compete for an age group spot.  At these smaller races, I actually have the chance of this happening.  But I love the bigger races, the ones with 10, 20, or even 30 thousand participants.  I love seeing the diversity of our sport.  While every large race has a couple of handfuls of elite athletes, you will also find people of every shape and size, first time racers and veterans of hundreds of races, moms, dads, sisters, brothers, nuns, priests, tattooed biker types, young guys still smelling of booze from a late Saturday night out with friends.  Each seemingly so different from the next but on race morning they are all the same.  They are all runners, experiencing the same jitters and anticipation, the same excitement or dread and ultimately the same sense of accomplishment for a race well run.

Through the Pain

When I was thirteen, I walked into my living room, sat down on the arm of my father’s Lazy Boy recliner and without warning, came to the full realization of who I wanted to be.  Some people spend a lifetime trying to

Pushing Through the Pain

discover themselves.  For me, it took minutes.  As I sat there with my father, I was mesmerized by the image of Julie Moss crawling across the finish line at the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon.  I knew immediately that that was what I wanted from my life.  I wanted to push myself and watching Julie struggle on all fours, in the dark, toward that finish line, I knew how I would do it.

This doesn’t make me unique.  There are thousands of runners who watched that video, either that day or years later and thought, “That is what I want to do.”  It is either in you or it isn’t.  You either watch it and think “Why the hell would somebody want to do that?” or you watch it and utter a breathless, “Cool” in amazement at her ability to keep going even in the face of pain.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am no Julie Moss.  I will never be fighting for first place in a race. Instead, I fight to beat myself.  To better my last time.  To push myself further than I thought I could.  I battle against the barriers that pretend to be there.

When I started marathoning 12 years ago, it never occurred to me to think I couldn’t do it.  It never occurs to me to think that anybody couldn’t do it.  So, you’re 400 pounds and want to run a marathon?  Sure.  It might take you a couple of years to get in shape but sure, you can do that?  You smoke 2 packs a day and want to run a marathon?  Yep, get out there and become a runner.  You have never run a mile in your life? It is just putting one foot in front of the other.  It is doable.  That isn’t to say it is easy.  It isn’t.  But if you want to do it, I mean really want to do it, you can push through the pain and it is in pushing through it that you will find the joy in the marathon.

Joy of the Finisher

I have crossed the marathon finish line 13 times.  Each time, it feels a little like a miracle.  Did I really just run 26.2 miles?  Am I really done with the 16 weeks of training?  And most amazingly, did I really just push through that pain at mile 22?  The pain that caused me to start silently chanting “this is hard, this is hard, this is hard” over and over again?”  The pain that had me crying and convinced it just wasn’t worth the effort?  Did I really make it through that?  Yes, and that is what makes it worth it.  There have been marathons when I haven’t felt that pain, not many, but some.  But it is the marathons in which I had to push, when I had to overcome, that I find the most joy.

I have heard it said that anything worth having isn’t going to come easy and maybe that is why Julie Moss’s famous crawl to the finish resonated so strongly with me.  Maybe it is why I saw my friend Michelle’s pictures of her marathon experience and understood her joy at the end.  It is in the struggle that we find out what we are made of.  It is in the marathon that we push beyond that struggle and become the person we know we can be.

Special Thanks to Michelle from Daily Mile for sharing her pictures and experience with me and inspiring me to write about this pain and joy of the marathon.

The Choice

I am angry.  Truth be told I am livid.  For almost twenty years I have worked toward a healthy lifestyle.  I run, bike swim, lift weights and basically stay active a good portion of each and every day.  I don’t smoke, don’t drink and though I love food, I try not to over indulge.  I do all of these things because I want to live to a ripe old age in the healthiest way possible.  I don’t want to spend days on end in the hospital.  I don’t want to cough and hack my way through my old age.  I don’t want to suffer with diabetes or cancer or heart disease.  And really, when it comes down to it, living a healthy lifestyle, though it is work, it is also fun.  I enjoy my life.

