New Year's...habit tracking?

In my eternal quest to be a better grownup, I started habit tracking at the beginning of this year, and to my great astonishment it's one of the things I've kept up all year long. I've made a habit of habit tracking, I guess?

(The other thing I've kept up all year is my meal planning Evernote containing notes on nearly every dinner we've cooked since 2015, a la Dinner: A Love Story. I can tell you what we had the week Thing 1 was born - eggplant parm; pasta with shrimp and broccoli, etc. I *am* Jenny Rosenstrach, only less organised, less creative, and I don't get paid to write about food - alas.)

Anyway, you'll see below how my habit trackers evolved this year. None of this is particularly Pinterest-worthy, but that's just my personality. If it's just for me, making it more aesthetically pleasing is not a significant motivating factor, but crossing off each day is very satisfying. I take the bits and bobs of a system that work for me and leave the rest! This is how I work with training plans, too. Word of warning to any future coaches...

January 2018, like 10 weeks pregnant, sick to my stomach.  

January 2018 (see above). Those prenatal vitamins did not help with the puking, but I took them anyway. That 'run/ yoga/ strength' was more for my sanity than anything else.

December 2018 (i.e this week - haven't finished Friday and haven't got to the weekend yet). 

December 2018 (see above).
- Still taking my vitamins! Gummy vites for the win! I don't usually think that vitamins are a necessity with a nice balanced diet, but I have certain nutritional needs (because breastfeeding) that are helped along with vitamins.
- Somewhere along the line I decided to track daily flossing. This was probably prompted by having to schedule one of my biannual dental appointments. As it turns out, what gets measured gets managed better. Before tracking I flossed...maybe...a couple of times a week? Now it's more often than not, and when I forget it's because I've fallen asleep putting a child to bed. Why didn't I floss more before? It's so easy. The floss literally lives in the bathroom cabinet next to my toothbrush, where it has always lived. 
- 'Baby D' is vitamin D drops for the baby.
- 'Activity' is another case of what-you-can-when-you-can. Sometimes that's running 4 miles. Or my PT exercises, or MYRTLs. Other times that's walking a mile with the stroller, or walk-commuting to and from the coworking space or subway station. It all counts, right?

Note that as the number of behaviours tracked increased, the prettiness of the trackers diminished - they started out being coloured in with sparkly scented gel pen, and devolved into being crossed off. /shrug

This year, I also sort of tracked the books I read (in another Evernote note). For next year, I have a list of books to read written down in the back of my 2019 planner, let's see how that works.

It strikes me that habit-tracking is very much a process goal rather than an outcome goal. An outcome goal (ok, some people call these New Year's resolutions!) is something like 'lose 10 pounds'. A process goal is 'eat vegetables or fruit at every meal'. An outcome goal is 'Run a 1:50 half marathon'. A process goal is 'stick to 90% or more of a training plan'. I definitely prefer process goals, and paradoxically, they're easier to stick to because they're not all-or-nothing. If you don't meet your process goals in one instance - let's say I forgot to floss on Wednesday night - tomorrow is another day.

What are you tracking now or next year, and how? What else should I track in 2019? 

Reflections on a decade of running

Reflections on a decade of running 'seriously'

(and half a decade of blogging halfheartedly) 

This year it'll be a full decade since I started running 5Ks with friends for fun, then started wondering 'what can I do if I actually train properly?' That led me to the question 'what does it mean to train properly?' which then led me down a rabbit hole of online running information and blogs aka reading about other runners' personal experiences, which led me right here. 

Anyway, some thoughts on a decade of running seriously. 

