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After a few more weeks of pure baby devotion, I slowly went back to running. Once I could rest, I saw that I wasn’t completely starting over. My legs felt sore, but my lungs hung in pretty well.
I sputtered along as Emily’s half-hearted, second-rate running partner though our schedules were different now. Emily needed to [...]
Obviously, there’s the birth, which is no spa pedicure. Toby’s was light years easier than his brothers would be two years later. I was induced in the morning and he arrived at 2:05 under the covering of the single greatest breakthrough in modern medicine: a la epidurale.
Emily was greasing up [...]
Emily would not go down without a fight. She was intensely devoted to my pregnancy fitness. It was my first baby and my head floated in a cloudy plain somewhere between neurotic jubilation and maternal fantasy (when I wasn’t dry-heaving on the front lawn). Emily however, was googling specialty workout ideas and buying prenatal Yoga [...]
I didn’t run by myself for long before word got out that I was “on the market.” Runners are notoriously savage at capturing one another for training partnerships. I didn’t know Emily at all before she cornered my husband at church and claimed me. Greg warned that she might be a touch faster. I figured [...]
It was iliotibial band syndrome. Just an overuse injury caused by a tight, irritated muscle on the outside of my thigh. (I, along with half of all runners, am an expert on this injury so feel free to e-mail questions about it!**) The only cure was complete cessation of all running.
Running is spiritual. It is [...]
And that was good.
It was a slow death. I decided to train for a marathon. A group from church was doing the Houston HP, and it seemed like the perfect diversion from my sulking self-absorption. I paid the entry fee and immediately increased my mileage.
Four and six miles morphed into eight, ten, and fifteen miles. [...]
We moved in June. Sold the cute house. Quit the jobs. Said goodbye to Melissa. Left my family and friends.
And off we went to the little town in Texas where Greg would be youth pastor of Toby’s two-year-old church. A church that formerly held services in a bar.
When I crossed the threshold of our [...]
Melissa taught at the same elementary school I did. It only took a week’s worth of gossip in the teacher’s lounge for our coworkers organize a running partnership for the two of us. I was the youngest person on staff, newly married, and almost as qualified to teach as the custodian. She was the mother [...]
The only thing worse than the first few weeks of running is starting with a friend who is a “natural.” My friend was Courtney and to this day I am still bitter.
While I drug myself through the neighborhood in shame, Courtney opted to train on the treadmill. She was with me at the first 5k, [...]
I wasn’t going to show up for my second 5k without a bit more practice. I set out for a jog feeling very fit and healthy because choosing to run already set me in a higher existential sphere. I imagined how I must look to people driving by, wishing they were a svelte athlete in [...]
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