The years I don’t go, it feels like I’m missing a party. I get texts and emails and photos in the weeks and days before the race. I get invitations to gatherings and receptions. I feel left out. And then, on race day, I sit at the computer and look up bib numbers. I read [...]
How I Like My Eggs
February 8, 2013 By 11 Comments
There are a few good reasons to watch the 1999 movie, The Runaway Bride. They are: Julia Roberts’ laugh, Richard Gere’s hair, and the bit about the eggs. The movie is about a woman who molds herself into whatever and whoever the man she’s currently with wants her to be. She eats eggs the way [...]
My Year as a Fifty-Year-Old Sponsored Athlete
December 12, 2012 By 10 Comments
Used to be, I was the youngster. I scrambled up the professional career ladder of scholarly publishing so fast that I often had a hard time getting people to believe that yes, I really was an editor from Oxford University Press, not a graduate student. I had to devise ways to make sure that wait [...]
Verklempt at the Races
October 22, 2012 By 6 Comments
When I worked in college admissions, one of the most damning things we could say about a student was that he had the “Ds”: determined, diligent, dedicated. Students with the Ds get the work done. They don’t slack off, they tend not to complain, they’re the little workhorses of their class. So what was the [...]
My Best Running Buddy
August 17, 2012 By 7 Comments
On the rare occasions we run together, it’s generally only for a few miles. She will urge me on ahead or turn around before I’m ready to go back. During our too-infrequent visits, she will wake and run early in the morning, come home to find me still logy from sleep and foraging through her [...]
Nine Titles Thinking About Title IX
July 6, 2012 By 2 Comments
Because I never played sports, because I went with my feminist mother to 1970s rallies and women’s groups, because I attended a fancy-pants college on financial aid and wanted to believe that the world was fair and meritocratic, and because I was naïve and narcissistic, I hadn’t thought about how or if Title IX affected [...]
Falling
June 3, 2012 By 13 Comments
I am running uphill, not fast, having a conversation in my head with him, wishing I had said the same things but differently, wishing I hadn’t seen the hurt land on his face like that, wishing I had more tact, less candor; wishing for restraint, for subtlety, for the ability to blind myself to the [...]
Clothes, Fast and Slow
April 17, 2012 By 4 Comments
A while ago I went on a few dates with a retired professional baseball player. I met him while I was soaking my legs in an icy river after a long run. There were a couple of young guys near me, fishing in a half-hearted way, and we started chatting. Turns out they were rookie-league [...]
Food Fights
March 9, 2012 By 16 Comments
Détente. That’s the best I can do. I will never say that I am “at peace” with my body. But after decades of different kinds of war—cold, guerilla, civil—there’s an easing of strained relations, a relaxation in the level of tension. There are no visible battlegrounds, no fields of carnage, no memorials, even to the [...]
Horses and Dogs and Sports, Oh My!
February 22, 2012 By 9 Comments
When you participate in a niche sport, you can expect to unearth a small cadre of hardcore participants. Because more is sometimes better, especially when it comes to competition, and because enthusiasm likes to spread, people involved in fringier endeavors tend to proselytize, to seek to bring new members into their fold. Unlike with professional [...]
