Running

by Jen A. Miller

  But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to yank everyone into chaos. I knew that ungluing us would mean wrenching not just my life apart but another person’s too—and even if I slumped over when I heard the three beeps on the security system followed by the click of my dog’s nails on the hardwood floor signaling that he was home from work, he was still a person who at one point I had loved very much and who was obviously unhappy too.

  I started writing a weekly running column for the Philadelphia Inquirer that November, and my editor and his wife asked me and Nick out to dinner. Nick refused, saying it was in New Jersey and he didn’t want to cross the bridge, so I went without him, making excuses and smiling stiffly until the topic of conversation turned to something else.

  We went to Key West before Christmas, a disaster of a trip that started with us trying to run through town, me leading because I’d been there before, with Nick questioning every turn I took us on, and ended with me sobbing in our hotel room after he spent the day telling me how much he loved brunettes—which I was not. But again I didn’t fight and tell him to stop. I just sat there and stewed until I exploded in tears.

  Of course it wasn’t just that fight that upset me—it was everything. This relationship had broken me down to my smallest parts, a slow, steady erosion of myself that finally stripped me bare. The last time I’d been to Key West was with Jason, soon before he moved, and even though that relationship had ended, it never made me feel so small. The idea of being a failure if this relationship went bust was still running through my mind, but the alternative—a failure, but a free one—started to look like the better option.

  I knew that I was going to leave him when we got back—which I did, though I waited until after New Year’s Eve. I drank too much white wine at a friend’s party, which I threw up for hours, white-hot up my throat.

  In January, I sat down with my friend Kristen, whom I hadn’t seen much since I moved to South Philadelphia, at a diner near Collingswood, and talked around the edges of my decision to move out. Then I drove to my mom’s house and told her I was leaving.

  She looked me straight in the eye and said, “Okay. I’ll change the sheets.”

  The break up moment was anticlimactic. While he was out with his sister, I packed as much as I thought I’d need for a week. I waited, nervous. I almost unpacked the bag, but I knew if I didn’t leave then, I never would have gone, and ahead I only saw a life weighted down by a $15,000 ring—of children and obligations, of being his wife with his name, which he insisted I would take—with me shunted to the side.

  When he came back in, he looked at me. I looked at him and said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  We sat on the futon in my soon-to-be-former office and hugged. I felt awful. For me, for him, for what I perceived as me ruining our lives.

  We hashed briefly through what would go next: Who would keep the dog? (Me, but he’d hold on to her for a few days.) When would I pack and move out? (When he left for a ski trip in Vermont that I was supposed to take too). Then I left, driving right to my mom’s, screaming “Why won’t they let me go home” the entire way.

  chapter 8

  NEW JERSEY MARATHON

  MAY 5, 2013

  New Jersey Marathon — Miles 18–20

  We crossed a concrete footbridge over another lake, but this time we headed into Ocean Grove. This bridge has a gate smack in the middle that is locked every night from midnight until 5:00 AM. The gates were added in 1995 to—in theory—keep thieves from Asbury Park coming into a town that bills itself as God’s One Square Mile.

  The gates are still there, open, and runners teamed through them at different levels of distress. After crossing the bridge, we ran down a sidewalk parallel to the lake before turning into the heart of Ocean Grove.

  Oh, there she is.

  Waiting at that turn was Mom in a beige puffy coat, pale blue jeans, sneakers, turquoise hat with COACH embroidered across the front, with both camera and Clif Bar at the ready. Thank God. Not just because I was hungry, but because seeing that familiar face, which had been at so many races before but never a marathon, was a relief. I bought her that hat the first time she came to a race and I couldn’t find her after. Now she’s impossible to miss.

  Oh, there she is. There she is!

  I waved so she could see me as I came down the sidewalk as I passed her, I yelled, “Open it! I’ll get it on the way back.” She snapped a photo at the exact moment I opened my mouth. It’s a lovely commemorative shot.

  Our mileage in Ocean Grove was short, just over a mile run past Victorian and Victorian-inspired homes. I passed the nineteenth mile marker, then turned back toward the lake and another footbridge into Asbury Park, and back toward Mom.

  She took strides with me to hand me the Clif Bar. “So many people tried to eat this before you,” she said. Mom would run her first 5K the next weekend, and was more than capable of running with me for that short of a clip. I took two big, sticky bites before handing it back to her.

  Mom knew that, around this point in previous marathons, the wheels had started to come off. But here they weren’t. My legs started to show signs of weakness—a pang here and a pain there and a bolt of something in my left foot that had died back down to a dull ache—but I didn’t feel like a wreck, not even close. I felt like the previous 19 miles were just another run like any of the hundreds of runs that had come before.

  “I’ll see you in an hour,” I said to her. Finishing in an hour meant that I’d be running faster than a ten-minute-mile pace for the rest of the race. I should, according to my plan and training, be able to do that without falling apart.

  I crossed back into Asbury, ready and prepared to meet mile 20—and what lay after.

  As Mom promised, she changed the sheets.

