Five Miles

I’ll never forget the first time I ran five miles without stopping.  I’d started training for a marathon and five miles was the baseline I was supposed to get to before official training with the team started.  When I sat in the hotel meeting room for the Team In Training informational meeting three miles felt impossible.  (Hell, a mile felt impossible.  I was the girl who regularly tried to get out of the one mile run in gym class- and was successful on more than one occasion.)  Five seemed about as hard as 26.2 and so I knew, somehow, if I could get myself to five, I could get to 26.2.  

So in the weeks before the marathon training officially started, I started running.  I did most of it on the treadmill at the gym because these was the days before gps on phones and the ability to know exactly how far you’re running.  I had a rough idea how long New York blocks were but I wasn’t completely sure.  On a treadmill I knew exactly when I’d hit the mile mark.

It was a Friday summer night and I was at the gym attempting to hit the five mile mark.  I know, I know, I was 23 and living in the greatest city in the world and I spent my Friday night at the gym.  I never claimed to be awesome.  Anyway, that night, on a treadmill at a New York Sports Club I ran five miles without stopping.  I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so proud of anything in my life, and I have four kids and a Masters degree.  And I can rap the entire Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song.  

I remember walking out onto 23rd street a sweaty, red-faced mess.  As I stood at the crosswalk waiting for the light to change it took everything in me not to blurt out to the man next to me, a young, kinda handsome business type on his way home from work or maybe a happy hour, “I just ran five miles without stopping!  Five whole miles!”  As it was I’m pretty sure I had a ridiculously goofy grin on my face that I could not temper.

The sense of accomplishment I felt that night was guttural.  I’d run an impossible seeming distance.  Before that i’d shuffled through two, three and four miles feeling terrible pretty much the whole time.  That night my muscles ached and my breathing was still heavy but I felt better than I’d felt…well ever.  (Up until this point my physical fitness feats involved, well, trying to get out of running the mile in gym class)  I was proud of my body in a way that I’d never experienced before.  It had done something my mind wasn't sure it could.  It achieved.

I recently started running again.  I’m not 100% certain, but I think the last time I was running any significant amount was five years ago.  Since then I may have done a mile here or there (in between long stretches of walking), maybe a 5k once (during which I wanted to die the whole time).  For whatever reason I recently found myself shuffling around the track at the gym trying to see how far I could go without wanting to kill myself.  At first it was a mile (thanks to the Hamilton soundtrack), then two and three.

Last weekend I ran five for the first time in years.  In the past few weeks I’d gotten myself to a comfortable three and four felt like an accomplishment.  After a rough couple of days potty training Lou (again) I needed the stress relief.  I set out to do five miles.

The temperature was pretty perfect and the prairie path had just the right amount of shade.  I listened to someone’s best running songs playlist on Spotify and felt pretty great for miles 2-4.5.  The last half of a mile involved a lot of motivational self talk (you can do this!  You are going to feel so great when you are done!  Don’t stop!) and when the woman’s voice from my Nike Runner’s app proclaimed “five miles completed” I found myself feeling almost as proud as when I’d stood on the corner of 23rd and Madison all those years ago.  

My body has done a lot these past few years.  I’ve grown and birthed babies and then sustained them for a year.  My weight has yo-yoed back and forth with each pregnancy while running, muscle tone and the like have taken a back burner.  It felt good to do something physical, to meet a milestone, to accomplish.  My body did something this weekend my mind wasn’t sure it could.  It achieved.  And I’m maybe more proud of my 33 year old body for that achievement than I was of my 23 year old one.