There are several gift-giving guides for children available this time of year, but don’t forget the special woman in your life who considers hot pink Asics her number one fashion statement. Here are the gifts the running mom in your life really wants.

Noise-isolating earphones. After listening to a never-ending chorus of “Mommy? Mommy! Mooooommy. MOMMY!” for hours on end every day, we don’t want to hear anything except Rihanna’s newest mix or maybe some Iron Maiden while we run. We don’t want to hear the neighbourhood dog, we definitely don’t want to hear your kid if we don’t have to listen to our own, and we’re even negotiable on hearing someone sneaking up behind us in the event they want to take us to a quiet place.

A good sports bra. Mother Nature is a cruel, cruel beast. You’d think she’d take it easy because she’s one of us, but unfortunately she changes everything after a woman gives birth. Everything. And there’s nothing more disheartening than realizing that sound you hear 2k into your run is not your feet hitting the pavement, but rather your once perky assets slapping against your ribcage.

Wine. Also known as liquid motivation. We might not be super-eager to run home to the chaos we left behind, but you can bet the promise of a glass of malbec will put a spring in our step and keep us going until the end.

A running shirt. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy or special. It just needs to be there as back-up in the very likely event the one we’re wearing gets puked on or a massive snot ball rubbed on it before we can make it to the front step.

A banana. Chances are we were saving the last one in the house as a pre-run snack, but cut it up for our three-year old instead. Chances are even greater said child didn’t eat it, but made sure to stick it in their ear or up their nose so we couldn’t either.

Running tights and/or Body Glide. Sometimes when we find the time or actually remember to shave/wax our legs, we get motivated to put on a cute pair of shorts or a running skirt. And then after a few kilometers we remember the reason we stopped wearing them in the first place is that our thighs are aiming to earn a Girl Scouts badge by trying to start a fire in a very primitive way.

A nap. If there’s anything that kills motivation faster than discovering a Gilmore Girls marathon on TV, it’s exhaustion. And if your spouse/daughter/friend is a mom, there’s a 98% chance she’s tired. The other two per cent who say they aren’t are lying or heavy drinkers and the alcohol has numbed their senses.

By: Magi Scallion

Many Canadian runners have a love-hate relationship with winter… or maybe just a hate relationship. It’s a tough time of year with shorter days, colder temperatures, and poor running conditions on the whole. My strategy has always been to participate in a winter sport and to look for beautifully sunny winter destinations. It also helps that I do primarily contract work so I can switch my hours of work to early mornings and evenings so that I can exercise and be outside during the sunny part of the day.

This week I’m visiting one of my favourite winter destinations. Silver Star mountain in Vernon, BC is a great place to visit if the winter blahs are getting you down. First and foremost the cross-country skiing is excellent (more than 100 km of groomed trails) and the downhill skiing is pretty good as well. The ski village is also very charming: the houses are all painted in bright colours and walking is the primary mode of transportation.

There is a delicious coffee shop / bakery in the village, at which I spend a lot of my time. The coffee is good and the baked treats (croissants, cookies and more) are absolutely mouth watering. It’s a great place to enjoy lunch or an afternoon snack after a good morning of skiing. We normally stay in vacation rental homes with hot tubs while on the mountain… and hot tubs are not hard to find. There is not much so nice as sitting outside in a hot tub while snow falls in the evening.

Finally, the resort is high above Vernon, and normally high above the clouds. It’s really lovely to feel the sun on your face while looking down the mountain at a layer of clouds. We all need a little bit more Vitamin D in the winter.

I highly recommend Silver Star as a winter destination – whether you’re a cross-country skier, aspiring skier, alpine skier or pure runner. I’m sure you’ll find it a relaxing and cheery break during the long winter months.

***

Born in Nova Scotia and emigrating to British Columbia via Ontario and Alberta, Magi has been running the entire way. Primarily defined as a cross country ski racer, Magi has competed nationally and internationally in that sport. The highlight of her career was competing in the World University Games and the World Cup races in Canada in 2007. Cross country skiers rely heavily on running for cross training and Magi has become an accomplished trail and mountain runner, representing Canada at the World Mountain Running Championships in 2005 and the winning numerous national championships medals.

Today Magi runs for fun… and it’s a lot of fun! Epic mountain runs, city cruises with friends, and more keep her happy and occupied outside of work and school.

I went for a run Tuesday night. I wasn’t really into it. A stomach virus made its way through our house over the weekend and I was still trying to make up for lost sleep. I’m also pretty sure the smell of vomit lingered under my fingernails.

However there was something else that pushed me out the door, a far stronger motivation than even the need to escape my germ-infested home: the Victoria’s Secret fashion show was airing on television that night. I suppose there was a part of me that hoped by getting in my exercise for the day, I’d miraculously develop Alessandra Ambrosio’s abs or actual space between my thighs like Miranda Kerr. I’d probably have had to run further than 5k to even enter that stratosphere. Like non-stop. Until next summer.

The show always features a warning for parents with small children. I propose the following addendum to next year’s broadcast:

“Warning: the following broadcast may contain content that is inappropriate for women who have or plan to have children. Self-loathing may occur. Husband/Partner discretion is advised.”

It really doesn’t help matters that Alessandra, Adriana Lima and Lily Alridge, all who participated in the show, had babies in the past year. In fact, Adriana popped hers out a mere eight weeks before taping the show. Fortunately she didn’t pretend she got her body back solely from breastfeeding the way every celebrity mom claims to. Memo to those women: WE AREN’T STUPID AND WE’RE NOT BUYING IT. Many of us have also breastfed and our babies have not sucked the fat from our midsection to reveal six-pack abs underneath. Nursing means little ones drink milk your body produces. They are not tiny little lipsosuction machines (unless a lipsosuction machine also pukes in your hair three minutes after finishing).

