Nick was all in. I introduced him to my local running store friends, bought him a GPS watch, and stocked up on Shot Bloks for two instead of one. By June, a year after we met, we talked about that first marathon almost as much as the possibility of me moving into his house.
Nick presented this as a practical move. We were doing a constant shuttle between our two places, usually ending with me and Emily sleeping at his house, then I’d shuffle to work, bumping and pushing my way through South Philly traffic, to bump and push my way back through one-way streets and four-way stop signs to pick up my dog and go home, adding about a half hour to my already long commute.
Plus, Collingswood became that place hipsters went to breed. I could rent out my house for more than the mortgage, taxes, and insurance cost per month and turn a small profit.
Nick kept talking about marriage and kids, and that the only way to figure out whether our relationship would work was to live together. I agreed, but hesitated—not for any religious or traditional reasons about living together before marriage, but because it felt rushed. I felt as if he wanted to push us ahead with a shove instead of a nudge, as if his life timeline hadn’t changed since his divorce. He just stuck another woman in that role.
Then there was his house. It was a lovely three-story house with finished basement and roof deck, but it was in the wrong place. It was also one his ex-wife picked out. On Google Maps, the photo of the front door features a blue wreath, one she put there.
I had not, as he predicted, fallen in love with South Philadelphia. To me, it was still claustrophobia-inducing, harried, and dirty with trash everywhere—on the streets and sidewalks and overflowing out of trash cans. It wasn’t what I wanted and what I already had: a nice house with a small lawn in a small town, where trees draped over every street. I had been groped four times already in South Philadelphia, and once while walking my dog at night, a man in a truck told me exactly what he would to do to me when he bent me over the hood of that truck. Of course these kinds of things happen in nice towns because jerks live everywhere, but these incidents were concentrated where Nick lived. I understood why people wanted to live in the city. I got their rationale. For a lot of people, the clustered convenience of having so many things at their fingertips, of living without a car, makes them happy. And I liked visiting and enjoying the bars and restaurants and people and culture, but I also liked going home to sleep in my own bed where the only real noise at night were the sounds of leaves slapping against each other in the wind and the train passing by.
Nick assuaged my worries about living in South Philly by saying that it would be temporary until repairs were done on his house. He asked me to call my realtor, and we spent our Saturday afternoons walking in and out of three- and four-bedroom Collingswood houses, debating whether we’d buy a fixer-upper or pay the extra money for a house that was already updated. My dog’s new phobia of my car sealed the deal. I started throwing stuff out, putting my furniture on Craigslist, packing boxes, writing the listing for my house.
Before meeting with the realtor, we’d run the Fairmount Park loop. We still talked, but the tenor had changed. It wasn’t discussion about our lives and who we were, but how we would move forward together. Nick was taking the lead in our pace—ramping it up ever so slightly to where I was just a bit uncomfortable—and in mapping out how our future would go. That left me a bit uncomfortable too, because it was made up of his vision, not mine.
“I don’t want to do Philly for my first,” I said about that marathon. It wasn’t so much that I’d done poorly on the half there before, but I didn’t like the course, and my unease with the city was growing. It seemed silly to give it my first marathon.
Nick’s only response: “I like this city. You live here now, so you better learn to like it. That’s the marathon we’re going to do.”
Here’s how we trained: On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday the alarm went off at 5:30 AM and I rolled out of bed to take Emily for a walk, after which I’d shove Nick to get up. When he finally did, we walked a block and a half to a gym, a three-story building with Rocky-wannabes throwing weights around on two different weight-room floors, with one room on one level dedicated to cardio machines. The ceilings were low, with two rows of treadmills close to the televisions hanging from those low ceilings. Behind was a walkway, then two rows of elliptical machines. I tried to be as far away as possible from the woman who set herself up on an elliptical and talked on a Bluetooth the entire time she pedaled away, yakking loud enough that I heard her over my music. Who she was talking to so ecstatically at 6:00 AM, I have no idea, but by the end of marathon training I wanted to shove the Bluetooth down her throat.
We’d run mile after boring mile to nowhere, staring at the closed captioned broadcast of SportsCenter or local news, which always reported on the weather, the traffic, one scary medical story about how I was going to die at the hands of some common household product, and then something about cute animals. Nick taught me the trick of laying a Phillies rally towel over the treadmill monitor to keep myself from staring at the numbers tick slowly by. I challenged myself to not move the towel for as long as possible, because when I did, I was never as far along as I wanted to be.
Wednesdays were the longest treadmill days, with runs stretching to 5, 6, 7, 8 miles, one step after another into the boring abyss.
By the time we worked up to 7 miles on a Wednesday, I learned that the treadmills threw you into automatic cool-down after sixty minutes. I kept pushing the pace up only to be slowed down again. I was so frustrated—and so close to being done after an hour of boring running into nothingness—that I smacked the display.
Then it was a hustle back home to shovel down granola and milk, shower, and then drive to the office with the windows rolled down, still sweating but hoping the air would blast my hair dry and cool me down. In the parking lot, I’d coil my hair into a bun, hoping the look came off as slick and chic instead of a frizz-balled mess.
