The day I decided to start to write about my running was the same day I had a brief moment of insanity and committed to run a half-marathon with a friend.  At the time, I had not run with any true dedication, other than chasing my children,  in nearly six years.  I've chosen to document my way back into the sport here in this blog, in the hopes that it will encourage other running mothers with too little energy, too little time or too little motivation to get back out there, too.   This is where my own story begins....

The first time I attempted to run after I had my two daughters felt a lot like running with a stranger. A large “watch-it-wiggle“, complete with a “see-it-jiggle” kind of stranger. A stranger who had poor footing due to her lack of sleep and shoes that suddenly weren‘t wide enough anymore. This stranger couldn’t even find her breath without falling back on lessons learned in childbirth classes and felt speed bumps in the road like they were Mount Everest.

This was a far cry from the runner I had become during my twenties. In those days, I felt like a lean, mean, “boy, don’t I look hot in a bikini!?” machine. I had once had powerful legs that held a strong sub-nine minute mile. I could hold entire, easy-flowing conversations as I darted up and down even the steepest of hills. Now - I was a big, white, blob of motherhood. An emotional, binge eating, hormonally challenged mess looking for one small piece of the sanity I once knew - and the streets of suburbia outside of Raleigh, NC is where I intended to find it, the embarrassing public spectacle it was going to be, notwithstanding. If it kept me out of the wine rack and if I didn’t die of a heart attack or fall, literally, on my face, it might just be worth it.   The truth was, I was doing this not just for myself, but also for my beautiful little girls. They deserved a healthy, energetic mother, someone they could look up to for taking care of herself.  The only place I knew to find that for them at my age and with my time restrictions, was in running shoes out on the streets.

So, I laced up my tight fitting shoes, donned some new running pants that I had to buy so many sizes larger, I was sure they would parachute me away if the wind was too strong , checked my watch and stepped outside. After a quick glance to make sure I didn’t see any neighborhood friends outside, I started off, uphill.  Well, maybe it wasn’t really a hill, it was more like a brief, ten foot long slight incline to a cross street. Immediately, I began to rely on my lamaze style breathing to conquer the beast (in, in, out…in, in, out) and I made it over the hill to a flat stretch of road. I got my breath back and checked my watch, two minutes for ten feet. There was room for improvement.

 Almost immediately, another hill. A much bigger, much longer hill. Almost in a state of panic, I began my lamaze breathing again before I even got there. Once on the hill, I was sure I was going to have to stop, or have that aforementioned heart attack or fall on the face. I decided that I‘d prefer the heart attack, it would be much more respectable, it would simply say that I pushed myself too hard; instead of the fall on the face which would say, “Are you kidding me? Who falls on their face while running more than a 12-minute mile?”. This would have been an ideal time for that gust of wind to come along and parachute me back home, where I belonged.  Just as I was about to call it a run and return to my house which was still in sight, a memory came to mind and I rememebered that on hills, I should drop my arms to transfer the energy from swinging my arms to powering my legs. So it turns out that I did remember how to run, if only my lungs would remember how to breathe.

I tried the dropped arms approach and it worked, but it didn't stop the wheezing or the intense desire I then had to vomit. Surprisingly, I easily overcame my need to vomit using skills I first learned during early pregnancy and later through the multiple strains of stomach viruses that had plagued my house since I’d had children. I fell back on  a simple mantra… “mind-over-matter, find a focal point“.  Again, I slowed to catch my breath and checked my watch. The time was disgraceful by this point, so I decided to stop checking.  Mercifully, my house was starting to become a speck on the horizon and I was still vertical. This was progress.

A monumental mile or so later, my focal point and sudden inspiration to go faster became the house of a close friend. I knew that I simply couldn't  have a heart attack or fall on the face at that point in my run. Not because it would have embarrassed me, although it would have. She’s a good enough friend for that - the point was more about her three extremely “active” children under the age of five and the fact that she really wouldn't need a trip to the ER with me. I resolved that I had to at least  get far enough away from her part of the street so that she wouldn’t see my death or utter humiliation as her problem to have to deal with along with calling Maytag to get the melted crayons out of the dryer while simultaneously pulling her youngest son off of the dining room chandelier. So, as I passed her house and made a turn, I let out a wheeze of relief and finally, finally, was met with a downhill stretch.

The wheezing, the desire to vomit, the odd thigh-rubbing and the tricky footing continued for another few blocks as I made my way home. Then, just as I was about to enter my driveway and declare victory at the end of my whopping 20-minute inaugural run since becoming a mother, I recognized a familiar feeling - it was the prickly sensation of a bona fide, hard earned sweat. It was in  that moment that even I had to acknowledge that the runner in me was still alive, albeit barely, afterall.  She would live on to run another day.