13.1 miles and changemakers
We started with a get-to-know-you prompt in the Group Chat for our &Mother NYC Half Marathon training group: Where you live, Kids (if any), How many Half marathons you’ve run
Me: Ann Arbor MI, 3, and I have no idea how many half-marathons I’ve run!1
I’m fundraising for &Mother, a non-profit doing incredible work for parents in the running space, as part of their NYC Half Marathon team. I’m about halfway to my goal!
When I decided to try longer-distance running, I went all (or half?) in.
I signed up for my first half-marathon during my last semester of college. A sprightly and naive 21-year-old who had never knowingly or purposefully run more than 5 miles, with a “Why not?!” attitude. (I wrote about parts of that decision and how it changed a lot of things for me
, last week. And just talked to my co-founder, Alexis about it, here.) I trained for about five weeks, and was somehow able to run the whole thing.I signed up for two more half-marathons that year, one in Bryce Canyon and one in Baltimore. Thus began the tally.
This was—unsurprisingly to any fellow runners here—a gateway into marathons, of which I eventually ran 8 or 9, all pre-kids. But the half has always been my favorite. (What’s definitely not my favorite is when people say “Only a 5K left!” at the 10-mile mark. Only?! 5Ks are the worst!)
It’s long enough to feel challenging and to really settle in, but it’s not a marathon. And, IMO, that’s pretty great.
After each kid, running a half-marathon again has felt like a huge milestone for me.
I don’t feel a pull to go longer right now; mostly I don’t have any idea how I’d generate the energy to train or run those really lengthy workouts. But as I build up to 6, 8, then 10-mile long runs, with a half-marathon on the horizon, I feel totally in my sweet spot.
With each kid (b. 2018, 2020, 2021), the training has felt a little harder, a little more taxing, additional challenges and barriers to running consistently or sleeping or avoiding illnesses and all of the above. My pelvic floor required more PT after each birth, and more patience with getting “back” to running in some way.
Each time I toe a starting line (or, more accurately, bury myself in the sea of runners somewhere far behind the actual starting line!) is a practice in letting go of past selves, past race expectations, past versions of my body and psyche. My postpartum running experiences have landed at various points on my own spectrum of paces and finish times.
This will be my fourth half-marathon since having my third kid.
But this training cycle has felt so much better than the previous three. We moved to Michigan and have settled into a lovely new community. Our kids are a little “older”, so we sleep a little bit better. And I have been building this base for about two years now. I threw my name in the hat to run with the &Mother team for many reasons:
to race in NYC (and the state of New York) for the first time
to express a deep gratitude for the work they do, making running more accessible to moms little by little (part of that is fundraising for their Changemaker grant!)
and to celebrate that, almost three years into parenting three kids, I’m feeling ready to go hard again, to not “just” run 13.1 miles but to do it with a little fire.
In two weeks, I get to do all of that.
Thank you so much to those who have already donated and/or shared the link. I wish you could come run with me, too!
Yes this feels a little bit obnoxious, but maybe slightly less so than providing an exact # that’s well over 15? IDK.