The Final Four

This is the hard part.  The last four weeks before the marathon. All of my longest runs are behind me.  I am lifting less and cutting back on the speedwork just a little so that I don’t tire out my legs in the final weeks of training and I am ready to move onto something new.  The problem is I still have four weeks – three more long runs and six more speed sessions.  There is more work to be done, but this is where I begin to get restless. I just want to run it already.

In the past I have done just that.  Found another marathon a few weeks earlier and gotten it done.  One of my best marathons happened that way.  Every March my local running club hosts a marathon on the trail I run on week in and week out.  I don’t do the race every year, but I always know its there.

Two years ago I thought I might use it for a training run.  The plan was to just run an easy 18 and then head home.  But, of course, that isn’t how it worked.  I felt great.  There was no stress to it, no expectations.  Finishing it was easy and apparently not at all surprising to my husband.

But now its fall and though there are four local marathons, the other three are all after the one I have planned.  So, I am forced to be patient.  To try hard not to sabotage all of the work I have put in.  In the words of my teenage son, I have to “just deal.”

Those who know me know that I encourage others to complete the marathon.  That I believe anybody can do it if they train for it and believe in themselves.  The kicker though, is the training.  The marathon itself is fun.  The first few weeks of training are fun.  But, the four weeks leading up to the marathon are not.

I remind myself every marathon season that training is fifty percent mental.  If I put my mind to it I can continue to train and improve.  I remind myself of that, but I forget to remind myself to be patient, to take the last four weeks to tweak the bits of my training I can and enjoy it for what it is.

“What it is” is the opportunity to settle in. To get comfortable and know I am ready.  It is the time to rest my legs from the twenty milers of early training.  It is a chance to train mentally.  To visualize race morning and the miles that will follow.

It is also the time to settle into my rituals.  The month before the marathon my family watches more sports movies than any other time of the year – Invincible, Remember the Titans and one of my all time favorites, Without Limits.  I also pull my favorite running books from the shelf – The Runner’s Anthology and The Long Road to Boston.

Apparently though, it is also my time to grumble about wanting to be done already.  Though this is the first time these words have made it to the page, I recognize them as the same ones that tumble through my mind before every marathon.

For me, it is the hardest part of marathon training, because suddenly, I have the time for self doubt.  I am not working as hard and that little marathon devil sits on my shoulder questioning this training program, no matter what “this” training program is.  Shouldn’t I be out there doing more, pushing harder?  Shouldn’t I just throw that program away and go with my gut?

This year though, I will shut the little devil in a shoe box and leave him in my closet.  Hide him away and try to enjoy the extra time and the extra spring in my legs.  I will trust the program and give myself a break.  Marathon day will be here soon enough.

And like my children who wait with baited breath for Christmas morning, I will wait and enjoy the anticipation.

Mind Over Matter

I went to bed looking forward to my workout this morning.  After a tough long run over the weekend I thought an intense spin session and weights would boost my confidence and help me start the week off right.  The nice thing about Monday’s late morning spinning class is that I don’t have to wake up early and even if I do, I can hang around the house for a while working on chores or writing before the children wake.

The morning started just as it should have.  I woke up with no headache or other side effects from the dehydration I had suffered on my long run.  My legs felt good and I was in just the right frame of mind.  I did wake up early, which isn’t a surprise as it has become my routine to start these hot, summer days earlier. So, I took my time.  I cleaned the kitchen, wrote a little and even posted a special birthday post for a surprise running partner I met along the trails on Sunday.  All in all, it was a productive morning.

Finally I threw on my heart rate monitor, kissed the children goodbye and headed out the door.  And that is where my plans went awry.  Sometime on Sunday my husband or children had gone into my car in search of who knows what and had turned on all of the interior lights so of course, my battery was dead.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, fitness is ninety percent mental, the other sixty percent is all physical.  A dead battery was all it took this morning.  It was as though someone had put a tack on the driver’s seat and popped my balloon.  I had to wait for AAA to come out and jump the car (actually in end I needed a whole new battery) but other than that I was free to ride my bike in the basement or run in the neighborhood.  I have Pilates and Yoga discs galore.  I could have jumped rope in the road in front of the house while waiting for the tow-truck driver.  I had choices but I couldn’t see them at the time.  At the time, my workout was ruined.

