It started as a mere snicker. A tee hee that morphed into the kind of laughter that suggests a Depends might be in someone’s future. And it was coming from the backseat.
I should have kept my mouth shut. Since I’m not known for that, I naively asked, “What’s so funny?” Little did I know it was me.
“Mom,” Older Boy said, in between spasms of laughter, “have you SEEN your arm?”
I then asked stupid question number two. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It sort of just hangs there,” Older Boy said poking it. “You have, like, an arm goiter.”
Younger Boy chimed in. “It’s like tether ball,” he said. “Let’s smack it and see how many times it goes around!”
Charming.
Now I will admit I’ve been lax in my fitness efforts. After getting a brand spanking new resurfaced hip last year, I babied it. I pampered it so much it wouldn’t have been surprising to see me wheeling it around town in a Bugaboo Stroller singing it lullabies.
Actually, I was terrified to use it. And I was under strict orders not to. Not by the doctor but by The Husband. “If I ever see you running again I’ll tackle you,” he told me. But what’s the point of having a new hip if you’re not going to use it?
Since Older Boy took up running, I’ve been a little antsy to lace up my shoes again. But I knew it would have to be on the sly and I’d have to fake a hot flash if busted. I looked forward to everything about running again but one thing: starting over.
It would be just like the day I joined the running craze of the early 1980s. Armed with my copy of The Diet Pepsi Guide to Running, I was twenty-one and ready. The book covered all aspects of becoming road ready – eat plenty of carbs, fat grams are your sworn enemy and hydrate with plenty of, you guessed it, Diet Pepsi. I laced up my pristine white Nikes with a red swoosh and opened the book to the training schedule: Day 1: 3 minutes. Surely that was a mistake. Only three minutes? That was the dumbest thing I could imagine if I wanted to be a Real Runner. I was going to Really Run, for a Really Long Time. And I took off down the street like Usain Bolt.
It was the first and last time that I ever ran that fast.
Two minutes and forty-seven seconds later I was lying on my back in the front yard red-faced and gasping. But I got my first taste of those brain tingling endorphins – the runner’s high. And I was hooked.
Then I got up the nerve to enter my first race. And I was slow. Really slow. A three-legged dog beat me. Old folks outside Dosker Manor Nursing Home offered me hits off their oxygen. They were rolling up the chutes when I got to the finish.
One race under my running shorts, I decided my goal was to run a marathon before I was impossibly old at forty. I beat my self-imposed deadline (the only thing I’ve ever beaten) by a mere three weeks.
At thirty-nine, I was trying to outrun what I thought was the first mile marker for middle-age. At forty-eight, it’s a lot more complicated because now I’m trying to outrun arm goiters, a meno-pot and the occasional hot flash.
But I’m going for it.
It won’t be pretty. It won’t be fast. But I don’t care; I’m gonna kick some asphalt anyway. At least until I get cold-cocked by my arm goiter.
These running socks were apparently designed by and for the peri-menopausal woman.
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