1. What does it mean to run 'seriously'? It means a dedication to better, whatever that means to you - getting faster, going longer, training smarter, sticking with hard things.  speed has nothing to do with dedication, and competitive is not necessarily the same as fast.
2. There are some races whose memory I cherish. My very first 10K was actually way, way back in 2002 (!) - it was the Army Half Marathon & 10K. I remember going with my mom, then immediately losing her in the crowd and waiting around at our pre-determined meetup spot for her to finish. That may be the one and only race I ever got my mom to do with me. And she runs 3 miles every morning... The Tokyo Marathon was another lifetime highlight. So was the year I ran the Great Eastern 5k while 13 weeks pregnant, just soaking up the atmosphere and watching every woman runner I knew do one of the races. 
3. There are some races I'd like to erase from my brain. 2010 Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon: stomach trouble way too early (at the halfway mark), couldn't keep my gels down, lots of walking. Good fun. 
4. Friends, if you're used to 500-person road races in small towns in the US, road races in Singapore are a zoo. Most Singapore runners also don't do it with anything approaching the, um, level of ambition that I've seen in US races and blogs. Consequently, races in Singapore are very good for the ego. I'll be the first to admit that was instrumental to my sticking with running. In 2009 I finished near the 'front of the pack' with a sub-1h 10K and started thinking: 'Hm, that was a nice feeling. I wonder how well I could do if I actually trained?'
5. Ten years and eight marathons later, the rest is history! I still hold the family marathon record, as husband has never done a standalone (he did a 50K as his first race of any distance longer than a half marathon - go figure). 
6. But I still don't know how to pace a race. I mean, I know, in theory. I have never executed what I consider good pacing, in practice. Probably because I don't get enough practice. 
7. Unfortunately, despite how popular running is (or maybe because of it?), race organisation in Singapore leaves a great deal to be desired. Too many races are about the shirts, the medals, the swag - everything but a) is the distance correct? b) was the route map right? c) did it start on time? All of the serious runners I know are quite peeved about this. They deserve better. Not everyone wants or can afford to travel overseas for a well-organised marathon every year. Shoutouts to a few races that are really well-organised and that I love: the Great Eastern Women's Run series, the Singapore Bay Run & Army Half Marathon. And the running community, where you can always find pockets of people who are generous with their time and their energy and always willing to give back.  
8. I've come to the conclusion that there aren't any blogs by runners who are in dedicated training, who have small children and also work full-time. That's because it's apparently impossible to do all four of those things (blog about training for something while working and raising children who are very young). It's just impossible and usually the blogging is the first thing to go...sorry! I have tremendous flexibility in *where* and *when* I work, but even so, the baby year is f'in hard. Which brings us to:
9. The blogging 'market'. Perhaps this is the twilight of blogging? Perhaps market consolidation means there are a few big blogs making a ton of money off ads and affiliate links and the rest are just a fun habit/ labour of love? There are a lot of people out there who used to write running blogs that I miss. (Hi, Health on the Run! Jogging Jeano, where'd you go?) 
10. There are some blogs that are still around and update at least semi-regularly: SF Road Warrior, Arkansas Running Mom, How I Complicated My Life Today, A Fast Paced Life, A Healthier Moo, I'm probably missing a few others.
11. For some reason, all of the action seems to have moved to Instagram. Microblogging is technically easier - 1 photo, a few lines...case in point, I'm writing this on my phone and it's freaking hard to add links vs just tagging people on Instagram - but then also: people carefully curate edit filter their pictures, put together a whole essay and paste it in, etc. etc. Or use it to record their training ('today I ran FIVE miles at xx pace!'). There are some runners who are only on Instagram whom I love (hi coach Nicole!), and I appreciate the convenience of conversation/ commenting/ messaging on the platform, but I also enjoy a good hefty blog-length race report. I like reading about the process of training, not just the actual running but also what goes on in your head.
12. But whether online or in real life, fellow runners will always commiserate with you about plantar fasciitis, celebrate a PR with you, and talk about poop.     

Hark! A baby!

Baby bean is here! Well, to be more precise, baby bean is now more than a month old and over 10 lbs (I may have cheated slightly by nursing her before they weighed her). There's nothing stopping me from writing here. She's a sleeper. I'm just lazy!

Her first and middle name mean 'peace' in two languages and she's living up to it, completely unlike her big brother, with whom we stumbled around in a sleep-deprived haze for the first two years. She is a 'trick baby' - tricks its parents into thinking babies are easy. (100% of smug sleep-training guides are written by the parents of trick babies.) I joke that if we'd had her first, the kids would be closer in age...

