Handing Over the Baton

I’ve been a runner for most of my life. I started running in high school and never looked back. I married a runner that I met on my college team. I ran a few marathons, and stopped running on and off to have children. Four of them, to be exact, including a set of twins, who collectively drive me to continue running. My eldest is now 10, and has just started running. This is not the kind of thing you want to push your kid into and burn him out at an early age, but I’m not gonna lie. I couldn’t be more thrilled. I hope he becomes a lifelong runner, and develops a love for the sport. I’m faster than him now, but I know it will only last a little while longer. I go on short runs with him, and my husband and I have taken him to a few 5Ks. He’s still at the point where he PRs every race. He goes to track workouts on Tuesday nights, and people know his name. He’s the youngest person there by well over a decade- and I’m being generous. He uses his new running watch that he got for Christmas to time his intervals, running them faster and faster until he decides he’s done.

I listen to him list the other sports that he could play- ones that involve balls you have to chase and tussle with others to get, sports where you should be tall, sports where you should be huge, and sports where the ability to perform coordinated lateral movements is the key to success. He sighs as he lists these other sports, and gives reasons why they’re not the best fit for him. “I might as well just run, Mom. I guess it’s a good thing I like it.”

Sometimes in the kitchen he gets twitchy, and dances around while I’m trying to get dinner ready. He picks up things, plays with them, puts them back down. Over and over, until I exasperatedly send him downstairs to the treadmill to run until he is tired so he will stop bothering me. Before he really started running, he’d run a mile and that would be enough. But as he gets into better and better shape, his lack of tolerance for the monotony of the treadmill tends to drive him back upstairs before he’s tired. So now my kitchen problem is back and dinner takes a little longer to get on the table, but it’s worth it for the little running quips he doles out when he’s in the right mood.

“Mom, I think I hit my breaking point today during my run.” He sounds a little too exhilarated for someone who had just hit his breaking point, so I question him further, and he says, “You know, when you get to that point where you feel like you could just run and run forever? Isn’t that the breaking point?” Um. No, honey, I think that’s a runner’s high. The breaking point is something a little different.

I took him to a cross country practice with a local youth cross country team once his soccer season was over. These kids had been running all season, while he had been playing soccer. They were seasoned racers, some super speedy, some just regular kids, and they just had a few big meets left before it was over and everyone would retreat to the slopes or just their warm houses to wait it out until track started. They ran 4-5 miles that day, including a timed interval workout. He had never run that far in his life, but afterwards, he said to me, “Mom! Can I do this instead of soccer next fall? This is great! You don’t have to chase a ball around. All you have to do is run. It’s so much easier!” I didn’t think his former soccer teammates would have agreed, but I told him, “Sure.” I kept my tone casual, as if it was no more or less significant than him needing a new pair of socks. I also told him that he could go to all the rest of the practices that season, if he wanted to. A smile started to tug at the corner of his mouth. I kept my eyes on the road, as I know he will be doing in the decades to come as his feet, which are almost as big as mine, pound the pavement.