After college, I entered the ‘real’ world. I still loved running, but now, I wasn’t on a team or under the direction of a coach to run a specific time or distance. I also married my first husband (my high school sweetheart) about 6 months after graduating. I remember my new mother-in-law complaining to me that my husband was perfectly happy with me the way that I was, so I didn’t actually need to run. She never understood that I was running for myself, and I didn’t actually consider whether he cared about my physical condition or what I did for exercise. I guess that I wasn’t raised to believe that I should be exercising simply to make my husband happy. (And, I’ll note that he realized that as well – he knew my running wasn’t to please him. She was just of a generation where that was the norm).
We were married in November 1988 and my son was born in April 1990. At the time, we had joined a gym and I wasn’t necessarily running races, but I continued exercising. One of my fondest memories was going to aqua aerobics when I was 7 month’s pregnant. The baby had dropped so low that running was incredibly uncomfortable, so I took to the pool. The poor instructor was absolutely panicked that I’d go into labor during class. While I assured her that was highly unlikely, I finally gave up going to class, because she was so worried.
Going out into the real world and dealing with being an adult was enough to keep me busy, so races weren’t in the cards at that stage of life. While I kept up on the Olympic runners and our own local college standings, I didn’t have the time or the inclination to worry about my own running. I’d say that during this time, I was an ‘on-again, off-again’ runner. After my son was born, we invested in a jog-stroller, but because he had vision issues, it was actually quite traumatic for him to be flying through space without being able to see me directly, so the jog stroller wasn’t used much until my daughter came along. I tried running with him, but often times had to stop to reassure him that I hadn’t actually disappeared and he was perfectly safe.
During my children’s early years, I ran off and on. I didn’t enter many races, but tried to keep up with my running while balancing the demands of young children and working full time. Of course, the kids always wanted to be with me, and this included ‘running with mommy.’ Unfortunately, a 3-year-old running is actually more like a fast walk, and when they don’t want to sit in a jog stroller, it becomes a battle of wills to actually get any exercise in at all. In the end, I decided to focus more on the children and less on myself, which meant that I wasn’t running all that much for many years.
When my son was around 11 or 12 years old, he needed to run a 9-minute mile for his participation in a non-school club. I agreed to help him train, and we spent many evenings at the local high school track. I would chase him around the track, trying to get him to run at the required pace. This usually involved things like me taunting him, ‘your momma runs faster than you,’ or running up behind him and ‘goosing’ him. At the time, I’m sure he hated it, but we had some good laughs years later about how I traumatized him. In the end, he did run the mile in the required time and met the goal set by the club. So, it’s all-good, eh?
We also had an English Springer Spaniel (Abby) who wanted to run with me. She had this terrible habit of going out way too fast, so that by the end of a run, I was dragging her home. As a part of her instincts to track birds or other small animals, she liked to run a zig-zag pattern in front of me. Unfortunately, her desire to track was often overcome by an immediate need to poop. So, there were times where she’d stop dead, and send me toppling over her as she landed directly in front of me when she squatted without any prior warning. Fun times running with kids and dogs – lol.
In about 2004, I heard a story on NPR about a style of running called Chi Running #chirunning. The idea was that you’d let gravity pull you along and that if you felt pain when running, you were doing something wrong. I took a class and became hooked on this new technique that emphasizes body mechanics and proper form. I also found that, for the first time, I could run any distance without my knees complaining. While I wouldn’t say that I’m a master at the technique, I would say that it has allowed me to run injury free for a very long time. It also allowed me to increase my mileage into the half-marathon distance, which I never expected after the tendonitis in my knees during college.
In 2007, I joined Johnson Matthey as an HR Director for their businesses in Massachusetts. My HR boss discovered that I was a runner, and tried to ask me without being too obvious, how old I was at the time. Now, he could have just looked it up (being in HR and all that), but he said that there was a corporate team where they needed to have people over 40. In order to actually score, the team needed two women. They had one (and a very good one at that), but needed a 2nd woman. I was 42, so told him that I just barely qualified. The race in question was the Broad Street Run – a 10-mile race through downtown Philadelphia, held on the first weekend in May. So, here I was, a cross-country runner (remember, 2.7 miles is the standard women’s distance at the university level), and I hadn’t run ‘professionally’ since college. My HR boss was asking me to run a very important race (it was a highly competitive corporate environment for the teams) after I hadn’t run competitively for almost 20 years. With much trepidation, I agreed to enter the race.