It was a boring job, but it was a steady one and a temporary one that allowed me to work on freelance projects when office work was slow, and occasionally have lunch with Dad, who in his new life seemed a changed man from the last time he lived at home. He loosened up, smiled more, was happy. I liked seeing him like that.
I obliterated all debt still hanging around from the recession by collecting that full-time salary and letting someone else pay for my health insurance while freelancing at the same pace I had before. I cracked Runner’s World that spring, and did my first interview for them over the phone with my office door closed in the hopes that no one would walk in while I was asking Michael Palin of Monty Python—Michael Palin! of Monty Python!—about his running experiences over the last thirty-plus years.
“I have never come back from a run feeling worse than when I set out,” he said in that lilting British accent as I quietly freaked out on my end of the phone. “It is terrific in a sense that I clear my mind. I come back from my runs with more energy and concentration.”
Then I’d go home, bump and push my way through the South Philadelphia four-way stop sign gauntlet to push and shove for a parking space somewhere close to the house, hopefully between cars that would not treat my bumpers like suggestions rather than stop signs, walk the dog, and then wait until Nick came home and figure out what we’d eat to satiate a new, never-ending hunger that ate at our stomachs.
We were doing Hal’s Novice 1 schedule, which called for four days of running per week with one day of cross training and two days of rest. Wednesdays were pace runs. Saturdays were long runs. It was lighter than what I did when I had tried for the New Jersey Marathon, but more exhausting to complete since I balanced running with a job for which I needed to shower and the needs of Nick, which proved to be monumental.
In the run-up to moving in together, Nick had been devoted, loving. Despite his opinion that he was never wrong, he seemed committed to building a life that would work for us both. One reason he wanted to run a marathon that fall was so I could get
one in before I had our first child. After Jason, I stopped trying to think about those things like weddings and babies, but when Nick held my hand and said that Josephine, my mother’s middle name, would be a wonderful name for a daughter, I melted just a bit inside.
When I moved in, though, something shifted, and I found myself trying to change myself into what he kept telling me would be the best version of me.
These comments were harmless at first. Maybe I should dress a little nicer, so I met with a stylist at Nordstrom. Maybe I should spend a little more time with his friends versus going to New Jersey to see mine, since his were close by. Harmless, right? But these criticisms grew in frequency and vigor. My music tastes weren’t just different from his anymore. They were unsophisticated. Of course I should put my freelance work aside if he needed me to do something for him, like go to the dry cleaner near his hometown, a forty-five-minute drive each way. He really needed that tie for his meeting, and I had all that spare time with my less-taxing profession. When someone egged the house, I was the one who cleaned it up because he had something important to do. I scrubbed at yolk and whites that had frozen on the stairs while the neighborhood walked by and stared on their way to church.
But I did these things and rarely complained, because to complain would start a fight. Maybe that’s what would make a relationship finally work for me. Nick was so masculine, with a personality turned to eleven, and I assumed a slightly submissive role, thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to let someone else drive the car for a little while. When the balance tipped too far, I didn’t say anything, just went uncomfortably along.
The Saturday long run became a flash point. Where before he gently pushed the pace to slightly uncomfortable, now he ran too fast for me, and I spent most of these long runs trying to catch up.
“Just go ahead,” I’d say as I trailed him, trying to keep the pace. On most training plans, especially for beginners, long runs were supposed to be done at an easy pace, and the one he set was not easy. I knew where the car was. I knew how long we had to run. I didn’t care if he finished ahead of me.
“No. You need to keep up. It’ll make you faster.”
Then there was the timing of our runs. I wanted to at least start before sunrise so I didn’t roast the entire way (later, when I trained for the New York City Marathon in 2014, I started long runs at 4:30 AM). Part of that was preference. I hated running in the heat. Another was practical: I’ve had eczema since I was eight, and it’s triggered by stress, heat, and humidity. Nick brushed aside my concerns. My eczema would be under control if I could just relax, he said, and running in the heat more often would make running in the heat less painful.
I tried to grind through a 9-mile run with Nick before Hurricane Irene hit that August. An eczema outbreak had already been stirring, setting up residence on my eyelids and in the crooks of my arms, but it lit on fire as I tried to run in soupy air down Columbus Boulevard.
“Nick, I need to stop,” I said.
“Why?”
“It hurts.”
“How can a skin problem hurt? It’s a rash.”
“I am telling you, Nick, it hurts,” I said, and stopped.
“This wouldn’t be such a problem if you’d just relax,” he said, stalking back to me. “You wouldn’t have these breakouts if you could control your emotions.” He’s taller than me by half a foot, and he stared down at me as I ran my nails over the patches of eczema on my arms that by then were weeping pus. “Now come on. You’re going to finish this run.”
I let him go ahead of me, dragging myself to keep up, him occasionally looking behind me to make sure I was still there.
