Now that the perfect running weather is upon us, let’s talk some half.  The half is my favorite distance because 13.1 miles is long enough to be really challenging, but short enough to train and be a devoted mama.  

There are many excellent training programs out there, but this one is customized for Running Mamas.  The programs I found in magazines and online seemed to target elite runners.  The mileage was higher than I actually needed to finish a strong half.  The key to a strong half is not running for a long period of time, but running over a long period of time.  If you create a strong base by regularly running, you can do a half.  Yes YOU!

Here is the Running Mama training plan:

Remember I am an expert on this subject because I have won tons of halves.*

• I run three times a week with only one long run: Six miles, Three miles, and one long run.
• For the long run, I start with six miles and increase slowly until I peak at ten.  Yes, I said TEN! 
• When you increase, don’t add any more than two miles.  For example, get comfortable with six, then move up to no more than eight.  Stay at eight for two-three weeks before you increase again.

I never run any more than ten miles because of the time and energy it takes.  I didn’t find that running higher mileage made me faster or better, it just made me tired and injured.  Now that I am responsible for little ones, being tired or injured is ridiculously inconvenient.   I want to finish a strong race, and be a great mom too.  It is possible.

Next week:  My secret tips for training and race day.  Shhhh… Don’t tell.

*No I haven’t.

There is a beautiful street at the end of our run, lined with tall trees.  When we round the bend to this last stretch, it is praying time.  There are no rituals to make God seem far away. Our hands can’t clasp, we can’t bow our heads, we can’t even close our eyes.  We are two friends talking to each other and to our God who is as close as our own breath.  Our prayers spout and gasp, but they surround us like little lamps, warming our insides with freedom and energy.   

There is no pretension.  Our confessions, our worries, the stones of our souls, they float off like bubbles as we stomp down the road. We pray for our favorites- Her Jerrod, My Greg, and the four babies between us.  We fight for them, with all the fervor our legs can muster.  We can’t help it, as we speak we run faster and faster, as if our effort is the measure of our passion. 

When we finish, we are breathless.  We have shown each other our ugliest, our best.  Like two lovely warriors we walk along, sweaty and peaceful, ready for another day.

I sputtered along as Emily’s half-hearted, second-rate running partner though our schedules were different now. Emily needed to run in the afternoon, the worst time of day for a baby. I couldn’t keep up while pushing the baby jogger, and I refused to dump a cranky infant on my husband the minute he walked through the door. Emily was my friend and it hurt to see the close of our era. We met to run here and there, but in the end, I casually drifted away.

For awhile I didn’t do much but gawk at my baby. I couldn’t be with him enough. I had no idea he would take over my heart, no my very being, with such ferocity. If I planned to do anything for myself it would not be at his expense. I hated to give up running, but in comparison, I really didn’t care.

Was there someone else as devoted to her babies as I was? Someone willing to run at odd times on low-energy, maybe even wearing mashed bananas on her shorts? To stick with it, I needed a different breed of woman. Someone whose legs only took her as far as two tiny arms could reach.

I needed another Running Mama.

I mentioned my hope to a few friends at church, and through a friend of a friend, I met my running soul-mate. When I found her, heaven itself burst into song and unfurled the rainbow of joy over my snot-crusted shoulders. Her name was Jerri, disciplined runner and mother of two.

I said “Can you be up by 6:00?”

She said “How about 5:15?”

I said, “I will cancel last minute if my baby is sick.”

She said, “Me too. Times two.”

I said, “Do you run fast?”

She said, “Let’s just stay together.”

Cue tears of jubilation.

Emily was greasing up the wheel bearings on the baby jogger a few days before my six week Dr. visit. Her optimism was flattering. I don’t know how she saw any hope at all, since I had been through six weeks of extreme sleep deprivation, raging mastitis, and accidental undernourishment (who had time to eat?). Miraculously, my Dr. sent me home with a clean bill of health, which seemed a little sadistic since I looked like a corpse compared to my former self. But apparently, actually being alive is not a prerequisite for caring for your newborn, or in Emily’s case, resuming an exercise regimen.