I now found myself seriously training for the first time since the late 1980’s – I couldn’t let down my boss, embarrass myself or let down the corporate team. Fortunately, my kids were old enough that going out to train wasn’t a problem. I was mostly running in the early mornings before they were even awake, and I could certainly head out for an hour without needing a babysitter at this stage. I created a training plan and diligently worked at completing it. Talk about stress! Fortunately, I made it to race day and actually did pretty well – all things considered. Our team (Master Milers) came in first place of the corporate teams, so everyone was happy. I then followed this up with 3 or 4 more Broad Street finishes that were pretty good – I wasn’t breaking any records, but I was running 10-mile races.
In 2010, I was running casually and entering the Broad Street Run when I was available (given kid and other commitments). One day, on a casual run, I suddenly had the most horrible pain in my foot. I was about 2 miles from home and it was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced on a run. I stopped and tried to walk it out, but there was nothing doing – I couldn’t just power through it, I hobbled home. Over the next several days, I was in so much pain that I finally booked an appointment with a podiatrist. After an x-ray, she told me that I had Hallux Rigidus. This was caused by acute arthritis in my big-toe joint. It also triggered a bone spur in my heel and plantar fasciitis. After giving me a shot of cortisone and showing me how to wrap my foot, she sent me home to do some research on options. Her recommendation was to go home and Google this, then decide what I wanted to do. I found this rather odd, given she was supposed to be the expert. I’m not used to self-diagnosing, much less determining surgical options for myself. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed, and I actually decided on getting a second opinion. I called the ‘foot and ankle’ specialty clinic at the Rothman Institute in Philadelphia (the major orthopedic practice in the region). Through divine intervention, I was scheduled to see the head of the practice. After looking at my X-rays, he advised me that I could do a bunionectomy, or a joint fusion (and not a joint replacement the first doctor had suggested – he told me that he spent about half his time undoing these ill-advised surgeries. Joint replacements might work for larger joints, but they don’t work on toes). He cautioned me that a bunionectomy would deal with the immediate issue, but that eventually, the joint would deteriorate again since this was arthritis. So, I would likely be looking at two surgeries, with no guaranteed time between them. My options were to sign up for two surgeries, or bite the bullet and have one (joint fusion). I decided that if joint fusion was the ultimate outcome, I’d rather just have it over and done with all at once. Reluctantly, I scheduled the surgery and painfully gave up running for about 8 months. Before you think that it took that long to schedule the surgery, it was actually more a practical matter – I wanted my daughter home to play nurse-maid, and to do it when work was less busy, so December was picked as the best time logistically. That way, I could do my recovery while lots of people were off for the holidays and work was generally slow.
I had the surgery in December 2010, and spent the next several months convalescing. In the summer of 2011, my daughter (who is definitely NOT a runner) came home from university and announced that she wanted to run a 5 km race. While I was shocked, I readily agreed since I was now released to start running again and was looking for a way to get back into it. We signed up for a color run (where they spray you with colors while you run an untimed 5 km distance) and also booked a lesson with a Chi Running instructor. This was probably the best thing for me since I knew that if I left her, she’d stop running, so I had to stay with her, no matter what. So, I was forced into running a very slow pace (which is actually really hard), and taking it very slowly. We did a whole regime of ‘walk 5 minutes, run 5 minutes’ and gradually built up to running 30 minutes straight. I couldn’t have designed a better training plan myself as this regime kept me from overdoing it, and ensured that I followed a gradual increase in my distance. We ended up running two 5 km races that summer, and I successfully ignored the clock so that we ran within her limits, and not mine. The outcome was that I was back, and felt great! The surgery had been successful, and Chi Running allowed me to run even with a fused toe joint on my left foot.
