Finally—finally!—my doctor cleared me to run again that fall. I danced the first time I took my first few steps into a run, and even though I felt almost as unsteady as in those first workouts in training for my first 5K, I knew I could do it—and I did. My body remembered the motions. I welcomed that time back into my life, one that didn’t require a gym membership or headphones to drown out other people. My body and brain were free.
I didn’t feel the same pressure to control running anymore, either—breaking your butt does that to you—and my life was on a more even keel. I was getting laid on a regular basis. My hip wasn’t screaming at me anymore. Work was booming too. Since I started freelancing, I’d occasionally done work for the company where I’d spent the summer before my first year of college, where my dad was now part-owner. We didn’t work together, but when I’d come into the office to write newsletter copy or help with big proposals, he’d take me out to lunch at the Manayunk Diner, which wasn’t very good, but Dad lived in the Pennsylvania-side suburbs of Philadelphia and missed New Jersey diners. This was as close as he could get, and it was a short drive from work.
That year, they needed emergency help after their marketing person quit with $1 billion of proposals to write, so I had a steady stream of income again on top of my regular freelancing work. By fall, I had finally said goodbye to Jason, and while the cloud of “what was wrong with me to make these men leave” still hung—I was sure Nick would figure out whatever my big, giant flaw was and cut me off too—now I could push that cloud away without rage smashing it.
I settled on the Bird-in-Hand Half Marathon, a race near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as my comeback run, and I had help training. Nick ran the Broad Street Run 10-miler that year, and despite not really training for it, being sick, and running on a day where temperatures brushed 90, he ran ten-minute miles from start to end. He offered to train with me for the half marathon for the first few long weekend runs until the distance became too much for him. He showed up at my house in old running shoes with an MP3 player, but he never turned on the music as we finished a five-mile loop around my town. We ran 6, then 7 miles, then 8, until he signed up for the race, too. He took me on my first go-round of the Fairmount Park loop, which is just over 8 miles along Kelly and Martin Luther King Jr. Drives. It includes the final stretch of the Philadelphia Half Marathon and is also where flocks of runners go to log their weekend miles among walkers and bikers (I know of one running team called “On Your Left”—after our first run through I understood why). I was used to training on wide, quiet suburban streets and empty park paths. There, I ran into a half dozen people I knew.
On those long runs, Nick and I talked about life. He talked more about why his marriage ended (she didn’t get him, she spent too much money, he should have broken it off when her mother demanded he buy her an expensive wedding dress). I talked about my past, too, not just about Jason but about Stephen and my books and how I clawed my way through the recession. Because I didn’t need to look at him, I could talk about things that would have been hard to say face-to-face. Unlike running with Jason, there was no negotiating the pace because we were at the same one: slow enough to keep talking but fast enough to still be a challenge. I started to miss his banter when I ran by myself on weekdays. Podcasts were far less interesting than unwinding another person’s life while on a run.
After working off-site for a month, the marketing director of the company where my dad worked asked me to come into the office on a full-time basis—temporarily—until they found a replacement for their marketing person. Dad was thrilled. He had encouraged my writing career, but this meant I’d be around more often. I bought a bunch of boring black slacks, shells, and cardigans, hired a dog walker to take Emily out at lunchtime, and commuted five days a week to Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. I’d come into work an hour early to work on my freelance projects, sneak in interviews and calls between the gaps in proposal due dates, and then finish those stories on nights and weekends.
Nick’s ex-wife was connected to that industry, and a proposal with her name came across my desk. With his last name. I almost texted him that he had a relative he didn’t know of, then I realized who it was. This woman with a smiling face and professional head shot and smart bob and pretty smile was her. The evil one. Who, Nick said, on their August wedding anniversary, texted him asking if they could make up and make babies, who started wearing her rings again when she found out he was dating someone, and then used me as the foil to try to heal their relationship even though she had moved out months before we met.
It was a very confusing time. And we talked about it while running, Nick sharing his life story, and me deciding how far and where we’d run.