So, mentally, I could go back to work tomorrow. Emotionally and intellectually, I really enjoy baby snuggles (and catching up on my reading/ TV*, heh) and I know that this is probably going to be the last time I have a teeny tiny infant. Meanwhile, my husband had a couple of weeks off and is working from home. We don't have any family nearby so having him around for non-baby chores is invaluable! Thanks to a flexible, all-but-dissertation grad-student schedule, we spent the last two weeks reconnecting over board games while the baby napped and the big kid was in preschool.

Physically, the last few weeks of pregnancy, I was just DONE. Basically any time I left the house, I was a sweaty, uncomfortable mess, buoyed only by the thought that I couldn't possibly be pregnant forever. Fortunately, labor and delivery were fast  and intense. The day before my due date, we went to the hospital at 8am, and by 3.30pm, voila, baby. Being well-rested and pushing for only 10 minutes has made recovery that much easier - no pee leakage and my pelvic floor, core and legs feel so much stronger than the first time around. The minor trade-off is stretch marks and a squishy middle - I'll take it.

Ironically I am running no miles and eating no ice cream unless it's dairy- and soy-free. Baby bean is sensitive to something in my diet, as per the gas, goopy diapers and blood in stools, and those are the two most common triggers. This makes grocery shopping a challenge and eating out a nightmare. My 3 most helpful tips, via friends:

- Look up Whole30 recipes, as those are free of dairy and soy and generally don't use processed ingredients with soy hiding in them.
- Look for foods labeled parve/ pareve -- under Jewish law, you can't consume meat and dairy together, so these foods (which are 'neutral' & can be eaten with either meat or dairy) definitely don't contain any hidden dairy, you just have to check for hidden soy ingredients.
- Coconut aminos are a decent direct substitute for soy sauce.

it's very kind of him to read to her but 100% of the audience is asleep

What now? I'm itching to run again. Starting again will be slow and frustrating. But I trust that my body knows how to run (been doing this since I was 12) that it'll come back to running when I'm ready (having taken breaks before, first for dance and then for baby 1) and that I'll one day feel stronger and sharper and hungrier for speed than I ever have before (not 'back to the same', but beyond it).

I'll run this fall, of course, but I'm not planning to race till mid or late 2019. I want to enjoy life with two kids, figure out a new routine, and while I'm doing so, figure out how to fit the necessary 'extra salt' (strength, stretching, rolling etc) into my routine. What better time to build in the extra salt from scratch, if my world is going to be turned upside down and rebuilt anyway?


*Reading, TV and boardgames enjoyed:
Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1
The tail end of Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Season 1
Exo, Fonda Lee
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I was Ready, Meghan O'Connell
The Smartest Kids in the World, Amanda Ripley (on the education systems of the best-performing countries)
Let Your Mind Run, Deena Kastor
Educated, Tara Westover
Pandemic: Legacy, Season 1 (boardgame, good for 2 players)

An extremely boring third trimester 'training log'

I'm still here! In case anyone was curious how the last few weeks of pregnancy were playing out...here is a very boring 'training log'. Boring because I have nothing to prove to anyone, running isn't fun for me any more, and I like my pelvic floor too much. Definitely not one of those outliers who runs till the day she gives birth...

I quit running altogether around week 33 (it's hot, I'm unwieldy and uncomfortable, what's the point?), but still walk around to get all my errands done, run after kiddo, do my PT exercises, and swim whenever I can. I used to literally run my errands, but am too uncomfortable to do that any more. So I dusted off the Fitbit and now try to get in my 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day between commuting, errands, and chasing the preschooler around. (On the first day I got it back out, kiddo pinched my Fitbit so we put it on him just for fun. After a few minutes of marching around the room and scrutinising it to watch the step count go up, he forgot it was there. Between the hours of 5pm and bedtime he racked up 2,500 steps!!!)

Dawn patrol. Lots of walks along the river.

6/11 to 6/17
Week 31-32 of pregnancy
Monday - Walk, strength workout
Tuesday - off
Wednesday - Walk, strength workout 
Thursday - Walk to PT, and PT
Friday - PT exercises
Saturday - Watching kiddo's last dance class of the term with my mother-in-law. I'm exhausted just watching him bounce around, does that count?
Sunday - Went strawberry picking, then came home, jogged roughly a mile to the splash pad with kiddo, met up with friends for a picnic lunch, and then shuffling a mile back.

