NOVEMBER 6, 2010
At mile 12, we left downtown Long Branch and turned onto Ocean Avenue to enter the southern part of town, the wealthier section. More homes here are used only seasonally. Some are large, severe, and guarded by long driveways, hedges, and, in one case, a griffin. Ocean Avenue is wider here, but its fault for racing is a big one: Here and in Deal, the next town south, the only shade provided would be the shadows of streetlights that curled overhead, and we’d run that strip twice.
Before we crossed into Deal, though, we turned off Ocean Avenue to run around Whale Pond Brook, a 0.7-mile jaunt off the main road. Because the course had to be rerouted off boardwalks in Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, it made up distance with a few turns away from the shore and into the respective towns. One of these was at mile 12.
I started passing people here, a little earlier than I’d anticipated, even though I kept my pace—in spite of the Porta-Potty stop.
Keep your speed. Don’t go too fast. Keep your speed. Just keep your speed. Just keep swimming? Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.
Back at mile 11, I had fallen into step with a blond woman about my age. She told me she was three months pregnant and running this race after having run the Boston Marathon three weeks before. She had finished just before the bombs went off. This was her redemption race.
“I just want to run and feel safe again,” she said. She ran strong next to me with a tiny little belly protruding from under her race bib. If she hadn’t told me she was pregnant, I would have assumed it was from an overexuberant carb load the night before.
Between miles 11 and 12, we closed in on a couple running the marathon together. For the last half mile she had been futzing with the arm band that held what I assumed was an MP3 player.
“Do you want me to stop and fix it?” her partner asked. He looked older than me, face slick with sweat, and strained.
“No!” she snapped back, ripping off the arm band, the sound of the Velcro detaching like a shot that echoed off a redbrick church on our right. I turned to my temporary running friend. My eyebrows zipped up, as did hers.
“I told you that this wasn’t going to work,” she said, trying to rewrap and attach it while running, and slowing down. “And now my neck hurts!” she yelled.
Her partner took the MP3 player from her. “I’ll fix it,” he said. Their pace slowed, and they fell back closer to me and my temporary running friend.
“NO!” she said, and grabbed it back, then stopped in front of me. I sidestepped around her.
“Do you want me to fix your neck?” he asked, pleading now. Runners and a few spectators stared too.
““NO!” she yelled. “I don’t know why I’m doing this with you!”
Watching them fight made ugly memories try to jump into my brain.
My temporary running friend broke away. Her fiancé and his mother—who didn’t know my friend was pregnant—were up ahead. Her shirt had +1 printed on it, and that’s how they were telling her soon-to-be-mother-in-law that she was also a soon-to-be-grandmother.
I pushed ahead without her. The words of the “Cell Block Tango,” from the musical Chicago shoved my memories out of the way. “He only had himself to blame . . .”
Picturing those women of the cell block kept flashes of my past running fights from clogging up the gears, which I didn’t need when I was still dropping ten-minute miles despite the blip at the Porta-Potty. My legs and lungs and hips felt fine. I needed my brain to stay calm and clear if I was going to drop-kick the second half of the race and cross the line with my head held high.
After Jason and I reached our inevitable, slow-motion car crash of a conclusion, three options presented themselves, running-wise:
1. Stay the course. Despite bottoming out at the end of the race, I was still in the best running shape of my life. The Philadelphia Half Marathon is at the far end of the fall racing season, bumping up against the start of spring’s training season. I could roll that training over into setting another PR in the Ocean Drive 10, and try the half again at one of the dozen spring races in the area.
2. Take a break, at least from distance training, just like I planned to do with dating.
3. Run harder. A lot harder—and farther too.
I went with number three, and set this goal: Run a marathon, and run it fast enough to reach what is considered a mark of excellence for the amateur runner, which is to qualify for the Boston Marathon. I saw no reason why I could not do this. I had been posting faster times, and I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t set a high bar and reach it, especially when my state of mind wasn’t so much La la la, I love running, so I should do more of it and be good! but more grim determination.