First hurdle: the baby jogger. When I put Toby’s eight-pound self in the seat, the shoulder harness hit him in the forehead. Uggh, maybe in a few months… I left him with Greg knowing this completely unnecessary stint away from home would cost my husband his Shalom for the next thirty minutes.

When Emily and I set out, my sports bra felt like a vice holding two leaky water balloons (which was reeeeeally ooky). “You can make it a mile,” said Satan, skipping off unencumbered. It was really hard. Really, really hard. I panted and wheezed and took it one mailbox at a time. It didn’t seem fair that I was starting over. I ran a half marathon the month before I got pregnant and now I was back at the beginning again.

I did make it a mile, but it was different. It took more out of me than my nursing and overtired self had to give. Something had changed in me — something deeper than my lack of fitness. At home, I stood over my baby boy, swaddled and beautiful in his Moses basket.

He would come first.

I liked the idea of shattering the plump, lumbering stereotype of pregnancy in lieu of svelte athleticism, but I didn’t have it in me. Running was so hard now, with the extra weight and nausea, and I sort of wanted to enjoy the break. Every day Emily would come over to yank me off the couch, and every day I would half-heartedly succumb.

In November she finally gave up. She bought a bright red jogging stroller for my baby shower and presented it with obvious hope. I still love that girl.

Christmas passed quickly for everyone but me. The hands of the clock seemed locked in place, though I watched them with fierce devotion. I read What to Expect, The Girlfriend’s Guide, and Pregnancy Week-By-Week until they were floppy and redundant. I surfed BabyCenter message boards and envied the women posting newborn pictures and typing out lengthy birth stories with obscene attention to detail.

The slowest increment of time known to humanity is the final week of pregnancy. While you are living it, tortoises seem to undergo a full life cycle. It is tortuously boring, turning you into a bloated whiner, compulsively devoted to your own well-being.

And then one day it’s over. Just like that.

Well, sort of…

Emily rationalized our partnership as mutually beneficial. She was fast, but couldn’t run far. I was slow, but used to long distances. It was running stasis, equal and opposite parts balancing each other into harmony. Lovely.

The harmony sounded like a wheezing, barfing, housecat being drug behind a cheetah. Emily was so darned competitive. No matter how fast I ran, her pace was two notches faster. I think If I ran at the speed of light, Emily would have projected herself into the future and beat me anyway.

I finally gave up trying to stay with her and kept a couple steps back. As long as I wasn’t beside her, she would sink into a non-puke-inducing pace. Believe it or not, Emily and I became quite the pair. For almost two years we wore out running shoes on our Texas country roads. We entered dozens of road races together (and the Hotter n’ Hell Hundred cycling ride!) and in the end, we both met our original goals. Still when I think of Emily, my mind fills with sunshine and the smell of hay blowing across the hills.

There was only one thing compelling enough to quench our running bliss. It was an evening mid-May when I saw it, plain as day, and marvelled at the powerful emotions it stirred in my heart.

Through the tiny window on a little white stick were two pink lines.

Running is spiritual. It is the shadow of my relationship with God, a physical symbol for an invisible inner life. Through it I learned to be strong, to be humble, to persevere. Now it was time to surrender.

So, for three months I didn’t so much as jog across the parking lot.

Winter passed slowly. Things began to change. Greg and I moved into a new house in the country. I secured a teaching job at a school close by for the following year. I started a small group for teenage girls in our upstairs room.

One morning I looked out the window at the fresh blue skies of Spring. I grabbed my running shoes from the dark corner of my closet and started again. This time, it was no girl, pouting and selfish who flew across the countryside under the warm sun.

It was a woman.

*“While I’m In Between” taken from Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman by Britney Spears.