6/18 to 6/24
Weeks 32-33
Monday - pool running, 30 minutes
Tuesday - walk (took kiddo to swim class. Solo parenting evening = on my feet from 5pm to 9pm when he finally goes down. Did I mention I wish he'd drop his nap.)
Wednesday - nothing
Thursday - Did my PT exercises and called it good.
Friday - Walked (lots of errands)
Saturday - PT and kid-chasing
Sunday - nothing

6/25 to 7/1
What? It's July??
Weeks 33-34
Monday - walked parts of my commute
Tuesday - kid swim class and solo parenting till bedtime counts as a workout, surely
Wednesday - nil
Thursday - walked, errands
Friday - ?
Saturday - longish walk
Sunday - ?

7/2 to 7/8
Weeks 34-35
Monday - PT
Tuesday - walk
Wednesday - off. Went to the beach for the 4th of July!
Thursday - walk
Friday - swim!
Saturday - kiddo woke up early so we walked to get coffee and then hit up a neighborhood playground; later we enjoyed some outdoor time at his friend's birthday party
Sunday - off

7/9 to 7/15
Weeks 35-36
Monday - PT and swim
Tuesday - walk
Wednesday - off
Thursday - PT and walk
Friday - walk
Saturday - long walk
Sunday - off

7/16 to 7/22
Weeks 36-37
Monday - PT and Aaptiv maternity workout
Tuesday - walk, errands
Wednesday - Walk. Went to the track to say hi to everyone at Community Running, then proceeded to walk laps while telling people 'I'm doing these sprints all out - what do you mean you can't tell?' :p
Thursday - walk (commute, OB visit, daycare pickup)
Friday - ...nothing?
Saturday - off
Sunday - off. Rainy day. Movies and pyjamas.

Currently reading/ read:
Still reading - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Still reading - James Hamblin, If Our Bodies Could Talk (which is strangely silent on women's bodies so far?...)
Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (I found this delightful)
Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project (on the birth of behavioral economics)
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (now I need to track down all the other books in the series in my library system)
Naomi Alderman, The Power (excellent)
Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell (I didn't like this quite as much as other Lehane books)
plus a bunch of random assorted stuff - mysteries, YA sf/fantasy, etc.  

Cambridge 5K Freedom Run mini-recap: From PR to PW!

The Cambridge 5K Freedom Run: a mini race-recap

The Cambridge 5K Freedom Run last year, if you remember, is the site of my surprise 5K PR. This year, running it 30 weeks pregnant, I knew it was going to be a Personal Worst! But we signed up to hang out with friends, and it's stroller-friendly so all our kiddos could come along for the ride.

On race day (June 3) I woke up still not sure whether I was going to spectate or participate. The weather decided it for me - sunny most of the day and in the 50s/ 60s? Bring it on! We started at the back, with the strollers and the walkers, right where I needed to be to do a 5 minute run/ 1 minute walk ratio. I was definitely running during the run segments, but it was an easy effort - no heroics here.

flag-on? flag-off!

The course starts outside a mall, goes through an office area with lots of biotech companies, then loops back up to Cambridge Street and the residential neighbourhood near the local courthouse. There are maybe four or five turns, a brief climb, and a gradual downhill back to the finish. I can think of worse ways to spend a summer Sunday. I finished with a record personal worst (36:39) and can definitively say the Cambridge 5K race experience is just as pleasant at the back of the pack as it is in the middle (as it should be). I also like to think that my PW this year after my PR last year is throwing a monkey wrench into the 'race cheat investigation' algorithms. ;) 

Kiddo's last single-stroller race!

The afterparty featured a huge range of brews and ciders (sadly, none for me this year, but I did snag a lemonade and a couple cans of cold-brew coffee to take home), but it was loud and a little overwhelming for the stroller set - and my ice cream hopes were dashed! What kind of barbaric summer race doesn't have ice cream or freeze pops at the end?! Otherwise, if you like beer and dancing plus a well-organised race experience, it's worth the money. 

Came in first in the completely unofficial, probably-1-woman '3rd trimester' category. 