Running harder hadn’t helped me get over Jason the first time around, but I didn’t blame the running or the training. I blamed getting sick, my sister’s wedding, for me being wrong—about everything. This time, I told myself, I would do better, and it would work.
In 2009, a twenty-nine-year-old woman needed to run 3:40:00 to qualify for Boston. That meant covering 26.2 miles at a pace of 8:23. Yes, that was hard, but it was still about a minute slower per mile than what I had needed in the half marathon, and I held that pace for 7.5 miles. Don’t get sick and you can do it, I told myself. Simple.
I printed out Hal’s Advanced 2 marathon schedule, the most difficult one he offered. No matter that I’d never done a full marathon before. In addition to 400-meter repeats and tempo runs, this schedule added 800-meter repeats, hill training, and pace runs, with only one running day off per week instead of two.
I targeted the New Jersey Marathon on May 2, which meant eighteen weeks of training starting the first week of January.
As I took a running lunge forward, the sport did too. From 2000 to 2009, the number of finishers in U.S. road races increased 37 percent across all distances, according to Running USA. In 2010, the organization produced its first-ever half marathon report because of what it labeled the “astounding growth” in the number of finishers of the half. Marathons saw 10 percent more finishers in 2010, the largest one-year percentage increase in any of the previous twenty-five years. Marathoning, Running USA reported, had become a “mania.” In 2009, women surpassed men in races: 53 percent of race finishers were women that year (5.4 million), compared to just 23 percent of finishers in 1989 (908,000).
“Training for and running a marathon is something that one can control unlike the stock market or the economy,” Running USA wrote in its 2010 marathon report. And, for me, a way to tighten control over my emotions, find some sort of solace in the wake of being dropped—again.
I was going to take running, which had failed me at a crucial part in my life, and pin it to the ground. With hard training, I could crush it, dominate it, make it my bitch. If I wanted it enough, tried hard enough, trained hard enough, I could control running and center at least part of my life. I would not let the breakup with Jason remind me that I was a failure, that no one would love me, that I would die alone. If I ran hard enough—even if I ran alone with my podcasts again instead of with a glorious, gorgeous human being who proclaimed that he loved me—I could win.
Another mania took hold in 2009: barefoot running. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, which is about the Tarahumara Indian tribe, was published in 2009 and hung on to the New York Times bestseller list for more than four months. Part memoir, part reportage, the book championed barefoot runners (like the Tarahumara) and outlined how once McDougall gave up bulky, overly padded running shoes, his running injuries disappeared. The Mizuno Wave Riders 9—my first pair of running shoes, bought in 2006—clocked in at nine ounces. I ran the 2009 Broad Street Run in Asics that looked like they carried their own flotation devices.
After Born to Run, running shoes shrank. Vibram FiveFingers, those funny toe shoes, showed up in my running store, in races, and, as a marker of quick-flash fashion, on hipsters, who wore them on their fixies on their way to the PATCO train. (By 2010, hipsters discovered Collingswood, fleeing here from Philadelphia to get their kids into our schools without feeling like they were giving up and moving to the suburbs—we had row homes and a train. I could deal with that, though their proclamations that they “discovered” Collingswood were grating.) In the 2009 Broad Street Run, I ran next to two guys who skipped shoes entirely. Minimalist shoes made up the fastest-growing segment in running for 2010 and 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal. Companies like Merrell, New Balance, and Fila got in on the act too.
Jason and I both read the book during his first fall away. We both bought Nike Free shoes, too. They weren’t much different from Jason’s regular shoes. He preferred to run in racing flats, something he kept with him from college. Running in flats was a big change for me, though, and I stuck with it even when he didn’t stick with me.
I felt lighter and faster in those shoes. They made me feel like a real runner. Those tiny white and yellow shoes looked more like slippers with laces than running shoes. Like those other real runners, I rounded the track on an 800-meter repeat once, twice, then did 400 meters of recovery running in between, and repeat, repeat, repeat again. Instead of putting my head down when I passed those other runners, I smiled and nodded (track etiquette: Run counterclockwise on the sprint, then clockwise on the rest lap in between). Sometimes if the runner looked friendly, I’d offer a high-five, and they’d slap back, our gloves muffling the noise.