Instead, Adriana revealed the tough (read: insane) regimen it took to have her looking like this when she walked the catwalk.

Six hours of working out a day, seven days a week. Unfortunately no one is paying me hundreds of thousands of dollars to run (let me know if you want to though), so my dream of strutting in lingerie for network television remains elusive for now. I may not have the bank account with millions of dollars and abs you could grate cheese on, but I went for my 5k, breathed in cold, fresh air, admired the Christmas lights in the neighbourhood and watched the fashion show with the one thing I have that the Angels on the catwalk can’t: cookies.

Two weeks ago I organized my first trip away from both kids since giving birth to Little Dude in April. It was just a short weekend jaunt to Sin City, but I experienced a mixture of emotions between being drunk on the feeling of forthcoming freedom  (I promise, that’s all I was drunk on for the time-being) and extreme guilt over leaving my seven-month old while he was still so attached. Friends talked me off a ledge and assured me that taking time for myself and my love would make me a better parent, and even though I wasn’t entirely convinced, I proceeded with my plans. Cheese strings were bought in bulk, favourite toys and pajamas were cleaned, and endless lists were made. I am a great list-maker, but not such a great list-follower-through-er. I can easily identify what needs to be done, but when it comes to actually doing it, I get easily side-tracked by very important things, like feeding my baby and making sure the cork doesn’t break when I’m pulling it from my Friday happy hour bottle of Zinfandel.

Given that I needed to gather all of the necessities for myself, as well as for the kids’ stay with their grandparents’, writing it all down ahead of time seemed to be the responsible thing to do. Heaven forbid my daughter should decide at 3 a.m. that Grover would be better company than her SpiderBear. I only wish I were exaggerating the possibility.

My own  packing list was short and sweet. While I knew I would need important things like socks and jeans and my own corkscrew, the first two things I actually wrote down were running shoes and my breast pump. The last time I was in Vegas was pre-kid, in 2008 and my packing list back then was vastly different. Not only did I not have children four years ago, I considered running something one did when trying to make it from house to a vehicle in -30 degree weather as quickly as possible or to escape from the mafia. And up until that point I had only had experience with one of those (I’ll leave you to debate which one).

Confession: I stayed up all night the night before I left. List or no list, I kept remembering just one last thing I had to do. By the time I finally dropped, exhausted onto my bed, I had about three hours before I needed to be at the airport. I immediately fell into a heavy sleep only to be woken up by the phone 15 minutes later. It was a nice idea while it lasted. I cried almost the entire way to the airport, kissed my babies goodbye and boarded the plane tired, disoriented, worried, but desperately craving some time to remind me of what life was like before I had little ones.

Mr. S and I had planned to run somewhere in the area pretty much as soon as we booked my flight (maybe even before). Originally we thought about heading to the famed Red Rock Canyon, however a friend who lives in the area recommended a trail beginning at Lake Mead and leading through tunnels that were part of an old railroad system leading to the Hoover Dam. It was almost exactly six kilometers to the Dam and six back. I haven’t done a run that long since half-marathon training, but my brain is always more optimistic than my running legs.

Unsolicited advice: when planning a 12k run, don’t go to the casinos until 2 a.m., even if you ARE on a roll and up to $10 on a lucky penny slot. Also, don’t drink a Bloody Mary and then champagne and then a half-yard of strawberry colada and think that a 9 a.m. alarm will look and feel just fine (Hint: it won’t).

Fortunately measures such as non-refundable car rentals made it impossible to hit the snooze button until mid-afternoon. Instead, we grumbled, downed strong Americanos like they were an electrolyte replacement and drove the half-hour to our course. Even more fortunately, my half-marathon prep this summer often involved severe sleep deprivation and even poorer nutrition, so my body didn’t seem as ill-equipped to handle 12k fueled on four hours of sleep and caffeine as I initially expected.

I can’t tell you every little detail of everything we saw (in a nutshell, a lot of cacti and some very cool tunnels). What I can say with certainty is that I’m glad that I can call myself a (almost) runner this time around. This felt more “us” than a typical tour of the Hoover Dam, which can take several hours and require you to board a bus crammed with hung-over/overeager tourists. Instead we got to experience it as (mildly) hung-over athletes. We were able to talk without interruption – about our kids, how nice it was to be away, but how much we missed them; about our future; about their future; about things not even related to them. Somewhere in the middle, we got to share a bottle of water and Gatorade and a baked pretzel (without a three-year old clamouring for a bite) and see a major tourist attraction and an engineering wonder (P.S. That’s what my husband called it. I wouldn’t know an engineering wonder if one beat me over the head with an infrastructure blueprint). And we only had to wear one layer of clothing in the middle of November!

We were tired at the end of our adventure, but not so much that we couldn’t enjoy some liquid refreshment (ahem, recovery) at the nearby Boulder City Brewery. Above anything, we felt alive, reconnected and so glad to have seen more of Nevada than the Strip. While it was nice to have a break and feel like a human instead of just mom for a few days, I would never have started running if it weren’t for the birth – and ensuing hormonal surge – of my firstborn. Somehow it felt as though four years had come full circle and one hour and 24 minutes of a steady, slow pace almost (almost) made me ready to come home. Once I conquered the penny slots, slept in one last time and had a final Bloody Mary.