In my mind it was done.  I had had my moment to get going and missed the window.  There is an old saying about mind over matter and I believe it.  It doesn’t matter what the reality is, if we believe that something is so then it just is.  This has been on my mind a lot recently as I have had several workouts completely ruined by my mind.  The one that sticks out most clearly was almost a month ago now.  I was going out for an easy three hour run on an out and back course.  For an hour and forty five minutes I felt unstoppable.  My body was responding to the miles like a well oiled machine when suddenly I looked around and realized I had not been this far down this particular trail in almost a year.  This is when I realized I had run out fifteen minutes longer than I had meant to.  Meaning my total run would be three and a half hours instead of three.

From that moment my mind took over my run.  Instead of getting tired at two hours and forty five minutes, which would have been expected at this part of my training, I immediately felt fatigued, my legs began to hurt and I slowed down.  My run was in tatters and it was all mental.

Looking back, analyzing today as well as that ruined long run, it is easy to see the mistake.  It is easy to get angry with myself now and wonder why I let it happen.  But will it be so easy to correct next time?  Can I change the mind tricks once they start?  I have to believe I can.  I have to believe that knowing the problem is half the battle.  The next time this happens I will have a battle plan.  Because that is what it is – a battle of mind over matter.

Resistance Trainer

I have a resistance trainer that I love with all of my heart.  The best bit is we grow together.  The trainer gets bigger and I get stronger.  And though I didn’t buy my trainer at a store, he is absolutely priceless.  He is now three years old and weighs close to thirty pounds but that is not how the story begins.  It begins six weeks after his birth.

I was given the go ahead to exercise after the requisite six weeks rest that comes after delivery.  The first thing I did after arriving home was to strap my little resistance trainer into our new jog stroller and head out for my first three mile run since I found out I was pregnant.  The first run, as they say, was the hardest.  Three miles took thirty six minutes and it took everything I had to make it through even at that pace.

Over the years, I have gotten faster and stronger as Zane has grown taller and heavier.  In the first year I wore headphones and even as I built my time on the road to almost two hours, he slept through almost every run.  I have since trained for three marathons using the jog stroller and my growing resistance trainer.  During that time, Zane stopped sleeping and started pointing out trees, dogs, and cars along the way, learning new words as I pushed my way past my earlier limits.

It has been my hope with all of my children that they would see me as more than just the person who feeds and bathes them – that they would also see me as an athlete.  My older children have had the benefit of seeing me train and finish marathons.  They have seen the work that goes into my quest to be an athlete and they have grown to think of me in those terms.

I knew that one day Zane would see this too, but I was surprised by how fast that happened.  During a recent run I was pushing my way up a hill as Zane sat in his stroller chattering away about the world going by.  Suddenly he stopped for just the shortest second and said to me, “Mommy, I am getting bigger and bigger.”  The funny thing was this came at a particularly hard part of my run.  I had been giving it my all to push his thirty pounds up a steep incline and though I thought I had no breath left to give I answered, “Yes, sweetie, you are.  And you are getting heavier and heavier.”

He did his quiet thing for a couple of more seconds and came back with a reply I will cherish for the rest of my life.  In his serious little voice he said, “But you are a very strong mommy, Mommy.”  You can bet your bottom dollar that I made it up that hill without walking, and the rest of the run went by faster than I thought possible.  Suddenly, my little resistance trainer had become my little motivator.  And as I said before, I love my resistance trainer with all my heart.

Running Away

“What are you running from?”

I hear this pithy remark on almost every run through my neighborhood, usually from nice older gentlemen who are trying to be clever.  Depending on my mood I either chuckle and respond with a wave or simply nod my head all the while thinking, “Obviously you have never been a mom or you would know what I am running from.”

Today, it was the editing class I, in a moment of weakness, signed up for in order to be a more effective writer.  I haven’t read the chapters or even thought about completing the assignment and my next class is tomorrow morning.  I am running from the added stress this class has brought into my already hectic life.

But there are so many things a mother runs from.  Sometimes it is the laundry that is piled chaotically on the floor of the laundry room or the dishes that couldn’t fit in the dishwasher after this morning’s playgroup.  Often it is the toddler pulling at my legs or screaming at the top of his lungs while playing some game I couldn’t possibly understand.  But most often it is the mom inside my head that wants to scream at the toddler who causes me to run.