But by mid-February, a prick of pain settled into my right hip. As I progressed through the month, charging up and down Haddonfield’s steep Centre Street hill, surging through pace runs at a speed that pushed my lungs to bursting, that prick became a stab. I pressed on, grinding through tempo runs before lunch and pace runs on Saturdays, then I’d down Advil and take a long, hot shower, after which I’d still be soaked in pain.
I stopped lifting, too. I didn’t want free weights to get in the way of my devotion to the sport. I turned over the keys to my body to running on the promise that it would save me. I could not give up. I would not allow myself to quit like Stephen and Jason had quit on me.
On my first 19-mile run, I made it out 1.5 miles before turning back home, pain radiating from my hip. I changed into my old Asics. I made it a half mile again before I quit. I walked back home and threw my shoes across the living room. I slunk upstairs, crawled into bed—still in my running clothes—and pulled the covers up over my head while my dog tried to lick my sweaty face.
All that running and I think, to some extent, running in the wrong shoes, had killed my butt. The real name of the injury is gluteus medius tendinosis, but my doctor called it Dead Butt Syndrome. When he told me, I laughed.
“I know,” he said. “But you can recover.”
The injury is the inflammation of the tendons in the gluteus medius, one of the three large muscles that make up the butt. It was my first running injury.
As much as it hurt, that dead butt led to my first big break in writing about running. When I wrote about the injury in the New York Times later that year, I described the injury as so: “If you think of the pelvis as a cup, the muscles that attach to it, including three gluteal muscles and the lower abdominals, interact in an intricate choreography to keep the cup upright when you run or walk. If these muscles are strong, the cup stays in place with no pain. If one or more of those muscles is weak, the smaller muscles around the hip take on pressure they weren’t designed to bear.”
My body struggled to keep the cup upright, and those muscles tore. Scar tissue set in, which sent the injury into a feedback loop that had me walking back to my house instead of running 19 miles.
This wasn’t my first piece for the New York Times, but it was my first about running, and the first that drew a lot of attention—warranted and not. When I first had meetings at the offices of Runner’s World, one editor called me Dead Butt Girl. A guy who blogged anonymously under the name Angry White Dude called me a “yuppie libtard running freak” and wrote over and over again, in a mocking way, that I’m a Starbucks coffee drinker. Well, sorry, Angry White Dude. I’m a Dunkin’ Donuts kind of gal—though yes, you do seem very angry.
To recover, I was ordered to stop running, break up that scar tissue through sports massage (a.k.a. agony), and rebuild the muscles in my abs, back, and legs to keep the cup upright—the same muscles I had kept tight through weight lifting but ignored while on my Boston Marathon qualifying-time quest. This would take time, though. I would be out for four months.
I still made it out to the Ocean Drive 10 that year, turning in a 1:22:46 performance, which wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t close to what I wanted, in either distance or time, and the pain was shattering. I waffled at the expo about whether or not to bump up to the Ocean Drive Marathon. I had run 17 miles in one shot. What’s 9.2 more? What’s a little more grinding pain when I already felt so flat and dull, like a winter sky tamped down by fat gray clouds? Just as I reached out for a pen to make a change on my registration, my mom took me by the shoulders and steered me to the 10-Miler packet pickup table.
Only after the Ocean Drive 10 did I take my running break. I felt like a fish flopping around on the sand, grit lodged in my gills and eyes. I retreated to the stationary bike and stared longingly at runners on the treadmills, even though I hated the treadmill. I felt floppy too, like all the work and training and muscles I’d built from running were melting away. I was afraid to eat too much but afraid to eat too little. I did not want to turn back into the 115-pound waif I was with Stephen. I didn’t want to inflate into a heifer, either.
