Running has been an important part of my life for 20 years now. Managing to keep on running through life’s many changes and ups and downs has been one of my greatest joys.
I started running in ninth grade, when I was thirteen. A friend urged me to go out for the high-school cross-country team, and I willingly went along. I was immediately caught up in the excitement of the competition, the camaraderie, and all the other glories associated with being part of a team. Although I was never a standout runner, and I did well in school and participated in other activities, track and cross-country were the dominant factors in my adolescent life.
I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I continued running even after I graduated and there was no coach to cajole me and no meet on the horizon to motivate me. While I didn’t run competitively in college, I ran for fun, to keep my sanity, and in a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to keep the results of late-night pizza and dining-hall food from hitting me too hard.
After school I kept running, entering lots of local races, doing the obligatory marathon, and always, no matter my work schedule, finding a time and place to run. I have never been much of a morning-run person, and despite the ever-present temptations, usually managed to get myself out of my apartment for an-after work run.
Then came marriage, and the sometimes unspoken tension that lies between a runner and a non-running spouse when it comes to the time consumed by running. For a while my husband did run, usually doing maddeningly well in races on very little training, but it’s just not in his blood, and I not unhappily reconciled myself to running mostly alone.
The home we moved to a few years ago is out in the woods, bordering hundreds of acres of state game lands, broken up only by foot trails and a seldom-traveled dirt road. For a runner, it was a dream. I could literally step out my front door and run for miles without seeing another soul or vehicle. Inspired, I began to seriously step up my running, joining a group of local runners for weekly lunchtime track workouts, actually training for and even preregistering for races rather than jumping in on a whim the morning of the event. In fact, it was after a particularly grueling 10-K that I came back home and, on a hunch, took a home pregnancy test.
Last spring, about six weeks after my daughter was born, I somewhat nervously strapped her into the jogging stroller my parents had gotten me for Christmas. I’d been jogging on a treadmill, so I wasn’t too worried about my physical condition. It was more of a generalized fear, an uncertainty about whether my life as a runner could continue. To my delight, I did just fine managing the contraption, and my baby, who slept through the whole event, didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Even though I had the mighty challenge ahead of finding time to run while working full-time and raising a child, somehow, I knew I’d find a way.
Throughout the months that have followed, we’ve had our moments. Some days she would happily sit and play with her toys through a forty-five minute run, while at other times she’d start screaming about a mile from home and would not accept anything less than being held in my arms until we reached our house. And that dirt road, which had once been so inviting to me, now acts as an obstacle- way too bumpy to push a baby on. So I go back and forth, pushing the jogger on the 1.1 miles of paved roads I can access from my house.