  I could have gone to a lot of places other than her spare room. I could have rented an apartment in Cape May or Asbury Park like I dreamed of when I left Nick briefly. I could have bought another house. I even looked at a few, including one around the corner from the one I owned in Collingswood—a steal except that it had ivy growing into the basement and a kitchen that needed to be replaced.

  But after living in someone else’s house, renting didn’t appeal to me. Neither did laying out a lot of cash to buy a new place that needed major upgrades. My tenants scheduled a closing date, so I decided to move back in and live with Mom until then.

  While Nick was in Vermont, Kristen, Mom, and Jen, who had been with me at the wine bar on my first half-date with Nick, helped pack me up and had me ready to move out in three hours. I didn’t have much: books, clothes, no furniture except a chair and a bookcase. It was a warm January day, and we all sweat as we worked.

  “Can you turn down the heat?” Jen asked.

  “I don’t touch the thermostat,” I replied.

  “I’m so glad you’re leaving,” she said.

  I put two boxes and two duffel bags in my mom’s spare room, which held the bed that I had given up when I moved in with Nick. He kept sending me emails about how I was a terrible girlfriend but he’d still take me back if I worked on my issues. I ignored most of them, and tried to start again.

  When I lived with Mom after college, we didn’t see too much of each other. I was at school most nights and working three days a week with lots of library time in between. Then, we shared a big house with a living room, family room, half-finished basement, five bedrooms, and two and a half baths. Except for holidays and in the summer when my younger siblings came home, we were the only two people there, and could glide through our daily lives without running into each other. We didn’t even need to watch the same TV show since we had two TVs.

  But she’d since sold that house and moved into a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath, one-thousand-square-foot house. It was cozy and the right size for her, but tight for people who did not share a room. My old bed barely fit into the second bedroom, which was also her office.

  I was a mess. In those first weeks I veered from dizzying happiness to ha
ve left Nick and South Philadelphia, to paralyzing fear that I was going to be alone for the rest of my life, so unlovable that even the dog didn’t want me. I could tell she missed Nick. She sat on the loveseat around the time he came home, as if he’d changed houses too. She lay at my feet during the day, staring up at me with her big brown eyes. I apologized to her over and over again.

  Nick had made noise about keeping Emily. On that I would not budge, even when I caved on everything else. I didn’t fight him to get back all the money I paid toward the new bedroom set we bought when I moved in. I complied when he demanded I refund him his half of the $500 he paid toward Emily’s last heart exam. If he had kept Emily, I might as well have lain across the sewer drain on Mom’s street and let the rain and chemicals and runoff from all the pesticide-laden lawns in the neighborhood do their job.

  Mom and I weren’t quite Oscar and Felix, but it was the first time I lived with a parent as an adult (and no, a recent college grad doesn’t count as an adult). During the day, I plucked at my keyboard hoping to find the inspiration to work, watched Law & Order reruns, and tried to not look at Nick’s Twitter account to see if he was subtweeting me. I’d text Mom about dinner and make something either from her bottomless freezer or from the groceries I insisted on buying for the both of us (Mom laughed at the suggestion that I pay rent, so that was the least I could do).

  We spent most nights across from each other at the dining room table, shying away from talking about the one thing that was on my mind. Mom had rebuilt her life after the divorce, but I hadn’t had a chance to really see the woman she’d become until that time we lived together. While she still owned the big family house, she’d worked nights and weekends at a grocery store to pay that mortgage and the taxes on the house while also saving for retirement. She never quite caught up in her career after taking so much time off to raise her kids, and not having a college degree gave her a ceiling, she thought. But brushing close to sixty, she still kept studying for and taking tests and getting clearances that would help her advance her career.

  “I don’t regret it,” she said one night over salad and steaks. “I have you kids, and I love you all. But things could have been different.”

  In a lot of ways. If she’d gone to college, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten married, or she’d have kept working after she had my older brother. She had been seven months shy of qualifying for a pension at her job when she quit. Or maybe my parents would have gotten divorced earlier. I don’t know. It was hard sometimes to look at the parents I know now—who get along, who cohosted events for my siblings’ weddings and babies, who posed for pictures with their kids and laughed with each other—and see the same people I had lived with before. In some ways, it gave me hope that I could get past a situation that had been much shorter and less fraught than the end of their marriage, and that I would laugh again soon.

  My parents had their faults, especially when they were still married, but together they had given me the tools to get out of that relationship: college, a drive to succeed, independence. I was able to leave Nick because, while I felt pressure to get married, I didn’t depend on him financially. I was able to control if and when I had children, so I wasn’t latched into a situation for them. I had my career, my own savings, my own retirement funds. I owned property. I could leave a bad situation.

  Another result of Mom and I living together then: She started running too. Mom was a teenager when Kathrine Switzer officially became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. Switzer registered under the name KV Switzer, and even after a race official tried to rip off her bib and pull her off the course she finished and then went on a worldwide mission to start women’s marathons with hopes that women could run the marathon in the Olympics too. “We knew if someone were not recognized at the highest level of the sport, nobody would take them seriously,” she said to me for a story I wrote for RunnersWorld.com about women’s-only races. I freaked out over talking to her about running the same way I had when I interviewed Michael Palin.