For the next several years, I ran occasionally and without a real purpose. This is when I discovered that my running was more a spiritual or mental health activity than a physical pursuit. During my runs, I could pray, process what was going on in my life, and ‘talk’ to God, or generally commune with nature. I listened to the birds, communed with nature and generally just enjoyed being out in the fresh air and moving on my own volition. I never found things like motor boats or motorcycles to be ‘fun,’ and I actually hated the noise and vibration. But, running – running was just me, and nature, and what I accomplished was all down to my own efforts.
When I moved to the UK in 2013, I continued running casually. I thought about entering some races, but my work travel schedule was pretty intense, so predicting when I could be home on a weekend, and that I’d actually have time to train was difficult. So, I just kept up running whenever I could, and made trips to the gym when the weather was nasty and kept me indoors.
I turned 50 in 2016. This wasn’t a big deal to me, and I didn’t feel particularly anxious or upset about reaching this milestone. However, one day, while waiting for a sports massage, I was perusing a fitness magazine and came across an article about milestone birthdays. The author presented the idea that when you hit a major milestone, you should do something that you’ve never done before. I thought about this – what had I never done before? Well, I had never run a half marathon. Right then and there, I decided that I would run a half marathon before I turned 51. I went home and goggled, then realized that the fall was very busy from a work perspective, so trying to book something that would give me the right amount of time to train and within the constraints of the weather conditions would be difficult. I then looked for a race in the winter, but in a location where the weather would be milder. That’s when the Barcelona Half Marathon popped up. That was it then – I signed up for it and set my sites on early February 2017, just a week before my 51st birthday.
Later, while chatting with my son, I asked why he didn’t join me for the race. We had done a 5km race (Turkey Trot) during a recent Thanksgiving in Houston, and had a lot of fun running together again. Our history of me traumatizing him when he was 11 as well as his own running history meant it was something we both enjoyed doing. I offered to fly him over, if he’d agree to train so that we could run together. We decided to aim for 2 hours (roughly 9 minute miles over the 13.1 miles of the course), and set about virtually training together. Even though he was in Texas, and I was in England, we trained together and shared our progress to keep us on track for February. When we finally arrived in Barcelona, we were a little daunted, but pushed through. Given that he’s considerably taller than me, he kept us on pace for the first half of the race. His training for the longer distance hadn’t been as strong as mine, so my job was to keep us going in the second half of the race. By mile 12, I turned to him and said that I knew I could finish, but I definitely wouldn’t have a sprint left in me at the finish line. He pulled ahead, but in the end, the multiple balloon arches psyched us both out, and he finished only 30 seconds ahead of me. That said, we came in within 2 hours, and were so pleased with the fact we could check this off our bullet list.
Since Barcelona, we signed up for another Half in Dallas, but due to business travel for both of us, we didn’t feel comfortable with our training and pulled out of it in the end. I did a 10 mile race in one of the London parks in May 2018 that also wasn’t very satisfying. The winter had been really rough (lots of really cold, wet and windy conditions), so I had primarily trained indoors. The treadmill slowed my pace down and I didn’t have sufficient good weather or time to feel good about the race. I also didn’t realize that there were a few significant hills in the course, so my finish was less than stellar, and I even had to slow to almost a walk in mile 7 due to a pulled calf muscle. That was frustrating, and even though I finished the race, I was still highly disappointed in myself.
Upon my return to the US, I started to think about what races I’d like to do. I have several in mind, and am starting with a cute one put on by the local military base. It’s to drive better relations with the community and is billed as a 10 Nautical Mile race (which in real terms is 11.5 miles). I’ve also signed up for one in March 2020 in Napa Valley, which I’ve always thought about doing. So, I’m going to continue to work in some races from time to time to keep me on my toes and out of trouble.
The Barcelona Half Marathon 2017 finish
While I’m not sure if I’ll regain my pace from college days, I’m happy with the fact that as I enter my mid 50’s, I’m still out there getting in the miles and loving my running all the more.