We ran a tune-up 5K in October, two loops around Knight Park to raise money for the Collingswood Public Library. Nick trailed me for the race until the last 100 meters, then beat me by five strides. I still finished first female in the race—the one and only time I won a race—and in return was given a trophy as long as my arm and a pair of Vibram FiveFingers.
I wore them to run on the beach a few times, which is the only place I ran barefoot anyway, then donated them to Goodwill. I went back to the Mizuno Wave Riders, too, and apologized to the shoes that I ever strayed to hop on the barefoot bandwagon. The Nike Frees were banished to dog-walk duties. I last wore them in a mud run I finished with Nick, after which I threw them out. Goodbye, shoes Jason loved. And goodbye, Jason.
(I know a lot of runners who are still Vibram devotees, but the bubble has burst. By 2013, sales of minimalist shoes fell through the floor. In 2014, sales dropped by 50 percent just through the first half of the year, according to SportsOneSource, which tracks the sporting goods industry. In 2014, Vibram settled a class action lawsuit brought by customers who felt they were deceived by advertising that the shoes could prevent foot injuries—claims that they alleged were not based on scientific evidence.)
I chose the Bird-in-Hand Half Marathon, because it was a small, first-year race. I didn’t want to do a big-city race again in case I collapsed again. If I flopped, the only people who would see it would be those running and the Amish, whose fields were the scenery for the race. Then I could safely retreat to my ten-milers with no one knowing that I couldn’t tack on an extra 3.1 miles without the wheels coming off.
Nick and I stayed at a Best Western in Lancaster. He didn’t seem nervous as we dressed. I was. My hip had held up through the training, but I hadn’t pressured it with any kind of speed work. What if it snapped? What if the pain returned? What if I failed again and tipped the balance I had finally found?
Compared to the Philadelphia Half Marathon, the size of this crowd was a speck, our cars just filling the parking lot across the street from the starting line. After the national anthem, we set out over rolling hills on roads that were only partially shut down. Cars whizzed by. Buggies, their wheels grinding along the side of the road, passed us too. I learned that cows could run when one saw me at one end of her pen and then kept up with me for the length of the farm.
Nick stuck behind me the entire time, but I sensed he wanted to go faster.
“Just go,” I said at mile 10. My hip was holding up, but I felt the first stirrings of that familiar end-of-race breakdown in my legs and uncomfortable burn in my lungs, and we still had 3 miles to go.
“No, I’m not leaving you. I’m not doing that like he did,” he said, a reference to Jason.
He pulled even with me at mile 12, and told me to push. We turned toward the finish on a field—a field that was wet at the start of the race and turned into a mud slick by the time we crossed through.
“I can’t keep it up,” I said to Nick.
“Yes, you can,” he said, and jumped in front of me.
I turned onto the field, splatting my feet down into a slick of mud, and fought to keep upright. I crossed under the finish banner, and put my hands on my knees as Nick walked through to grab a bagel and water. I finished in 1:55:43. He finished just ahead.
“
See?” he said and hugged me. “You could do it. And that wasn’t so bad.”
We ached and creaked around that night, collapsing into his bed at 8:30 PM. As I was about to turn out the light, my dog in his lap, he said, “How’s your hip?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Good. Now you’re ready for a marathon.”
I liked Nick. I liked hanging out with him and being attached to someone who was so smart and savvy and who seemed to like me and my dog. He walked Emily and played with her and carried her around his house, bought her toys to keep there, and let her lick his legs after a run. I fluttered on the edge of scared and excited. I was getting too close. His divorce was finalized that fall, and instead of being relieved at his relationship status, I had started to worry both that I had rushed into another relationship and that it would collapse around me as soon as gave in to what I knew I felt. I reminded myself that he was honest about that relationship, and he liked to point out how I was “better:” that I was “petite” (I laughed when he said that, but he said that in comparison I was a compact person), that I was better with my money, more mature, smarter, and, as he said, I could “take” his personality. I could roll with his sometimes off-color jokes, even when I was the butt of them, and that I really understood him where she didn’t.
