Running Like a Girl Read Online Free Page A

shoes clip the edge of the pavement if one shimmered through the park. I would feel my stride become irregular if I heard one approaching from behind. After a while, I began to realize that no one was watching . Everyone was ultimately more interested in themselves, their children, or their mobile phones. As I discovered when I started trying to smile at approaching runners, quite a few were so tired that they weren’t focusing on anything at all.
    It amazes me now that I kept leaving the house for those crucial early expeditions, particularly as any potential rewards seemed so far away. I tried whatever I could to maintain momentum, even though I had no real idea what I was doing. I was too proud to ask for advice, lest I give away how much Icared. Google became my friend, and I found myself talking online to novice runners on the other side of the country about where specifically their ankles were hurting. I walked and ran, I ran in tiny bursts, I ran after dark when the sidewalks were emptier. I downloaded podcast after podcast so I could pretend I was doing research for work while I stomped along in my own sweaty world. I kept going, I kept going, I kept going.
    After two or three weeks of doggedly jogging around northwest London, I stood on my dusty bathroom scale. “Oh, I never weigh myself! You can’t quantify what I am in pounds or ounces!” I remembered telling my mother and sister with a flourish the previous Christmas.
    I looked down at my feet and saw that I had shed a few pounds. Later that week, during an idle moment queuing in my local supermarket, I picked up a two-pound bag of potatoes from my shopping cart and let its heft sag in my hands. I had already lost the equivalent of one of those. I imagined the bag strapped round my hips and pictured myself trying to run like that. No wonder half an hour of running felt easier; there was simply less me to carry around. Running began to slide, slowly but surely, from a torment to a joy.
    What I didn’t know on those early runs—the ones where even my face seemed to hurt when I got home—was that I wasn’t lily-livered or weak-willed. Nor was I biomechanically unable to run. I was, in fact, “going lactic.” As we run, oxygen is constantly being flushed through our bodies, but when there is a shortage of oxygen, the body goes into an anaerobic state and creates lactic acid. The buildup can remain in our muscles, creating that charming run-over-by-a-truck sensation. It stings, it burns, it makes you hurt from your fingernails to the roots of your hair. I had no idea what pace I should be going when Istarted out. My goal was simply not to die before the end. As a result, I burned myself out by going anaerobic before properly warming up. For weeks I suspected I was able to run for only ten minutes. I would belt out the distance as fast as I could, determined not to walk. When I got home, I’d collapse and descend into existential torment.
    I want to weep when I think of the number of women who head round the block only to return twelve minutes later, broken and tearful. I don’t doubt that when these women meet me and hear that I have run five marathons, they want to weep for me as well. I suspect that they believe all runs, forever, are as crippling as those first few; that’s certainly what I thought. They are not. If only someone had told me sooner.
    Except someone had told me sooner: my father. Though it had been his calm acceptance that I could run a marathon that gave me the courage to apply for a place, I had become reluctant to let him in on the mission. That may have been on account of his great eagerness to help. The minute places were secured for me and my brother, our dad offered his thoughts about training plans, anaerobic exercise, and the importance of stretching parts of the body that I’d never heard of. Little of this meant anything to me. While my brother seemed to absorb the basics of the science