Before that, I had been a drama geek in high school (with a brief and tragi-comic experience playing basketball as a freshman that mainly involved benchwarming but did include making one basket for the wrong team). I wasn't an athlete; I didn't have experience with coaching.
Because of this, I viewed myself as a jogger for many years. I didn't have a concept of "training" or "competing." My runs were very different from the suicide drills we ran for basketball.
When I ran with my dad, we would run the same 3-mile loop every day. I gradually built my mileage by dipping into neighborhoods, but I didn't track miles. I ran for 30 minutes or an hour, and then I came home to the rest of my life, the parts of my life when I was expected to be a daughter, sister, student, and girlfriend with a part-time job and a huge list of books to read.
Running was a huge part of my life during those years as I struggled through graduate school, a car accident, two long and unhappy relationships, marriage, a summer in Egypt, pregnancy, a move to the Midwest, a divorce, and the suicide of someone I knew. Running helped sustain me through much of this, but I treated it like an old friend who could take whatever I dished out: I stopped running, I suffered through stress-induced junk food binges, I started running again, I backed off during pregnancy, and I started back with a desire to return to my old distances that was always countered by Mommy Guilt: an hour out of the house was too long. When I got divorced, it was also often impractical.
Somewhere something snapped for me.
I realized that I had been a runner all along. I wasn't "just" a jogger. Running wasn't something I did to burn calories or to get it over with--it was THE thing I wanted to be doing. Even though I hadn't known it, running was giving me the strength I needed.
Being able to call myself a runner and to start viewing my running as "training" has helped me take it seriously in a way I never would have imagined: I value what it does for me enough to hire a babysitter on alternate weekends to help with my long runs, and I value myself enough to set goals that require me to put my effort into this process, this action that has given me so much.
Since I started viewing running as something that gives as much as I put into it, I've managed to cut my half marathon time down by ten minutes (from 1:51 to 1:41). I haven't quite met my goal of 1:40 for the half marathon. In fact, I almost cried when I realized I would just miss it at the half I ran last month because I've hit 1:41 in three races during the past year.
But I have discovered that I can run fast.
I ran a 10K in 42:44 and a 5K in 21:19, and I am trying to follow a training plan that will help me finish a 5K in 20 minutes or less.
So today I ran fast.
While my daughter was asleep, I spent 30 minutes on my treadmill in the basement doing race pace intervals.
Running fast wasn't my goal when I was younger, and I know I won't ever be fast in the elite-athlete sort of way. Learning that I can push myself to feel strong and fast during my runs, though, has helped me develop a set of goals that work for me as a mother and a woman. They're goals that differ so much from the goals I set when I was in my twenties that I almost don't recognize myself. Or at least, I recognize that my goals have shifted with my values, my priorities, my needs, and my life.
When I run fast, I connect with my body in a way that I never did when I was younger. In some ways, I regret that. Mostly, though, I am amazed at how much stronger and more confident I feel now than I did then.
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