Whatever it is that I am running from, I am able to lose it on the roads.  The stress of my class, the pressure to keep a clean house, or the need to be the perfect mom is shaken off by the pounding of my feet on the pavement.  They may come back to haunt me again but for that day they are left in the dust as I run up one court and down the next.

As a runner, this is the part I look forward to the most.  There are days I run because it is in the schedule.  I need to run long in order to be ready for the marathon, or I need to do speed work so that I might be able to pass my daughter in the next 5K but these days, the running away days, they are the best.  There is no expectation of greatness, no schedule to adhere to, just me and the road.  If I have left the house running from the mom who wants to lose her temper I may sprint the first mile, if I have left to avoid the work of motherhood I can mosey through the entire run and feel no guilt.  This is the run with no pressure and no rules.

Maybe those old men are clever after all because now I realize there is something I am running from but there is also something I am running to.  I am running to a peace I can only find on the roads.

My Lucky Day

It was there on the calendar.  Twenty Miles LSD (long slow distance).  Sometimes I swear it should read LSBD (long slow boring distance).  There are days when it seems as though the run will never end.  Fortunately today I realized before I even hit the first mile that I had won the lottery.  Two hundred and fifty million dollars.  Wow, the possibilities.  What could I do with that much money?  For that matter, what couldn’t I do?

For the next several miles I was as generous as Oprah.  I had built a whole street full of homes in New Orleans for the Katrina victims, bought brand new uniforms for soccer teams in Iraq, given to my church and my children’s schools.  It is amazing how fast the miles went by as this happened.  At least a mile and a half was eaten up in just building the houses and another mile flew by before I was able to decorate them and move the families in.

By mile seven I felt like I had tithed enough for the time being and was ready to help my family.  My mom finally got that house in the mountains she had always dreamed of.  Completely decorated and ready to move in.  My dad was thrilled with his brand new fishing boats.  Luckily the salesman knew all about fishing and convinced me that Dad would need one for fresh water fishing and one for deep sea fishing.  It took a couple of miles just to decide what my brother and sister would want.  In the end, I decided to pay off their mortgages and buy them something fun.  Speedy, red Porsches for each of them.

Mile twelve came before I even knew it.  Mile twelve is my favorite mile in my regular long run.  Not because I feel so good at that distance but because I turn into a beautiful and distracting neighborhood right on the bay.  Between every house you catch the loveliest breeze.  And as today was my lucky day I decided to buy my favorite house.  It did take some convincing to get the current owner’s to part with it but once they realized how much I had always loved their house and how happy I would be there, not to mention the nice amount of money I was willing to offer to live there, they finally parted with it.

As the house is almost a hundred and fifty years old the kitchen definitely needed to be remodeled.  Luckily, I had been thinking about my perfect kitchen for most of my adult life and was able to remodel the whole thing from the gorgeous state of the art appliances to the natural stone floors and granite counter tops in less than a mile.

I do find that my mind wanders in the later miles. So suddenly I began to miss my sister.  I knew exactly the thing for this though.  She should come for an extended visit and if that was to happen she would need a guest house.  This project took some time.  I not only had to design, build and decorate the guest house I also had to put in the pool beside which the guest house would sit because everybody knows a guest house always sits beside the pool.

Quite unexpectedly I found myself at mile fifteen with so much more to accomplish and so few miles left to accomplish it all in.  I had to quickly hire someone to help me decorate the rest of the house.  The crew from Extreme Home Makeover are pretty quick so after offering to foot the bill for their next couple of projects they agreed to come in and work their magic.  It takes a week on their show but they build a whole house in that time.  For me it took them only a couple of miles. The basement was my children’s dream basement as the whole thing had been turfed and fitted with goals. Games could start immediately.  My husband’s home gym had everything a person could ask for including the flat paneled high definition television with every sport channel possible.  And my bedroom was everything I had ever wanted and more. Voila, my dream house was complete and I still had a mile and a half to go.

As with any long run this is the hardest part.  I was almost done and beginning to really feel it in my legs.  Unfortunately a lottery winning, marathon training mom’s job is never done.  There was water leaking into my beautiful kitchen from the upstairs bathroom.  Luckily I found myself turning back into my driveway. I will just have to call the plumber and fix that next time, I’m sure the bathroom can use a remodel.