Alas, post-race sacroiliac pain bugged me for the next couple of days. I've been getting pregnancy-related SI pain for the last few weeks, and the terrible thing is that I never know when it's going to flare up or how bad it's going to be - sometimes I can walk for miles or run without pain, sometimes I walk a mile and the pain shoots down my leg, and sometimes it doesn't show up until hours *after* the offending workout. This particular flare was bad enough to need a heating pad, and I'm also seeing a physiotherapist. While I'm going to try to run/ pool run as long as I can, I'm pretty positive that's my last race of this pregnancy. I'm stubborn, but not totally crazy...

Logistics: 

Start time: 9.30am

Finishers: roughly 1,800

Parking: LOTS of parking in the Cambridgeside Galleria Mall - so much so that we - ahem - nearly misplaced the car afterward.

Swag: This year's t-shirt (non-gender-specific, rougher material, tight at the collar) was decidedly substandard compared to last year's (gender-specific, soft material, perfect fit). Thumbs down.

After-party: lots of brews and ciders from Notch Brewing, Somerville Brewing, and Bantam Cider. I looove the Bantam Rojo cider, which I tried at the last Cambridge 5K race I did. Also snack samples (chickpea crisps, BarkThins, Rx bars), lemonade, hot dogs, and falafel. BUT NO ICE CREAM WHUT NO.

Registration: came to $46 including taxes and ticket provider fee

Photos: Free on Facebook, but coverage was, uh, spotty. But they're free.

Patience, grasshopper

Pregnancy update: 25 weeks this week, so a little more than half-way, but there's long enough left to be over all the ordinary aches and pains (ugh) and that due date is not soon enough to be all excited or anything. More detailed untraining logs can be found over at Salty Running.

Meanwhile in banal family details, I don't know what daylight savings time changes do to your kid, but mine wakes up earlier regardless of the season. The last two days he's woken up at 5am. One day I took kiddo for a run, and the next day Mr GCA was on duty and I slept in. Seriously, we need to teach the little to read so he can entertain himself quietly until WE are ready to get up. Tiger mom? Try tired mom.

Reunited with an old running buddy. Also, he's lucky he's cute.

A little over a week ago now I got to watch the Boston Marathon. (There are no photos of me doing so because the rain was torrential and my phone was in a ziploc bag and I took it out for only a few seconds at a time, to check with numb and frozen fingers where all my friends were on the tracker app.) I missed half of the people I was tracking, because we were all buried under 325789 layers of extra clothing, but all the friends I was tracking finished! Hats off (rainjackets and handwarmers on) to anyone tough enough to survive that weather.

But I didn't miss this, and I'll never forget it: we were standing almost at mile 25, and then heard ‘Elite women coming!’. The media van came first, then the motorbikes with their flashing lights. I saw Des coming through, and began to lose it, screaming my lungs out. Then, after her… no one. For. A. Long. Time. The seconds ticked by. My friends and I looked at each other. Where’s everyone else? Entire minutes pass. And that’s when we realised she had the win in the bag, and I basically started crying happy tears. And Yuki Kawauchi's win was the icing on the cake: he definitely wasn't in the lead when we saw him go by, but a few minutes later my phone notifications told me he had just pipped Geoffrey Kirui to the finish.

Getting to watch Boston is awfully inspiring for most everyone, and like many people, I'd love to qualify and run it someday. But between pregnancy and postpartum recovery (not to mention adjusting to a new routine in family and professional life) I literally don't know when I'm going to run another marathon again, let alone go after long-term sub-4 or BQ goals.

I mean, realistically? Nothing athletic has ever come easily to me. I'm not one of those superwomen you're going to see running through third trimester. In fact, I'm barely running right now, and there's still almost half an entire pregnancy to go, plus however long recovery takes! My body needs the break, even if my mind is raring to go. Obviously, I know I'm doing this now because we definitely want a second kid and racing will always be there when I'm ready. But I'll be honest - the enforced break is a little frustrating and I'm envious of anyone who can train to race right now.

But then I remember how long that first year of new parenthood felt. And how I actually got faster after that year than ever before, despite sleep deprivation, a new job, and imperfect and slipshod training. And the high of setting two half PRs and a gigantic, 35-minute marathon PR in the second and third years of parenthood. And that's fuel for the tiny spark of hope that I can do it all again.