Since I started blogging about my running life a couple of years back, I have been honored with emails from friends, family and even strangers who have told me I inspire them to get moving and to take better care of themselves.  At first I thought this was just something people felt obligated to say but then I started watching.  I started seeing signs of the influence one healthy life could have on another. I watched friends and family and strangers as they started working out, running and even entering races.

But every couple of months, I receive a call from my 60 year old mother, with another complaint about her health.  After years of smoking, eating poorly, and getting very little exercise, her lifestyle has caught up with her.  Her ailments run the gamut but ultimately ends in congestive heart failure. She has been told to stop smoking.  She has been told that the heart issues would dissipate with a proper, low fat, low sodium diet.  She has been told to exercise.  But she doesn’t do it and no amount of cajoling from her doctors or her children makes a difference.

Last night I received a call from my sister.  I could feel the steam emanating from her ears through the phone. My mother had just called her.

“I think I may be having a heart attack,” she said to my sister.

“Well, Mom, do you want me to call 911 or should I come and take you to the hospital myself?”  My sister asked with as much patience as possible.

“No, I want you to go pick up a pizza from Dominoes.  Then go to Subway and pick up a salad and bring that over to Aunt Joyce’s.  I promised her we would have dinner with her. And then, we can go to the hospital.”

My sister may be the most patient person I know but this was too much.  She insisted that they go to the hospital, my mother refused.  My sister lost her temper but my mother wouldn’t budge.  My sister cried and still my mother wouldn’t budge.  In the end, she gave up and did what my mother asked.

When they finally reached the hospital, my mother was in full blown congestive heart failure.  She had to be admitted.  Her first question?  You might think it would have something to do with her diagnosis or her treatment but, you would be wrong.  No, she wanted to know where she could go to smoke.  When the doctor told her there is no smoking on the premises at all she pitched a temper tantrum that would have put my two year old to shame.

As I sit here in my kitchen, seething because so much of this could have been avoided, she lies in a hospital room with dye running through her heart.  While I sit here waiting to hear whether she will have to have surgery, whether her body can even handle surgery, she lies there waiting for her next cigarette.  I sit here wondering how it is I can influence others to lead a healthy lifestyle, while my mother, who I love with all my heart takes nothing from my example and instead of lying in that hospital bed trying to plan out how to get better, she waits for someone to take care of it for her.

So, yes, I am angry but I am also sad, because though I can help my mom through this crisis, there is sure to be another and another down the road.  I am sad because I can lead by example but she has to make a choice to follow and if her history is any indication of her future, I know the choice she will make.

The Carrot

This running life is not always fun.  Looking back over my online running log and all of the times I have clicked the little happy face to say it was a “great run,” I am afraid that my new-to-running friends might be getting the wrong impression about my running life.  I do enjoy the benefits of being fit.  I enjoy the fact that while I watch other people have to sit and take breaks while walking around the National Zoo, it is just a stroll in the park for me.  I enjoy the fact that on our vacation to Maine this summer we were able to bike into parts of Acadia Park that the average person might not get to see. I love the fact that my kids know I can keep up with their active lives.

I also know there are benefits to my healthy lifestyle that go beyond just enjoying myself. Earlier this summer, I started a new breast cancer screening program at our local Breast Center.  The idea is to get a baseline sonogram of my breast tissue to use against future screenings.  The first thing the doctor said to me was how nice it was that there was no fat to have to look through – how much easier it made it to get a good look.  This isn’t the first time a doctor has pointed out a benefit to being fit for screening purposes.

Of course, there are hundreds of studies that tout the benefits of staying fit and living a healthy lifestyle.  Fit people are less likely to have heart issues, diabetes, bad knees, strokes and the list goes on and on.