By New Year’s Eve, I knew I was sunk. We cohosted a party at his house that was planned as small get-together and ended up a rager. That’s not why it was a less-than-ideal event, though. Nick played a horrible prank on me earlier that day by convincing his friends through texts and Twitter to make me think that you needed to wear costumes to the Mummers Parade, a Philadelphia New Year’s Day parade with roots in blackface. I didn’t want to go because, well, who wants to be associated with that? Especially when the race’s supporters see no problem with some comics and musicians still including red face and yellow face in their acts, or doing routines with references to minstrel shows?
Of course no one attends the parade dressed in costume, but I didn’t know that, and because Nick and his friends posted about picking up their (fictional) costumes on Twitter, and I asked them on that public platform what they meant, I looked like a fool. “You’re too sensitive,” Nick told me. I didn’t think I was too sensitive, not when this man orchestrated a group effort to embarrass me—all online where everyone we knew would see. I told him to go fuck himself and that I wasn’t coming over that night.
But after apologies and promises of how much fun the party would be, I showed up at his house with my dog, my face still puffy and red from crying. I ignored him until the party started to fall apart, first with a girl in hippie jeans who dropped a beer on the floor then tried to rub the beer into the wood floor “because no one will notice.” I kicked her out, and order was restored. Nick and I still went upstairs for a midnight toast on his roof deck with a bottle of champagne, where he kissed me and told me he loved me and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. And I went to the parade the next day, pushing down my squeamishness about supporting such an event because I wanted to be a good girlfriend.
I even wrote about him in my second New York Times running column, a piece titled “Fitness Goals: Run. Race. Beat the Boyfriend,” about how I started dating someone who hadn’t been a runner yet he ran more race miles than I did throughout that year. “Before I met him, I craved the solitude of those long, lonely runs. Now I want his wry companionship next to me for every mile,” I wrote.
The essay ran early in the new year. I proclaimed to the world: “He is mine.” I was still worried he’d drop me like the others had done before, but I was having fun with him. I was conscious of being thirty—Nick reminded me of that. My third sibling was on his way toward marriage. I decided to hold on and hope that the same would happen for me.
Chapter 6
PHILADELPHIA MARATHON
NOVEMBER 20, 2011
New Jersey Marathon — Miles 13–16
The halfway point rolled under me the same way my hips and legs rolled together over the asphalt into Deal: smoothly. Legs: check. Hips: check: Lungs: check. Bowels: empty. Brain: nearly so.
Before the race, I broke the course up into a five-part checklist: Oceanport/Monmouth/Long Branch; Deal Part 1; Asbury Park/Ocean Grove; Deal Part 2; and the finish. I made the first part the longest on purpose so that every section I knocked off after that would be short, leaving me multiple victories leading up to the finish line.
Four? FOUR more segments left? I thought as I passed the Deal Casino, a summer beach club with a big, lush lawn facing the street, but whose contents had been tossed out by Sandy.
You are fine. FINE. You’re halfway done with the race and you feel good. You probably don’t look good, but that doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter doesn’t matter. Fluffy matter? Is that a dog over there? Do not stop to pet the dog!
The only shade offered along this stretch of Deal Part 1 came from streetlights curling overhead. I dreaded this segment, knowing the sun would beat down on me just as I was reaching the race’s halfway point.
And who knows how you’ll feel when you come back through here. No, stop it. STOP it.
Despite temperatures in the 50s with a cool ocean wind winding its way a block inland to where we ran on Ocean Avenue, the sun still screamed May. I dumped another cup of water on my head at the next water stop. Right before the mile 15 marker, I passed butt cheeks girl. Her shoulders and the bottoms of those cheeks were burned.