Which brings us right back to Des and the marathon. She's the patron saint of the pluggers, the people who keep showing up, whose very showing up day after day reinforces bit by bit their confidence and tenacity. It's the fairytale for those of us who have nothing else but the belief that if we keep looking where we want to go, eventually we'll go where we look.

Some literal, actual navel-gazing

Generally, under normal circumstances, there are only 3 people on earth who are interested in the contents of my internal organs: me, my husband (if he happened to cook dinner), and my primary care doctor.

However, get yourself one of these, and suddenly n > 3 people are a little bit more interested.

Tiny human #2 has intra-uterine dance party. Don't worry if you can't make out him/ her clearly. On normal ultrasounds the tech has to be like HERE ARE FEET, THIS IS THE HEAD. 

Once again I'm training to grow a wee human. (It's dead obvious to anyone Strava-stalking me: lots of run/ incline walk treadmill workouts, most of my jaunts were 2-4 miles tops for several weeks during the 'feeling like ass' phase of first trimester, my 'long' runs shrivelled to 5 miles...) People keep asking me "how do you feel?" Uh, I'm a parent, tired is my default state. So I've been going with the 'a little something each day' plan: a bit of movement every day, whether that's 20 minutes of treadmill walk, a group track workout, or a few sets of MYRTLs and 15 minutes of stretching. Instagram SuperHeroMotherRunner I am not. Right now, at this stage, I finally feel about ready to kick my long runs back up to over an hour, but the weather hasn't been cooperating and I have zero desire to treadmill for >1h.

Here is a gratuitous picture of small human #1 for good measure, from a year ago when he insisted on calling a CD an "ABCD", which is still one of my favourite language mistakes ever, right up there with 'heligoggy' for 'helicopter'. (Side note: why do children's books still come with CDs? On what antique devices are we expected to play them?)

Anyway, yes...tiny human.... I realise that in itself sounds like another cliche: girl achieves great big huge marathon PR (see: Baystate), girl eases off training, girl celebrates, girl gets knocked up. After Baystate in October, apparently my body was like 'What? You're not running 50 miles a week? DEVOTE ALL THE RESOURCES TO EGGS!'

It all happened so rapidly that at least one person asked me (kindly) if it was planned. (Answer: yes. I take a year and a half to plan for a single marathon, we definitely planned this tiny human.) We were just very, very lucky. Under absolutely ideal circumstances there's like a 1 in 4 chance each cycle, so I was psychologically prepared for it to take half a year, if not more. And, knowing other people who have struggled so hard with fertility, I am very, very grateful (& also wish someone would record this data point re: running, BMI and fertility for a fuller picture). We decided to just go for it, like the crazy people we are (because daycare x2 + 1.5 incomes + 1 bedroom apartment = pretty certifiable, even if temporary).

But your racing fitness! 

Anyway, I'm not the only one to have the thought go through my head: what's the point of working my way back to full racing fitness and building up all that motivation and confidence only to essentially chuck it aside again for about a year and a half? Between 2014 and 2017, I ran a scant handful of races (but oh I was so much more SRSBZNS about each one). It took me a year (tbh, partly physical conditioning, partly milk-supply-related anxiety) to work my way back to the point where I could happily finish a half marathon. I didn't run a marathon for three years. Why, after having achieved this level of fitness, would I want to 'throw it all away' again?

The truth is, folks, I'm playing a long game. I'm not on anybody's timeline but my own: I'm not training to qualify for the Olympic Trials, or even BQ (and heck, you bet I will take that age advantage, because #squeakerlife!). I'm not in any hurry. Racing and all its joys will be there when I'm ready. The tremendous advantage of being a mediocre (lazy) hobby-jogger is: There is no pressure. I can always improve some more. Heck, I have a friend who still sets PRs. In her 50s. Don't talk to me about over the hill; we runners eat hill repeats for breakfast.