If you think you have an IT band injury, stop running immediately and focus on getting it loose again. Special stretches here can show you how to properly care for the injury and prevent it from happening in the future. Also, a foam roller is miraculous for IT bands. If you live in the metroplex, GO HERE for an evaluation and adjustment. This guy has saved the running careers of half our church.

**Iliotibial Band Syndrome (ITBS): The IT band connects the iliac (hip) to the tibia (at the knee). A healthy IT band can move back and forth across the femoral epicondyle with each step, pain free. When the band is overused, it tightens, becomes inflamed, and causes a painful burning on the outside of the knee or down the outside of the thigh.

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. Sometimes my runs were so long it felt like the seasons changed from the beginning to the end. I trudged forward like a soldier because it wasn’t just about running, but creating my place in our new life. It gave me value, friends, an identity.

I completed a twenty-miler, our longest pre-race distance, two weeks before that chilly afternoon in January. I stopped by my trail after work for a quick eight. The temp dropped during the day, and all I had with me was shorts. I thought about skipping to bundle up with a latte, but it mattered too much to me. I changed clothes and set out. My legs never got warm. When I finished, they were red and splotchy, tight, and a searing pain shot down my right thigh.

Everything rational told me to rest, but I didn’t. The next Saturday I was back on the trail with a group from church, limp-running to keep up. A dull burn in my leg heated into a raging fire until I couldn’t force another step. I sat down on my butt in the middle of the path and cried.

All the training. All the time. All the plans.

But no marathon.

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 new rent house I was greeted by two dead roaches and a fog of must. We knew we were supposed to be here. We knew. But suddenly, I was scared of what we were doing. I had no friends. I had no job. I had no place that was mine to make home. I didn’t want to be sad, but I couldn’t stop it. I cried and I cried and I cried.

For two months.

At the end of summer, a school across the metroplex hired me to teach PE. A commute that took two minutes in Oklahoma now took forty-five. I thought about how to survive it, and my answer came in the form of a trail halfway between work and home. It was a two-mile loop that surrounded a health club frequented by many members of our church. Greg and I joined and I became the world’s most grateful runner.

Every day after work I stopped at my trail and ran as many loops as light allowed. I was ashamed of how difficult our new life was for me. I thought about everything. My old friends, my family, my cute house in Edmond, now home for someone else. I thought about our life here, how hard people were on a new youth pastor, and how lonely I was.

As I ran, the green summer turned into frigid fall and everything around my trail died.

Including me.

She informed me that their usual distance was ten miles, but she was willing to cut it in half if I wanted. I said, “Thank you,” though I should have said “please bring a defibrillator and oxygen tank in your fanny pack because I am grossly overstating my actual abilities to impress and befriend you.” We made plans and I was a little nervous.

Mellisa preferred running at dawn over dusk. I drug myself out of bed and we set out on the dark, quiet streets of Edmond. The first day I really thought I might die. I don’t know how I even made it since I still hadn’t actually run three miles before without a walking break let alone five. I knew I could not blow the chance to be her friend. Though I was a much slower running partner than her husband, she never complained. We talked about work, and marriage, and her kids. We talked and talked and one day I came home from our run and I didn’t feel like puking.

Some friends of Greg’s in Texas invited us out for the weekend. Greg was going to play golf and I decided to run my very first 10K at the Ft. Worth Cowtown. A group from a small country church was running their first marathon the same day. One of them was Toby Slough, the church’s pastor. Since Toby was a good friend of Greg’s we stayed to cheer him across the finish line.

Maybe it was prophetic, maybe it was just a pointed coincidence to look back on later when times got lonely. We watched the men as they came to the end, hurting, leaning on each other, and crying tears of joy. I was inspired, not only to keep running, but to find that same kind of belonging. Only God knew that within months our lives would change and we would be among them, following Toby down a different kind of road, a longer, harder, more beautiful road than I had ever run before.