Run #35: Strength From An Unexpected Source

Today's run was supposed to be my long one this week (although only two miles at this point).  Sundays, on this plan, will be my long runs; the others will be shorter.  I love this idea-- I guess I'd assumed that once you started running longer distances, you were supposed to run them every time you went out.  But according to this plan and a very helpful article on coolrunning.com, this is not the case.  

One more example, I see, of the all-or-nothing thinking that creeps into my daily life, despite all my well-therapized, CBT-trained vigilance. Ha.

But I digress. Something sort of amazing happened on my run today.

I took the girls with me (Daddy is off enjoying some well-deserved "Daddy Time"), and I decided to take them along my new residential route.  I don't usually run with the stroller, and while it's never as hard as I think it's going to be, it IS harder than I think it should be.  There is more of an upper body workout involved than you might expect, pushing that thing-- not from the pushing so much as the controlling-and-keeping-it-from-flying-off-the-sidewalk-and-into-the-street.  It requires attention, and this, at my stage, at least, saps energy I'd otherwise be using for running.

So I did my warm-up and my stretches and set off, and realized fairly quickly that this was a lot more taxing than normal, and two miles with the stroller would be tough.  I wrestled with that for a while as I ran, and finally decided I'd just run the same 1.5 mile route I've been running, and count the stroller as the extra exertion.  I didn't want to wimp out but I also wanted to be able to finish my run without stopping to walk.  I was feeling very frustrated with the magnitude of the stroller's impact on my psyche and my ability, and started thinking about something that happened during my 5k run in June.


I told you already that I kept finding myself getting teary as I ran the race that day, and the teariest moment came when I was about 2/3 of the way to the turnaround point-- not quite halfway through the race.  I was running along the center divider of Shoreline Drive, where they had set up a partition to divide the runners from the traffic lanes.  All of a sudden, up ahead, I heard people beginning to cheer, and the cheering was traveling backward through the pack toward me.  


The reason soon became clear: the first runner had made the turnaround and was on her way back, running outside of the partition on the traffic side because there wasn't room for anyone yet in the runners' lanes.


The cheers got louder, and I got an unobstructed view of her as she flew past me on my left at a full sprint.  Short, athletic-looking little spark plug of a woman, probably around my age, tanned and blonde and looking like the cheerleader who is always at the top of the pyramid or getting thrown into the air-- one of those little bouncy badass girls.  That was what I noticed first.  But then I noticed who was with her.

She was running full-out, legs stretching gracefully straight between strides, like a gazelle.  She had a huge smile on her face as people called out encouragement... and she was pushing a little blonde boy in a jog stroller.

That was the moment I truly realized, I think, that I could DO this, that I could make this happen even with two babies, that it was possible. It gave me a huge burst of energy that stayed with me for the rest of the race. It's hard to describe such a profound moment of clarity, but seeing that woman racing past with her stroller was so moving, and so inspiring, that even now, I'm getting emotional just writing about it.


Which brings me back to my run today, where I had the same reaction just reliving that moment in my mind-- I was tearing up and trying to remind myself that my babies in the stroller weren't obstacles in my path, they were the reason I was on the path to begin with, and I was just feeling generally emotional about the whole thing (oh yes, posts coming on this topic).


And then, I swear to god, something happened.


I was chuckling to myself over my weird running tears, and looked up and met the eye of an older woman who was strolling down the sidewalk toward me, about 30 feet away.  She took us in with a glance, and then broke into a huge smile, shook her head in admiration, and gave me a very emphatic double thumbs-up as I ran past her.


Holy shit. That running, smiling woman with the stroller, all of a sudden, was me.

It's all relative, it turns out.  There is no "there" there, no place where all the fit people who love exercise and run long distances go and close the door behind them and leave the rest of us out on the curb with our empty pizza boxes and stale donuts and too-tight t-shirts.  It's not all or nothing.  We each have a chance to make progress for ourselves, starting from wherever we start and going to wherever we want to go, for whatever reasons that motivate us.  We each get to choose our own adventure, and follow it at our own pace.


I'd like to think that that woman kept her smile as she continued on down the sidewalk, and that for that moment and maybe a few more, her idea of what was possible was expanded beyond the boundaries she'd kept before.  I'd like to think that seeing us gave her more spring in her step than she'd had when she started on her walk, and that she felt fortified by our exchange, and just a tiny bit more able to meet what lay ahead of her on the road.


I know I did.