Plus, I really like the kid I do have. Sure, I didn't sleep and existed in a rage-filled haze for a year and a half of my life, but for someone who was so demanding and angry at night, he sure is a sunshine child in the daytime. (Said a friend who just had her second: I forget, how do you get them to sleep? I looked at her blankly. Don't look at me, I don't know.) Sure, sometimes it's a PITA to wrangle everything, toddler clothing and snacks and all, for a 30min stroller run; but the look on his face when we pass a train, or various species of truck! And it is honestly fun to run at top (stroller) speed while pretending to be a spaceship or bellowing variations on Old MacDonald Had A Farm ('and on that farm there were...uh...some stegosaurs') with nary a worry about what other runners think.

I never really thought of myself as a 'kid person' and am still not a 'tiny infant' person; other people's children are cute and entertaining for a while and all that, but MY CHILDREN, oh, they are delightful. (YMMV. I obviously do not think this sentiment is universal.) Small #1 sometimes still insists on falling asleep with his hand on my arm or tummy, looking at me like 'duh, mom, you do not have bodily autonomy, you are an extension of me'. (In breaking science news, well crumbs, I *am* actually an extension of him. Who knew.)

In the meantime, I run because it allows me to be me. Not worker bee, not mama bear, not meal-planner-and-dinosaur-toy-imagineer-in-chief, just Runner Me. In another life this touchstone for my identity was dance. (Also mediocre hobby dancer, thank you very much.)

Comeback lessons from being a working mother 

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend who's expecting her first kid around the same time; having run at a pretty high level before, she expressed concern that she'd have to give it all up after kids and never regain the same level of performance. Well...sort of. Sometimes there are serious physical complications and medical considerations that force women to cut back on running - but otherwise, barring those, no.

Here's a parallel. Remember when women used to leave the workforce completely after having children? This anecdote from superstar MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins reveals what it was like to be a working woman in the 1960s and 70s, and the kind of internalised biases one had:

"The science drew me to Jim’s lab every available moment.
I lived in a state of euphoric scientific excitement. Jim
told me repeatedly I should be a scientist. I knew I couldn’t
live without this science, but how could I be like these men?
Even postdocs had wives who stayed home to care for their
children while the men put in 70-hour weeks at the lab. Who
would care for my children? I knew I would have to give up
science before I had children: in the era before amniocentesis,
that meant before the age of 30. So I made a plan: do
the most exciting science possible as fast as you can, hope
you do a Nobel Prize–winning experiment before the age of
30, then retire and be a wife and mother."

  - (Source)

These days, that sounds pretty preposterous. It's no longer assumed that women have babies and leave the workforce, or that no one else will take care of their kids. In our generation, most women (and a growing number of men, but I refer to women because that's who typically bears the physical burden of being pregnant and going through labour/ postpartum everything) recognise that whether we want to return to work or not, we have real choices that are ours to consciously make. The support systems aren't perfect, and in the US much, much more could be done to make them affordable for the average family, but the choice is bound not by physical factors but social ones.

There's a bit of a parallel there with running, though of course the physical aspect is more important. It's a new world. Even pro athletes are in basically uncharted territory - look at Paula Radcliffe, who won the New York City Marathon in 2008 after having a baby in 2007, or Jo Pavey, five-time GB Olympian (hmm...is there something about the UK support system that helps distance runners more? Makes you think, especially about the long-term future of the current crop of up and coming US women runners. HMMM. HEY.) Or in non-running sports, look at Serena Williams, fighting her way back to the WTA circuit. 

And just like it takes time and patience and hard work to ease back into work after maternity leave, it takes time and patience and hard work (and planning and physical conditioning) to ease back into running. (I'm talking about average-hobby-jogging here, not Olympic-qualifying, and really the audience here is that segment of people who started running well before babies were a twinkle in their eye, not so much the segment who took it up after kids because then that's two different kinds of uncharted and unfamiliar territory and you have no pre-existing mental standards by which you judge yourself anyway.) Most people don't hit the office at full speed after two months of sleep deprivation and talking to themselves; you wouldn't hit the track at full speed either. And maybe you won't be able to throw yourself into 70-hour work weeks, but damn if you don't get more efficient with your 40 hours. It all takes deliberate and conscious effort, and MacGyvering yourself an adequate support system. There's floundering. Mistakes will be made. It gets messy. And sometimes expensive, and not within everyone's financial reach. But maybe, just maybe, it's possible. (So Rachel, if you're reading this, don't lean out just yet!)