In May, the New Jersey Marathon came and went. I’d booked a room along the race course—nonrefundable—so I went anyway and picked up my race packet. I thought I’d scoop out a few coupons, but I was so angry at being there yet not really being there that I threw the bag in the trash, free race T-shirt and all. The night before the marathon, I went to a Kentucky Derby party in a red strapless dress and floppy hat, then lay on the beach the next day while the race went ahead without me, afraid to look up toward the Ocean Grove boardwalk in case I saw runners passing on their way to the marathon’s turnaround point. I kept telling friends who asked how I was doing that I was fine. I told myself that I was fine. See? How could I be sad in this floppy hat? Sipping this mint julep? Lying on this beach in this tiny string bikini on top of this fun Superman towel? I was super. How could someone like this have a sad thought in her mind?
Through that early summer, after the dull gray clouds wiped away, I bloomed—not in a flower-buds-and-soft-green-grass sort of way, but in anger. I drove too fast, cut through lanes too close. I stayed out too late, partied too hard, and snapped too quickly at people around me. I didn’t have that time running on the road to myself, that place to work out problems and aggression, even if it was just burning a little extra energy charging up a hill. I turned back to the weight room, sometimes spending an hour pounding out reps listening to hard-core rap music, dubstep, death metal. It didn’t have the same calming effect, though. I stayed mad.
I was mad, at Stephen, at Jason, even at Dan, for rejecting me. Anger was better than acknowledging the desperate, weepy voice in my head that cried they were right to reject me, and that I’d end up a sad, lonely spinster with a dozen cats even though I’m allergic to cats. Anger was better than that.
So when I walked into a bar in South Philly and sat next to a tall guy with shaggy hair, the first thing I thought was Ugh, get a haircut, hippie. And stay away from me.
That night, I was In a Mood. When I’m In a Mood, I stomp around a lot and lose my verbal filter. I put on a short, black dress and three-inch heels and stomped to catch the train to Center City to attend a Thursday night fund-raiser at a swanky hotel. But my friend Adam, whom I had met while working on a story, texted me and said I should come down to the South Philly Bar and Grill to watch the final game of the Stanley Cup.
South Philly was often a no-go to me. I couldn’t easily walk there from PATCO, and when I did go—for work, to meet friends who lived there and wanted to convince me it was a hip new neighborhood where all the cool twenty-somethings moved—what I saw was all garish neon slapped onto cheesesteak places, and no grass. No thanks. I didn’t like cheesesteak, so I had no reason to go there regularly.
The fund-raiser was boring, but I didn’t want to go to this bar either (see: In a Mood). But I told Adam that FINE, if I could catch a cab in the rain, I’d come. I stepped out of the Bellevue, and there was a cab.
FINE, I thought as I stomped into the car. The driver took me out of Center City, past the run-down buildings and homes along South Broad Street, and turned down what looked like an alleyway with cars parked on both sides and bikes whizzing by close enough to touch their handlebars on the cab’s side mirrors. The driver stopped in front of a neon-lit bar that matched the cheesesteak places. Outside guys with no necks and gold chains smoked cigarettes and took breaks from yelling into their cell phones to yell things at the pretty girls going by. And next to them were Adam and Derrick, Adam in a black T-shirt and Derrick in an old Flyers T-shirt.
The hostess, in a tube of black that pushed up her tits and pushed out her ass, which made my little black dress look like a caftan, told us that she couldn’t seat us until our entire party arrived, despite a still-empty bar behind her. I huffed. All I wanted was a goddamn drink.
And who’s the late one in our party? In strolls this big guy built like an oak tree with reddish hair that came below his ears, T-shirt, ragged shorts, and flip-flops.
“FINE. Let’s go,” I said, turning on one heel and stomping behind the hostess to a back table.
This was game six of the Stanley Cup, do or die for the Flyers. I wasn’t much of a hockey fan and neither were Adam and Nick—that long-haired guy—but Derrick was. He flipped and flopped and stood and jumped and ended the game with his head in his hands when the Flyers lost in overtime. The rest of us talked around him.
As the drinks continued, the conversation turned to how we lost our virginity, then how long you should wait before having sex with someone.
I, being In a Mood, countered everything they said.
“What if she wants to go?” Adam asked.