These are all things I am aware of, but when that alarm sounds at 6am and I know I need to get out of the bed and lace up my shoes, those things don’t seem all that important.  On those mornings all I want to do is crawl back under the covers and enjoy another hour of sleep.  Even on the mornings when I am ready to jump out of bed and go for those runs, it isn’t a guarantee that the run will be fun or even slightly enjoyable.  Yes, I love running but, that is a general statement.  I love running and biking and swimming.  I love being active.  But still, I don’t always love them.  Not every run, swim or ride is inspiring.  Many of them kick my butt.  Some of them are down right horrible.

I hope that people who look at my training log or read my blog will see the good runs for what they are.  They are a blessing that make me keep going back out there.  They are the carrot for all the sticks I have to put up with on the bad ones.  Being fit is fun and beneficial in a thousand ways.  And while the workouts are almost always beneficial, they are not always fun.  The trick, at least my trick, is to keep reaching for that carrot.  Keep rolling out of the bed on those mornings when I want to sleep and heading out the door slogging my way through a not so fun run in search of that run that brightens the world around me, that ride that makes me feel like a ten year old girl again or that swim that washes away all the worries of my day.

Elastigirl

I wasn’t bitten by a spider or dunked in radioactive waste.  I am not from a far away galaxy.  Still, I seem to have developed a super power.  Okay, it might not be a real super power but it is a power that I never expected to find within myself.

For most of my life, when it comes to my goals, I have been Little Miss Rigidity.  Even as a child I was single-minded when it came to meeting a goal.  As an adult this rigidity has caused me more trouble than I care to mention and yet I still found myself pushing toward goals that I should have given up on. The biggest area of rigidity for me was in my running. I would schedule a marathon, come up with the training plan and run – no matter what.  You might think I would have learned that this was not the way to go after I ran the Fort William Marathon in Scotland with a fractured tibia and had to take six months off of running because of the damage caused.  But, no.  You might think I would have learned after completing three months of training for the Baltimore Marathon with a stomach virus from hell.  But, alas, no.

This year I ruptured my plantar fascia.  This injury did not develop overnight.   The plantar fascia had been hurting for 18 months and yet I ran.  The morning it finally ruptured, I knew something was exponentially worse than it had been and I decided I would go to the doctor – right after my speedwork.  So I hobbled to the gym and started the workout telling myself that I would stop after the warm up if it was still hurting.  Of course, Little Miss Rigidity didn’t do that.  I decided to see if the first set of sprints would make the pain go away.  It was only a minute into the first set that I heard and felt the pop.

After weeks in a boot and months of physical therapy, I still signed up for two marathons this fall.  I had a goal, dammit.  I had to qualify for Boston.  My single mindedness found me aiming at the goal no matter what the foot was saying.  Until, somehow, I found I had been bitten by that spider or dunked in radioactive waste and suddenly I was Elastigirl.  Suddenly I found myself enjoying the cross-training Coach Jeff had scheduled into my training plan to bring me back without injury.  Suddenly, I found myself being honest about the pain in my foot.  Suddenly, I found myself with a super power that allowed me to step back and be honest about my chances of qualifying for Boston in October.

In the past this decision would have been gutting.  I would have spent weeks mourning the loss of the marathon, cursing my foot and crying into my Gatorade.  But this time, I found a freedom in giving up the goal.  Instead of looking at what I was losing, I was able to see the possibilities that it opened up.  I could see the possibility of running pain free and not worrying about pushing through the pain that was already beginning to resurface, but more than that, I was able to see an opportunity I had missed in the past.  This year instead of running sick or injured, I will be riding.  I have the chance for the first time in 16 years to ride the Sea Gull Century in Salisbury, Maryland.  It has been there all the time.  It was a possibility so many times in the past but I chose to ignore it in pursuit of “the goal.”

So, no, I am not “faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” But I am able to bend and make choices beyond the goals I have set for myself.  I am able to change things up a little and work towards something new.  I am Elastigirl.