www.carolineandtony.com

Running & Writing

February 3rd, 2006 Caroline

I am not a runner (though lately I run about eight miles a week). I don’t call myself a writer, either, though I write every day (and last month’s Mother Talk has me thinking I should claim the title for myself). But these days I feel similarly about running and writing. Urgent. Compelled. Anxious for the time to do them both, and relieved when I get an uninterrupted hour.

It hasn’t always been like this. I ran a little before I got pregnant the first time; it’s good, cheap exercise, and I lived near Golden Gate Park, so a new and different route was always available to me. But I didn’t miss it when my pregnancy made running impossible. I walked, did some yoga. When Ben was a baby, a friend and I joined a gym with childcare; the first day we went, we blithely signed our kids up for 90 minutes and hit the stairmasters. Ten minutes later, one of the childcare staff was flagging us down and we returned to find our weeping children clinging to the gate. So much for the gym.

Meanwhile, graduate school had pretty much sapped me of the urge to write for years after I finished. Writing a dissertation can do that to you. I started keeping a journal during my pregnancy and for the first time (six journals later) I have kept it going. But the writing was often no more than a log tracking short naps and sleepless nights.

Then one day this summer I found myself in my doctor’s office with my third case of strep throat in as many months. I was rushed and distracted, using the examining table as a changing pad for my squirmy, poopy new baby. I wanted to get my prescription and go.

But my doctor asked me how I was doing and the floodgates opened.

“I’m sick, and I’m tired, and I hate feeling like this and I want you to give me something that will make it all better, and I know you can’t, you can only give me antibiotics, and I hate taking antibiotics when I’m nursing even though you assure me it’s okay. I just want to be better. What can I do?”

Now, I love my doctor. She’s old-fashioned and maternal, and normally I don’t really go for that. I already have a mother, thanks, that’s enough. When I go to her office and see all the wizened Chinese ladies in the waiting room I feel like I do when I’m watching a baseball game on TV and a Viagra ad comes on: Oh, I don’t think I’m the target audience here. But she stayed open late for me once on a Friday Christmas Eve, when I called from my son’s pediatrician’s office in a state because my son had just been diagnosed with strep throat and I realized I had a sore throat, too, and she would be the difference between a tolerable Christmas weekend and three days spent writhing with pain and fever. She returns my phone calls, she talks to me about my life. She’s available.

So when she looked at me and said matter-of-factly, “You need to get more rest, and get more exercise,” I paid attention. And when she followed that up with a glance at fussy Eli and a smile and said “Good luck with that!” I didn’t even want to slap her. I took it as a challenge, and I set out to show her I could make myself better.

I went out and bought some new running shoes, loaded up the nano (a gift to Tony which I quickly hijacked) with Kanye West and jogged up and down the hills of Mill Valley breathing in the blooming gardens and freshly-mown grass. It was always hard to get going; there was always the fear, as with writing, that maybe today it wouldn’t go well. But I began to notice some changes. I was sleeping better. I was fending off illness. I took my running shoes on a family vacation and ran in the rain, and for the first time in years flew cross country without getting sick.

Then one day the nano wasn’t charged up so I just ran. At first I had one of Ben’s songs pounding through my head (”She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes…”) but then I managed to shut it out and start thinking about a journal entry. Now I don’t even bother with the nano, though I do wish I had some kind of machine that I could download my brain into so I wouldn’t lose the running ideas the minute I come in the door and Ben runs to me. (”It’s called a tape recorder,” says Tony. “But that takes talking, “I say. “I just want the machine to know.”)

I was at my doctor’s office recently, dropping off new insurance information with the receptionist, and my doctor spotted me in the waiting room. I hadn’t seen her since our talk last summer. “Good for you,” is all she said.

And today as I’m thinking about a book project a friend proposed, I put my head down and ran halfway to the ocean before I noticed where I was.

Entry Filed under: General