“Then fuck her,” I said. “She’s an adult. She knows what she’s doing.”
“But don’t girls worry we’ll lose respect for them?” asked Nick.
“Are you kidding me? Did I miss us stepping back into the 1950s? And by the way, we’re women, not girls,” I replied.
Adam and I debated how many dates you should go on before having sex. He said three. I said it depends. “Maybe she just wants some dick. And we can lose respect for you too.”
I took a gulp of my Miller Lite, rolled my neck, and told this story:
“I was dating this guy Jason. We met at a concert, and I woke up next to him the morning after—but no sex. Not on that date, not on a date where he took me to Le Bec Fin . . . (“Hoooa” from the group).
“For his birthday, I booked us a room at the Rittenhouse Hotel. We were going to a black-tie that night. Everything was perfect. He was gorgeous. I wore a little gold dress that stopped just inches short of my snatch. We were lying in bed. He’s on top of me. I can feel his dick pressing into my hip, and I’m like ‘Yes! Finally!’ Then he breathes into my ear ‘I don’t want to have sex until you’re my girlfriend.’ All I could think of was, ‘I just want to get fucked!’”
Nick and Adam laughed so loud they broke Derrick from his hockey bubble. I sipped my drink, pleased with myself.
I gave Nick my card because his company was hiring and I thought my friend Jen might fit the bill.
On what we would later call our first “date,” he met Jen and me at a corner wine bar in Center City on a soft summer night. They talked shop for a bit, but then the conversation was between the two of us as Jen watched. I felt something there, and he did too: He asked me to dinner a few days later.
As we talked, a van ran a red light and smashed into a black sedan. We watched as the medics came, and as tow trucks haggled over who would the haul away the wreckage. No one was killed or even taken away in an ambulance, but it was a big mess that left people limping as they walked away.
Nick was married when we met, but separated. She had moved out while their lawyers hashed out a divorce settlement. At first I didn’t mind his situation. I still wasn’t over Jason, and I didn’t want a boyfriend. I didn’t want to get hurt like that again, and I figured a fling before trying to seriously date again would be a good idea, like releasing a steam valve. I had no interest in anything long-term, and what I saw as Nick’s semi-unavailability was a perk. He encouraged me to date other people—which, hey, why not. I had been out a few times with a runner I met in a group run, Nate, a redhead with a sub-three-hour marathon PR, but he had just split from his fiancée and said that he didn’t want to start something with me that he couldn’t finish.
Where Nate was quiet and shy, Nick was a bullhorn. He told me up front that he was “kind of an asshole.” On one of our first dates, right before my thirtieth birthday, he pointed to a parking meter and said, “That’s you. After your birthday, you expire,” a joke he’d keep making for the next two and a half years. He said what he thought, did what he wanted. He loved to debate because he went in knowing he was never wrong. I liked his confidence, his assertiveness. He was a good temporary match.
Our first real date, he bent down to kiss me before I caught my train home and while grabbing my hip accidentally pulled down my strapless dress. My boob popped out, which sent us into gales of laughter—and I hadn’t laughed like that in a long time. We had sex for the first time on the Fourth of July on a futon mattress on the floor of his bedroom, because he still hadn’t replaced the furniture she took. He let me bring my dog too. No guy I had dated before had ever invited both of us over. The three of us watched the fireworks from his roof deck, us sipping wine, my dog—who isn’t bothered by fireworks—zipping from plant to plant sniffing away, then sitting on a bench between us as the colors boomed.
It wasn’t supposed to last. I was very conscious of being the one after the wife, and I had not given up on Jason just yet (that last encounter on the lifeguard stand was the month after I met Nick). But he stuck. We dated through the summer and into fall. I met his sister, his mom. On a warm September day that straddled the seasons, Nick came with me to Ocean City to keep me company and make funny faces at me while I had my head shot taken for the second edition of my Jersey Shore book. After, we ate greasy pizza at Mack & Mancos, then strolled down that boardwalk, our arms linked, my heart thrumming. Oh shit, I thought. I may want him to stay.
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.