Previously Published at Irongirl.com

Cross Country Son

Blaise was three years old when I started training for marathons.  He would run around the living room and announce that he was running a marathon.  Over the next couple of years, as his father and grandmother dragged him from mile marker to mile marker only to stand on the side of the road looking for mommy and catching only a quick glimpse as I ran by in the middle of the pack, he discovered just how far a marathon was. As any kid would, he began to dread the marathon days.  Lucky for him Maryland has several marathons to offer the long distance runner and Grammy was always willing to let him spend the night at her house the night before the marathon and skip the mile markers and the endless boredom.  Even so, by the time he was ten he asked if we could have just one vacation without a race.   Destination races were the hardest because there was really no way out for him.  From California to Scotland to Austria he stood waiting for mommy to cross the finish line.  As he grew he showed no interest in running himself.  Boring and running had become synonymous in his mind.

Then the unimaginable happened – he didn’t make the high school soccer team.  Going to a school known for its athletics makes for a lot of competition.  As a family we had always talked about the positive effect of athletics in your teen years but most especially high school team sports.  So he joined the cross country team.  He went into it knowing he would hate it.  Knowing it would be the worse sport ever.  For Blaise, no ball equals no fun.

The first week he walked around on tired legs and complained about being hungry every minute of every day.  Everyday I heard the same complaints.  It was too hot, too hard and no fun, until suddenly I didn’t hear it anymore.  Suddenly I heard about other kids who needed a ride home.  My car was filled with stinky, sweaty high school cross country runners, half-heartedly complaining about that day’s run.  But I also heard them talking about my son being at the front of the pack, about my son running the longer distances and I realized he was enjoying himself.

The first race was at a farm donated for the event by a local parent.  Through the cornfields and over the cow patties, around the barn and through the small copse of trees, six teams would compete in an official 5K cross country race.  It was the first day in team uniform.  The soccer players, who stood out among the crowd because of the whites at the top of there legs, complained of feeling naked in the short shorts and scanty tops.  The same kids who stood beside a soccer pitch with total ease showed signs of nerves as they waited for their race to be called.

But I stood there waiting – waiting to see my son start his first long distance race.  The gun sounded and the runners headed in one direction while the newbie parents followed behind the varsity parents who knew the best place to see the runners along the route.  We headed to the first marker and cheered on our boys.  I stood there cheering on a child who had supported my sporting efforts for years.  Stood there staring in wonder at the speed he had developed.  Stood there until I realized this wasn’t the last marker.  I followed the veteran parents heading to the next vantage point and the next and then finally the finish line.  I watched him round the barn and head into the finish.  I cheered for him and noticed his speed increase as he heard my voice.  I watched as he crossed the finish line and the enormity of the moment occurred to him and then I watched him do something he had done for years as he headed back out onto the course and cheered on the middle of the packers and ran back again to cheer on those who were really struggling with the course.

As a spectator, watching me all those years, he had been bored.  He couldn’t feel the intensity of the race, but at that moment he saw it clearly.   He knew how his voice could help carry the others over the finish line.  I was proud of his time, proud that he had run such a hard race.  But I was just as proud of his going back and becoming a spectator again.

Previously published in The Streak – An Annapolis Striders‘ Publication

It’s Just a Fat Day

In the picture I am fifteen years younger, my hair is short and I am the very picture of health.  I still have the shorts I wore in that picture.  They are a size two and are completely out of style but I keep them for the same reason I keep the picture, to remind myself.  I remember clearly the day it was taken.  We were hiking in Pennsylvania.  The weather was perfect, my husband was perfect.  It should have been a perfect day but I remember it as though it were yesterday, not for its perfection but because of how fat I felt.

This picture was taken just before digital cameras so the film sat in a drawer with several other rolls waiting to be developed.  The day I finally picked up the pictures my first child was two months old and I was struggling to lose the weight I had gained during pregnancy.  When I came across this picture I cried.  I couldn’t believe how I had let that moment pass.  I looked at it remembering how perfect the day was and how fat I felt and wondered why I couldn’t have been happy then.  I wanted to will the girl in the picture to be happy.

