Post Glen Arbor solstice run, feeling happy with endorphins, the scenic overlook and a Leelanau Coffee Roasters coffee in the car waiting for me.

Over many months of slowly getting back to some moderate level of fitness, post-stress fracture, my mantra has been “trust the process”. It’s discouraging and it doesn’t feel good to fight your way back but if you put the time and the miles in, check the boxes, et cetera, at some point it will pay off and you will begin to see some results. To that end, I did the Glen Arbor Solstice 5k two weeks ago and the Tri Goddess Tri duathlon this past weekend, and although my training runs are the same plodding exercises in sweat, fatigue, and irritation as they’ve been for the past year, my event results are starting to get back in line. In fact, I took 50 seconds off my Solstice time from last year, so I approached my duathlon with a bit more confidence than I might have otherwise.

The Tri Goddess Tri is a cool event for several reasons. It’s all female, and feels like a safe environment to ‘tri’ different events (see what I did there?). There’s a sprint tri, a mini tri, and a duathlon and you don’t have to worry that some overly competitive dude bro is going to trample over you in transition reeking of Axe deodorant and testosterone. They move a lot of participants – 500 – around the different events in a pretty organized fashion, the organizers and volunteers are enthusiastic, and the venue is great. Portage Lake / Waterloo recreation area is a beautiful wooded park and on Tri Sunday it booms with music and activity. It’s the kind of event where you pass someone and the person you pass tells you what a great job you are doing and to keep it up. Also, the swag is nice – a nifty finisher medal and a cute t-shirt. (It’s nice to get a stylish race shirt for a change, as I’ve become accustomed to ill-fitting cotton ones that I end up hacking the sleeves & collar off for lawn mowing and pajama purposes.)

The downside, of course, is that there’s a lot of rah-rah and you have to deal with skinny immaculate Real Housewife-looking women calling you ‘Goddess’ all day. “GO GODDESS!” “GODDESSES TO THE STARTING LINE!” They could maybe ease back on THAT throttle a tiny bit.

I hadn’t really planned on the du, but I remembered a week or so ago that I’d actually registered last year, but deferred it. Frugality fought with competitive spirit and my innate cheapness won. Not wanting to waste my already-paid fee, I activated the registration and asked Jax if I could borrow his daughter’s bike. My bike is an ancient Specialized trail monster from the mid-’90’s Stump Jumper / Rock Hopper genre and although it’s fine for tooling around town occasionally, it is not roadworthy. Unfortunately, the bike I borrowed wasn’t a lot better. And I hadn’t been on a bike for months. Still, I thought, how bad could it be?

Jax brought Miss L to see me compete and although I couldn’t find them in the fringe of spectators at the start line, a few seconds into the first leg I heard Miss L yelling “MAMA!!!” and I got a quick glimpse of her on the sidelines. It put the heart into me. I’ve never really been the type to care one way or the other if people come out to watch me do an event. I tend to be of the opinion that my family can see me red-faced and sweaty after any of my other runs, so why should they get out of bed to see it? However, it was undeniably amazing to know that I had a cheering section. Coming into transition, knowing they were at the finish line, gave me such a surge of positive endorphins.

The first run – a mile and a half – was mostly trail, which I am unused to. Still, I finished solidly with a decent pace and was among the first handful into transition. My hubris caught up with me during the 11 mile ride. The borrowed bike was about what you would expect for being owned by a twelve year old. The tires were full, but that’s about it. I never figured out the gears, which went crashing through their paces and sent the chain clicking loudly. I was passed by no fewer than twenty women, all gliding along on very expensive road bikes, and by the time I came back to transition, my legs were dead. You might think this is an exaggeration but unless you’ve extensively trained for it, nothing can really prepare you for how strange it is to try to run after a long bike ride. I took the first few steps out of transition and had a bad moment where my right leg twitched and simply would not move the direction that I told it to.  Although I was smiling when I passed Jax and Miss L, I was struggling on wobbly, unresponsive pins. “You’ve got a lot of people to pass,” Jax the Motivator yelled. He is one of those people who can display staggering honesty at undesirable times and then seem very surprised at the results, bless his heart.

Fortunately for him, I had bigger fish to fry, so I suppressed a snarling expletive and staggered on at a slightly brisker pace up the long gradual uphill out of the park, and I felt every step and every breath. Then a quick stretch on the road, with a blessed aid station where I stopped to chug some Gatorade – I was parched and hadn’t thought to leave a water bottle on my bike or in transition. I wasn’t sure I could get my legs working again and a sweaty 26-year old and I eyed each other warily (I knew everyone’s ages because the organizers insisted on writing them upon us in thick black marker.) Neither of us wanted to take the first step away from the Gatorade, but eventually I realized I was only going to beat her if I started running again. So I plunged back into the woods, onto the winding trails, up and downhill, and focused on the churning legs of the women in front of me. There’s a 52-year old! Whoop – I can pass a 39-year old! And me 43 and all.It’s petty and shallow but in the depths of human misery, odd things keep you going.

My legs regained some semblance of normal motion. I was passed myself by someone going like a bat out of hell, glistening with sweat on her muscled back, and for awhile was all alone on the trail with just the sound of the woods. Then I could hear the music and the announcer; I managed to pass one more goddess before the last lap to the finish where I reunited with my cheering section. Miss L promptly took possession of my race medal and plundered the snacks for the finishers.

