I signed up for a half marathon in March and I think the only thing I’m excited about is the idea of running a half marathon. The logistics, I’m finding, are a pain in the ass. I’ve encountered two major logistical challenges. First, I couldn’t have picked a worse time of year to train. This winter New York has gotten the most snow ever recorded, or something like that, so many of my training runs have been forced indoors on a treadmill. If you could prescribe a worse punishment for me than slogging away time on a treadmill, I can’t think of what that would be. I step foot onto this soul eraser and my eyes can go nowhere but the distance calculator, watching the hundredth of a mile counter creep S-L-O-W-L-Y along. I end up playing a little mental game wherein I challenge myself to go as long as possible without looking at the counter. I think the most I’ve ever gone is eight seconds.
The second logistical challenge of this endeavor is childcare. Weekdays, Mike is gone for 12-13 hours of the day, and the hours when he is home we are either sleeping or drinking wine. So, I am left to find other childcare options for weekday runs. Two friends have very kindly agreed to do what we call ‘baby swaps’ on certain days. I drop Drew with one of them while I run and then we switch and I take their child when they want to run or do errands another time. While this is really a golden (read: FREE) idea, it tends to work out like the half marathon – much better in theory than in practice. Coordinating schedules and naps and dodging kid illnesses just becomes a burden.
My local gym has babysitting facilities, but I’ve left Drew there three times now and each time I’ve picked him up after my workout his eyes have been red-rimmed from crying. If he’s gonna freak out over me leaving him, I’d at least like it to be for a good reason—I’ve gone off to get a 60-minute hot stone massage, or a three-course meal at BLT Steak—and not because I was grinding it out on the dreadmill next to a rank-smelling old guy who didn’t bother to brush his teeth today.
Despite these challenges, I am committed to running this race. It’s not big or high profile. It’s not even a distance I haven’t covered before. But I guess for me, crossing the finish line will be a way of proving to myself that the person I was before I had a child is still there. That girl who loves to crank up the music and just move through time and space and seasons, to get sweaty and breathless, to push hard up a hill to hear her heart beating through her chest, to go flat out in the waning moments of a run so she can come storming through the door at the end of it all, panting and heaving and leaning sweaty palms hard atop burning thighs and say, ‘wow, that was hard.’ She’s still there.