Over the years I have kept the picture as a reminder of how off my thinking can be on a “fat day.”  Sometimes it works but not always.  Sometimes the fat days win.  The trick is in not letting them get me off track.  The fat days become a self-fulfilling destiny.  I stop eating to fuel my exercise and start eating to be fat.  I stop working out as hard.  And ultimately I begin to gain my weight back.  I am afraid I am at the beginning of that cycle right now so I have pulled out the picture and am willing the girl in the picture to be happy, to look at her clothes and step on a scale.  I am willing her to get a grip and realize she isn’t fat.

The good news is that I am not alone.  Many women do this.  We seek perfection.  We are a size eight and want to be a six, sure that we will never be happy until we are and then we are and suddenly we want to be a size four.  Eventually this search for perfection sabotages all of our efforts at leading a healthy life.

Kirstie Alley was on Oprah a couple of weeks ago talking about this exact thing.  Looking back at the bikini episode that she filmed because she had lost all of the weight, she said she hadn’t let herself enjoy that body.  She had wanted to be thinner.  Instead she has gained eighty three pounds and is looking back at that picture wondering why she couldn’t be happy then.

I don’t have the answers for everyone but I do have them for me.  It is a just a day.  It can turn into two days and then a week if I don’t remind myself.  The mirror lies on fat days.  Sometimes even the scale lies so for me the trick is in that picture.  If I can remember how fat I felt that day, how embarrassed I was to be in a pair of shorts pretending to be an athlete.  If I can remember that and look at those size two shorts that are far from fat, maybe I can trick today’s Ann into remembering it is only a fat day, remind her that perfection is not the goal.  Ultimately, the goal is health and happiness.

Originally published at www.irongirl.com

I Am Not Afraid

I am a trail runner.  Before I even knew there was a name for it, I was a trail runner.  The first time I can remember running on a trail I was eight years old.  My family had moved out of the city into a trailer park in the country.  Other kids would roller skate or ride their bikes around the circle of trailers that was our neighborhood.  But not me.  Circles were not for me.  The minute I saw the trail leading between two trailers into the woods and heard that it lead to an abandoned railroad track and had trails leading off of it into the woods I abandoned my bike and headed into the woods.  I remember the other kids warning me about the Maco Ghost and the hermit who lived in the woods.  But I wasn’t scared.  Somehow I knew I belonged there, running on those trails.  I went every chance I was given.  I tried to talk my friends into joining me.  I found new trails with every run.  Some were clear others were not.  I would come home pouring sweat, legs covered in blood from the blackberry brambles but I didn’t care.  I had found a home.  A place I belonged.

Today, thirty two years later, I still love the trails.  I can’t resist them.  I hunt them out.  I am a trail runner even though the warnings are still there.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“Don’t you worry about being attacked?”

“Didn’t you see the sign about copperheads?”

“What if you fall and break a leg?”

I laugh and explain that no, I am not afraid.  I have a better chance of wrecking my car on the way to the trail than being hurt on them.

As I have gotten older I have learned to take more precautions. I always carry a cell phone.  I go at times when I know a trail is going to be most populated and I let my husband know where I am going to be.  But I am not scared.

In a strange way I think this fearlessness was a gift from my mother.  Way back then, when I first became a trail runner I was scared.  Not of the hermit who lived in the woods or the ghost we all claimed to have seen but of my mother.  I was scared every moment of every day, until the day I found those trails.  On those trails I found a peace I had never known.  I ran into those woods to escape a life of fear.  I was running away but I was also running to something.  I was running to the athlete I would become.  I was running to the beauty life has to offer.  I was running to a world of comfort I didn’t have at home.

I run on the trails now for different reasons.  I run to let go of the stress of parenthood or to feel my body responding to the ups and downs of the ground.  I run to feel my heart beating faster and the burn in my legs.  Often, I run just to see what is down a particular trail.  Will there be a stream, or a railroad track or a dilapidated house beside a manmade pond?  But I never run without a sense of gratitude for the trail and where it has lead me or the gifts of peace it has given me.  I am a trail runner and I am not afraid.  I am a trail runner and I always will be.

Previously published in Trail Runner Magazine’s eNewsletter, Inside Dirt May 2009

New Discoveries

We hear a lot about discovering ourselves.  About becoming a better person
through self discovery.  I am a little afraid of what I might discover about
myself.  I am not sure that I can be put into categories.  As so many of my
character traits seem to contradict the one before it.