Once we turned off Delaware Avenue to run the mile back to the house, he picked up the pace because he liked to end on a sprint. “Come ON,” he yelled back at me.
I stopped with a half mile to go and walked home, slammed down some Gatorade, and stomped up into my office where I scratched the patches on the insides of my arms raw. Three days later, my doctor declared that my eczema was infected and he put me on heavy dose of antibiotics and steroid cream. When I told Nick, he still insisted that I could control it if I really tried.
In this relationship I shoved myself aside, and by the time I realized what I’d done, it was too late. When I questioned him or raised a concern, I was either wrong or burdening him, so I just stopped and tried to change myself, my habits, my everything, to not be that burden.
After most of our long runs—if we didn’t need to meet with the realtor—I’d shower while Nick let Emily lick his legs, then I’d nap. After his shower, we’d go out and gorge ourselves on cheeseburgers and fries and craft beers. I’d smile again, laugh again, touch my still-hot face and wonder what the fuss had been about. I was too sensitive, just like Nick said. Everything was fine. As the fall progressed, we stopped meeting with the realtor. Nick said it was because our running schedule was too heavy, and I was interviewing for a job at Runner’s World, which would mean a move to Emmaus, Pennsylvania, about an hour from Philadelphia.
“Why move so soon if you’re going to have to move again?” he said. When I didn’t get the job and wanted to set up more viewings with the realtor, Nick said to wait until the marathon was over.
As summer rolled into fall, and the nights cooled, I thought things would get better. I quit the full-time work for my client after it became clear that they didn’t think the job was temporary. Dad was disappointed. “I thought you found a home here,” he said, but he wasn’t my boss, and he knew me well enough to let me go. That cut out the horrible commute, though I still woke up early to run on treadmills with Nick because he said he wouldn’t do it if I didn’t, and that if he wasn’t ready for the race, it would be my fault.
But that also meant that I was stuck in that house, in a neighborhood I was slowly starting to hate, all day. Fall didn’t make me want to put on a sweater and explore the city. It made me want to go home and run around Knight Park.
“Why do you keep telling me this?” he’d say when I brought up that the contractor—the one who was supposed to be finishing the repairs that would let Nick list the house so we could finally move—had not shown up that day. Again.
“Because it’s unprofessional of him. I was trapped in this house all day waiting for him, and he couldn’t even call?”
“I have enough to worry about without you pushing this onto me. Why don’t you support me. And what’s with this ‘trapped’? This is a beautiful house. You should love it here.”
On repeat.
On the day of our twenty-miler, Philadelphia was hit with a freak October snowstorm, and we stopped 6 miles in. We were supposed to go to a Halloween party that night in costumes Nick had picked out: cow for me, farmer for him, that whole cow/farmer/milk-for-free joke. I hated the idea, but I didn’t tell him that, and Nick had a way of presenting things he wanted without making me think I had a choice. “It’ll be funny!” he said. But the party was snowed out. Still, that cow costume hung on my side of the closet for months after.
I tried to fit into this new life, even if it chafed. At first, I thought it was because I hadn’t lived with someone else since graduate school, and of course there would be a transition period. I could make it fit, I told myself: because it was time for me to grow up, get married, have kids. I had already walked a different line than the rest of my family. Chucking your job out the window to be a writer—twice—was almost as foreign to them as me suddenly becoming a runner, an activity that my father was assured would lead to my early death. That person, the one who was the independent, home-owning entrepreneur, knew that she could forge ahead on any path that she so chose.
But then there was another plane of existence running under me, like the belt of a treadmill, about what I should be doing with my life. That was a hard path to avoid when it was what everyone else in my family was doing. It’s what kept me chasing after Stephen and Jason long after they deserved my attention. By the time I lived with Nick, my baby brother was about to get married. My
older brother and his wife had their first son. My sister had hers two weeks later, and was cooking baby number two.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if they had another cousin?” my dad asked me when I was visiting one day. We were in the kitchen, and Nick was out in the yard playing with my dad’s dog. My dad didn’t say much about Nick to me—“I trust you,” he said multiple times. But he wanted to know when we would take that next step.
“You have enough grandkids, Dad,” I said to him on a visit I made to his house on my own. I didn’t let my father know that Nick didn’t really like him and didn’t make that drive with me unless he had to.
“You guys would make some great athletic grandchildren. I’m counting on your genes to give me a superstar,” he said.
“Dad, he’s just divorced.”
“But it’s done. You know I have money set aside for a wedding. Just say the word.”
I don’t think my dad was conscious of the pressure he put on me to move in a direction I didn’t know if I wanted to go. To him, marriage equaled happiness, and being complete, and he wanted me to be happy.
No one in my family had drawn outside the lines. They all got married, had kids. Sure, college, a job, and career were important, but in the early twenties only. My late twenties were supposed to be dedicated to motherhood and family. Already in my thirties? I was behind. My sister had quit her job as soon as she had her first son. The Miller kids were expected to march along in the same direction, and I had thrown us out of step.
Running Page 12