  Switzer was one of many women who opened the doors for us to claim the marathon as our race too. When people have asked me why women lag behind men in marathon participation (in 2013 and 2014, women were 43 percent of finishers in U.S. marathons and 61 percent of finishers in U.S. half marathons, according to Running USA), I don’t think it’s so much that women feel they have less time because of their quest to “have it all,” but that we’re still playing catch-up. When Mom was in high school, girls in her class could practice with the cross-country team but they couldn’t compete. She graduated in 1976. Title IX had just been enacted in 1972.

  As an adult, Mom found biking, first with a kid strapped into a seat on the back and then in long rides with an outdoor club. She started running by including little “pick-ups” while walking, and when she wanted to run more she asked me if I’d take her to the local running store to buy shoes.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were running?” I asked when we walked through downtown Haddonfield on the way to what I referred to as “the store.” I spent enough time there that it had become Cheers. “Jen!” they’d yell when I walked in, and I walked in a lot more since I moved back to South Jersey.

  “What if I don’t like it?” she said (she did like it—over the next two years she would hire a running coach, finish a dozen 5Ks, a 10-miler, and two triathlons).

  While I encouraged her running, she pressed me to go out more. But to where? To what friends? My only friends I had while living with Nick were Nick’s friends. In talking to Jen and Kristen as they helped me move out, I realized how long it had been since I’d spent any time with either because Nick didn’t like them. Once I moved out of the neighborhood, most of the people who I thought were our mutual friends receded. I couldn’t trust them with the wailing going on inside of me. How did I know they wouldn’t tell him?

  I was also going broke. I had $10,000 saved, but I burned through that money quickly. I didn’t want to work. I forced myself to write my newspaper column, and punched out a story and a pitch here and there, but some days the only thing I could do was walk the dog. At night, Mom caught up on Downton Abbey, her in an old IKEA chair, me curled up with my dog and a fuzzy blanket on the loveseat that had been my grandmother’s.

  I blamed myself for what happened with Nick, and while I wound and rewound everything I did wrong—from being a bad girlfriend to staying too long—I did irrational things. Despite my waning savings, I had every room in my house repainted, the carpets ripped out, and the hardwood floors refinished. I bought a $900 purse. I hopped on a flight to Las Vegas, giving the cover that I was there to write a profile for my college’s alumni magazine, though I failed to mention in my pitch that I had dated the subject of this profile, and he said he missed me. I let him and booze and sunshine wash away my pain for a little while. I booked a flight to Alaska for Memorial Day, and then a trip to Florida for the end of February.

  And I ran. Mom lived a half mile from Haddon Lake Park and Audubon Lake, which made up that 4-mile loop I used to train for the Chicago Marathon. I had played at that playground and hopped over that creek and fished at that lake as a child. In the summer, having access to a clean bathroom and endless water at Mom’s is what made the loop most attractive. I didn’t need that endless water in the winter, but I needed the pattern, a familiar one: I wanted to run the same thing over and over again until my feet bled.

  The idea of running another marathon had played at the fringes of my mind even before I left Nick. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, I ran at least a mile a day as part of the Runner’s World #RWRunStreak winter challenge. That forced me to start running again after Chicago when I wanted to punch running in its face. Spring, I thought, would be easier for me. I hated running in the summer under the power of those ten thousand suns. A spring marathon meant winter training.

  One book I brought with me to Mom’s was Hansons Marathon Method: A Renegade Path to Your Fastest Marathon. For the first time in book form, brother
s Keith and Kevin Hanson, along with Luke Humphrey, shared the training philosophy they used for their Hansons-Brooks Distance Project, a professional running group that produced Desiree Linden, an Olympic marathoner who nearly won the Boston Marathon in 2011—a feat that had eluded Americans from 1985 until Meb Keflezighi won in 2014.

  I liked the idea of being a renegade. I also liked the idea of running a marathon and not diving in the last 6 to 8 miles. I wanted to train hard, and this guaranteed it.

  Eighteen weeks. Six days of running a week. The longest run on the schedule was 16 miles, but those miles wouldn’t be easy, nor would the workouts around it. That’s because weekends stacked mileage on Saturday and Sunday with no rest day or cross training day on Monday. With Hansons you run another 4 to 7 miles on Mondays, and after that comes your speed or strength work, like 400-meter or 800-meter or mile repeats. Then you get a day off on Wednesday before you jump into what for me was the worst workout of the bunch: the tempo run, which to them means running at marathon pace, starting at 5 miles in week six and ending at 10 miles in week seventeen. No build-up to that pace through the workout. No shortcuts. Just run what you’re going to run in the marathon, with a warm-up before and cool-down after.

  The most I’d done in training in one week was 40 miles. Hansons maxes you out—on the beginner program—at 57. That may be half the weekly mileage of a professional, but they are also doing their easy runs at a pace that’s faster than I run per mile in a 5K. Not only would the training be hard, but it would also be time-consuming.