For example, I am a person who has great difficulty thinking outside of the
box.  A few years back we spent a summer in London while my husband
completed an internship.   Though we had a furnished apartment, I came to
realize that it was probably furnished by a single man.  Within the first
few hours I discovered that there were no dish towels and as we hadn’t made
a stop at the grocery store on the way in there were also no paper towels.
And here is where the “not thinking outside of the box” comes in.  One of
the children spilled their drink and I was at a loss as to how to clean it
up.  Luckily, my friend Ann had no such problem.  She reached down, grabbed
one of the children’s socks right off their foot and cleaned up the spill.
It was like witnessing a miracle.  How in the world had she ever thought to
do that?

I am also the person who might stand dumbfounded at the gym if someone is on
my treadmill.  I realize that there are fifteen other treadmills but that
one is away from the fan which is too much for just a warm up run.  It is
also directly in front of the television that plays ESPN and more
importantly plays the Top Ten Plays every morning for my warm up run as
though it were playing it just for me.

So maybe you could describe me as rigid.  But no, that wouldn’t be quite
right.  Most of my friends are amazed at how I fly by the seat of my pants.
That same summer I would wake up and have my cup of coffee and peruse the
travel book I kept on the kitchen table.  Should we go to the Science Museum
or go see the statue of Peter Pan in Hyde Park?  No, we should definitely
jump on a train and head down to Brighton Beach.  Fifteen minutes later with
an empty backpack and two kids in tow we would be out the door, only phoning
hubby when we were on the train.  That summer we did visit the museums that
London offered but we also saw the tunnels under Dover Castle and Deer Park
behind Windsor Castle.  And countless other far flung places, all on the
spur of the moment.

A couple of years later we moved outside of London to the village of
Wimbledon.  I loved it.  My favorite part was my getting lost runs or bikes.
I would head out the front door with twenty pounds and a credit card in my
pocket and just run or ride.  I would go for hours.  I would turn down any
road that looked interesting.  With running, this usually meant a trip into
the city.  Through Chatham and the busy traffic, along the Thames Path and
around the city or out the other side into East London.  On my bike I was
known to go as far out as Windsor which was some fifty miles away.  Either
way I would keep an eye out for towns that had train stations and use the
train to get back home.  Getting lost runs were the best.

I am also the person who gets excited every time my husband mentions the
possibility of living in some exotic foreign country.  He came home a few
months ago and asked what I would think about living in Dubai.  “Sure,” I
said, “Where is it?”  Hong Kong?  Let’s go.  Singpore? No problem.

So maybe I am a free spirit.  Well, sort of, I guess.  Four year ago we
moved back to Maryland.  Apparently just a mile from the picturesque Severn
River.  I say apparently because four days a week for the past four years,
that is eight hundred and thirty two times, I have run out of my
neighborhood and headed left.  I thought I was being adventurous.  No
neighborhood running for me.  I would head left which would give me the
option of two different trails or a small wooded park.  I wouldn’t be caught
dead running through the streets of our neighborhood.  I was too adventurous
for that.  Which explains why I never went right.  Going right I could
either run on the main road up toward the high school or cross the road into
another section of our neighborhood and run on the neighborhood streets.
Why on earth would I want to do that?  I had never even driven in that part
of the neighborhood so why would I run there?

I am not sure how the body of water on my GPS in my SUV never registered in
my brain but quite clearly it didn’t.  And then yesterday for the first time
in four years I decided I wasn’t really up for the same run.  I couldn’t
face any of my three choices.  So, gasp, I went right.  I went right and ran
through the other section of our neighborhood.  But here is what I
discovered.  There is another entrance into our neighborhood which was
apparently the original entrance.  Wow, that was something I didn’t know
before.  But even more important discoveries were to follow.  If you go out
of that original entrance there is a whole world I have never seen.  First
of all there are actual hills.  Hills that I have been complaining about
missing since we moved back from the rolling hills of Surrey.  These new
hills were big rolling hills that rolled their way right down to, you guessed
it, right down to the water’s edge.  The minute I saw it I wanted to run
home and tell my husband about my discovery but I didn’t.  I ran along the
banks of the river and watched the geese fly low over the water.  I watched
the kayaks out for a just before dusk paddle and I marveled at my discovery.
I started fantasizing about my next run.  I will run at daybreak and watch
the sun rise.  I will run here in the summer when the water will cool the
air.  I will run here with my baby in the jog stroller and take my time
while he hunts for the blue heron on the banks.  Once I came out of my
reverie, I turned around and ran as fast as my short little legs would carry
me back to my house to drag my husband along the same route before the sun
went down.  I am proud to say that my husband was just as clueless as I had
been but also just as amazed by the beauty of the discovery.