I would do the du (haha) again, but not with a sub par bike. My runs were solid and I think I could have placed in my age group if my bike leg hadn’t been so dismal. But, I told Jax, I’m a runner, not a biker, so I’m not going to spend a lot of money on an expensive bike for one duathlon a year. Still, I’m glad I participated, and feel like I’m slowly starting to come back.

I got home from Mexico exhausted and my little one was ill with a stubborn tummy bug; there was lots of cuddling on the couch together for a few days, and it was Tuesday before I got out for a run.

I still haven’t given up on the thought of a June half marathon, but getting my base established and scheduling the long runs is getting increasingly difficult with travel and weekend plans. A couple of weeks ago, I ran with a girlfriend who used to be a solid minute per mile slower than me; this time, though, I was gasping to keep up with her. She yammered happily away and I wheezed.

These things worry me and when I see happy selfies and blog posts from committed runners, I’m tempted to feel bad about myself. Like if I’m not running at the top of my form, if I’m not keeping up, if I can’t run my best then I shouldn’t be running at all. It’s surprising to realize that this used to be my running philosophy and how I measured myself as a runner! All or nothing.

The Tuesday run reminded me of why I run and why I keep coming back to it. The timing wasn’t perfect – it was fit in during my lunch hour. There wasn’t a watch or music or stretching. The sky was blue and the sun was warm and it was spring. I didn’t run fast and I didn’t run all four miles without stopping. But there were red-winged blackbirds in the reeds and my running shoes made satisfying sounds in the damp sand and gravel at the road shoulder. There were tracks in the mud, deer and ducks, and I wound my way the mile and a half or so to the nearby University Botanical Gardens and in a few minutes was all alone with myself in the sunny meadows and woods. The trail went alongside the brown river and I stopped sometimes to look at things; the purple blossoms in the trees, a pile of glossy feathers from an unlucky duck.

My legs felt strong and I blew my nose in my shirt and was happy to be outside and alone and running, with hawks soaring high above me. I came back to the office bedraggled and blown out and perfectly happy to shower quickly, change back into my work clothes like a costume, and sit at my desk like anyone else, like a superhero in disguise, like a real runner – whatever that is.

This morning, I rolled out of bed and donned my new purple running shorts, and rode my bike down to the park. I had my wireless headphones and my Garmin charged, my brand new Amphipod belt to hold my phone and my bike lock key, and I felt that I was pretty adequately hydrated.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a 4-mile “Fun Run” locally and had the life sucked out of me. I was tired, I hadn’t fueled properly, hadn’t hydrated well. I still finished with a 3rd place age group but I was horribly disappointed with my pace and it was actually the first race that I’d ever walked partway. I walked through the drink stations and I couldn’t even hit the finish line strong.

It’s taken me a long time to come back from my stress fracture and in many ways, that injury reset me as a runner. I thought that once it was healed, I would go back to the same level of running as I’d been at before I was injured, but that’s not the case. I am a slower runner now. Maybe the speed will come back, maybe it won’t. Honestly, I don’t care much, because I feel like I am a smarter, happier runner.

I plan my miles now on a spreadsheet, and I cross-train with spinning and light weight work. I am trying tempo and interval training runs, and I’m not using running as a weight management technique, the way I did a couple of years ago. In fact, I’m the heaviest I’ve been since Miss L was born, but I’m also probably the healthiest, too, and definitely the happiest. I used to flog myself during my runs, constantly looking at my Garmin and pushing for pace, to the point that I’d feel angry at myself if I couldn’t hit the arbitrary goals I set for myself. If I walked during a training run, it ruined the run for me, and I never would have considered walking during a race. All of my PR’s in 5k, 10k, and half were set in 2013. But at the end of that year, I was injured, and 2014 was a write-off because of that.

This morning’s 10k was the Farmington Run for the Hills, a local event benefitting Special Olympics, and the first stop on my half-marathon training. It is a hilly, hot course through the neighborhoods and when I say hilly, I mean hilly. Every time you think you’ve seen the last hill, there is another one, with the last one about a mile from the finish line. It was a slow, hot slog. I had technical difficulties with my running playlist, which shut itself off after a U2 song that I had no recollection of putting on there to begin with (thanks Apple). I remembered various aspects of it from when I ran it two years ago – the dirt hill, the killer hill, the long slow incline, turning off onto the grass before the homestretch, the sun in my eyes. Two years ago, I PR’d the course. Today, I ran it five minutes slower than that PR.

But I learned the lessons from the Bataan Death March Fun Run.

Yes, I walked. I walked several times through the drink stations and made sure I was hydrating. I haven’t run 6 miles since my injury – the longest up til this morning was 5. So I made sure that I wasn’t pushing myself so hard that I felt sick, the way I did two years ago. I could have pushed myself more – I knew that when I was able to ride my bike home and didn’t feel sore or weak or whipped. I could conversationally thank all the volunteers I ran past, and if I’d been pushing myself, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed them. But I remember volunteering at a race last year and feeling so pleased when a runner thanked me, I think I will always try to do that from now on.

I could be disappointed that I didn’t PR or break that magical pace mark per mile that makes me feel great about myself. In a couple of weeks I’ll do the Kensington Challenge 9-mile, which is the second stop on half-marathon training. A lot of my training this late summer / early fall will have to be done on the treadmill, and I have no plans to PR in October when I head up to Empire. But I’m okay now being a pretty average runner and feeling cheerful about that because for me, being an average runner means being a happy and healthy and uninjured runner (hopefully).