The course was wide here: a big boulevard with shoulders on each side, separated in the middle by three vertical strips of brick. By then, Oz Pearlman, the leader in the race who had won twice before (and would win that day) passed by on his way back to Long Branch, followed by a trickle of fast runners that turned into a creek, then a river coming from where I still needed to run.
You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re not trying to beat them. Stick to the plan. Stick. To. The. Plan.
I don’t remember much about those miles because they were boring. The tough women of Murderess Row from Chicago hung around my head, dancing in their strips of black costume, all legs and abs and swinging hair, red flags in their hands to indicate that, yes, they were guilty. “He took a flower in its prime / And then he used it! And he abused it!”
The only real noise was the phat-phat of sneakers on road and the distant crash of the ocean, both sounds playing over each other, over and over and over again. “It was a murder but not a crime!”
Murderesses were fine. Boring was fine. Boring was more than fine because I had no distractions to throw off my balance: No encounters with any fighting couples or cars stopped at barricades, drivers mad that they couldn’t use the road over which we traveled. I wasn’t talking to anyone by then, not because of pain, but because my mind was done running around its own hamster wheel. It blanked, which is exactly what I wanted.
I passed mile 16—the farthest I’d gone in training—without a blip in my body and only a small thought that what lay ahead was, at least for this training cycle, uncharted territory.
I hadn’t completely given up on the marathon after hurting myself in 2010. It still scared me, though, carrying with it a big fat fear of bleeding nipples, runners breaking against The Wall, and making otherwise sensible people poop their pants.
The marathon, like every other race distance, became more popular through the ‘00s and beyond, though that growth was still modest compared to that of the half marathon, according to Running USA. I saw why. Training for a half marathon is like eating chicken nuggets, while preparing for the marathon is like starting out with the whole bird—unplucked. It’s not simply doubling mileage. It’s dedicating a sizeable chunk of your life to the training: the running, the preparing for the running, the recovering from the running, the eating and sleeping right to continue to do all the running.
In 2008, as I was training for my first Ocean Drive 10-Miler, I read the book First Marathons, a collection of essays from runners retelling their first marathon attempts. In it, everyone fr
om a nun to a husband-and-wife team to recovering addicts to legends of the sport share how they started running and their first marathon experiences, whether they were great races or disasters.
I had watched marathoners, too. In 2010, I ran the Asbury Park Relay Marathon on a two-person relay team. I did ten miles after my ultrarunner friend Sam ran the first 16.2. The race included eight laps around Asbury Park, and while I ran my part, Sam helped pace his friend Chris, who was doing his first marathon. Chris hoped to qualify for Boston through it.
Except Chris bonked, big time. On my last lap, I found them both sitting on the curb. Chris’s calf had seized, and Sam was feeding him salt pills to get electrolytes into his body to loosen up the cramps. When they came in through the finisher’s chute everyone started cheering, thinking they were done. Sam held his finger up and said, “One more! One more!” as embarrassment flushed across Chris’s already red face.
I didn’t want to be that guy, banging on my calf at mile 20 of a marathon. I didn’t want to be the runner who pooped herself, or who hit that wall, or who broke her butt in training—again. But I also didn’t want to be the writer who wrote about running without ever finishing a marathon.
As Nick started to toss around possible marathon options, I went back to First Marathons and reminded myself that if an obese, chain-smoking nun could start running at fifty-four and then run fast enough to qualify for the Olympic Marathon Trials, I could finish just one marathon without shitting my pants.
After I ran the Bird-in-Hand Half Marathon and did not break myself, I tried to get over the still-present fear of breaking myself through volume. Nick and I ran seven races in eleven weeks that spring (another Adrenaline 5K, another Ocean Drive 10-Miler, and Broad Street, plus the Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run, Asbury Park Half Marathon, the first Phillies 5K, and the Virginia Wine Country Half Marathon). “Jamming all those races into such a short time took the competition out of it,” I wrote in the New York Times. “I wasn’t running for medals or gift certificates or free shoes. I ran because the courses were there, friends were there, the finish line was there.”
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