Here I am, the lady who friends call when they want to venture into DC or
take a road trip to the far reaches of the Maryland, Virginia or
Pennsylvania countryside because I am the most adventurous person they know.
Here I am, the lady who flies by the seat of her pants and hops a train on a
moment’s notice.  Here I am, the lady who is not afraid to move half way
across the world or to get lost in a foreign land.  But here I am, the lady
who lives a mile from one of the most beautiful places in the world and took
four years and eight hundred and thirty two attempts to find it.  So who am
I?  What have I discovered?  I think it is that I am a discoverer with a
rigid spirit that bends only under more discovery.  So out I will head.  Out
my door and around every corner to a new discovery of the world around me.

Previously published in the May/June edition of the Washington Running Report

Movement for Life

For two days I sat in the hospital room with my two year old as they re-hydrated him through an IV. Sitting is not something I am very good at. I am a mover. Even as I write this I am standing in front of my computer. So, to be honest, other than when I had to sit there holding him or had to lie beside him, I was standing and pacing. When he would sleep I would take a quick walk down the hall to get the blood flowing. On a good day I find sitting hard. On a bad day I find it nearly impossible. Combine a baby who had been ill for a week with the fact that I hadn’t worked out in more than a week and you end up with a very bad day.

I paced and I fidgeted and I worried. As though Stephanie at Irongirl.com was feeling my pain, I received an email asking for an article for the upcoming newsletter. Suddenly, I had something else I could do. I went on a search for an idea for that, well this, article. I didn’t have to go very far. As I stepped outside of my child’s hospital room, I literally ran into the mother of the child in the next room. Both of our children were in for the same virus and the same symptoms. We had checked in within minutes of each other the night before. I admit to being tired and hungry and in desperate need of a shower but this mom was a wreck. As I compared the two of us, I knew I had my article.

I have come to be known among family and friends as the “fitness freak”. I am in constant motion and always looking for the next adventure. I am also pretty good, though not a t-totaller, about my diet. I know how to read the labels and make conscience decisions about what I am going to eat. Even when I eat poorly I have made the decision to do so. But comparing myself with this mom, I realized how much the health and fitness lifestyle I live has affected the way I feel everyday but especially on the bad ones.

This mom was obese. I find it hard to use that word because it has so many negative connotations as to physical beauty or lack there of but I am using it here because there is no other way to describe her and I didn’t look at her as not being attractive but as not being healthy. She was clearly too big for the cot they have in the rooms to sleep on so she was unable to sleep that night. I had noticed that when the nurses performed any procedure on her child they had to call in an additional nurse because she didn’t have the strength to hold her child in the positions that were needed. Beyond that, even though she was in her late thirties, it was clear she had difficulty breathing because of how heavy she was and that even the way she walked was affected. I later heard her discussing her upcoming knee surgeries with one of the nurses.

All of this made me think back to those surveys I receive about why I exercise. I think most of the time while exercising about how it makes me look. I do feel like I look better when I am more fit but that isn’t why I started exercising. I started exercising because my mother was diagnosed with cancer and everything I read about the disease attributes at least a partial cause to being over weight. In the process of learning more about my health I was amazed to learn about all of the diseases and health issues that are attributed to being overweight – diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, hip and knee issues, even colon cancer. The list goes on and on. In the twenty years since my mother’s diagnosis I have spent a lot of time learning more about the importance have staying active and eating well. I want to be around for a long time but I would like to spend those years healthy so I remain active and healthy now.

Though the rest of my day was still ahead of me, as I thought through the reasons for maintaining my health I felt better about the fact that I couldn’t sit still. I thought of all the pacing and all of the standing and watching my child as another form of movement that represents my health now and in the future.

Originally published by Irongirl.com