What’s a little half-marathon? Motherhood is the real endurance challenge

This past Sunday was my last ‘long’ long run before the Ottawa Half-Marathon. Which means race day is now less than two weeks away. Which means that, training-wise, there is absolutely nothing I can do to improve my performance between now and race day, and absolutely everything I can do to screw it up.

And screw it up I have, at least prior to previous ‘big’ races in my life. Like that time I thought I pulled my groin doing speedwork while I was tapering for a Boston-qualifying attempt, but it turned out that I had given myself a pelvic stress fracture. (Of course, I didn’t realize that until I had run the race with a fractured pelvis, silly rabbit. Suffice it to say, I didn’t make it to Boston – just the water-running lane at my local pool.) Or that time I stayed out a little too late dancing the week before my first-ever marathon, got coughed on by some random dude, and wound up with a full-blown chest cold a few days before the race. Or that time I ate my own body weight in sushi the night before trying to set a 10k PB, and had to suffer through 47 minutes worth of spicy tuna burps in addition to the screaming cardiovascular and muscle pain that goes along with trying to set a 10k PB. You get the idea. I’m not the smartest sometimes.

Of course, my life has changed considerably since those self-inflicted pre-race mishaps, and as the days tick down to May 3oth, I’ve got my eye on the adorable, little 15-pound saboteur in my house as the likeliest source of pre-race calamity. In my last blog post I described the sleep-deprivation injuries already sustained during this training cycle, and if I’ve come to know my daughter at all in the last four months, I figure she’ll pull out all the stops to make sure Mom shows up at the start line so bleary-eyed, I might actually start running in the wrong direction once the horn sounds.

Then again, if anyone’s taught me the true meaning of endurance in the past few months, it’s my baby girl. From a 15-hour labour (with my husband calling out metaphorical kilometre markers with each contraction), to marathon nursing sessions (to give you some context, we watched all five seasons of Battlestar Gallactica by the time she was 8 weeks old), to strength-building rocking and shushing sessions at 3am, to super-sprints up the stairs to the nursery after catastrophic diaper malfunction, little Alex has taught me that, just when I think I’ve hit my final gear and have to grind to a halt, I can actually dig a bit deeper and keep going.  (Thankfully, all it takes is a smile or a giggle from my girl to remind me – it’s totally worth it!) As our soon-to-be cover girl and Yummy Mummy Club founder Erica Ehm so eloquently put it when I interviewed her last week, “motherhood is a frickin’ marathon…Except that there is no finish line in motherhood – you just have to keep going and going and going!”

Amen, sister.  And somewhere around the 17k mark of my half-marathon, I plan to remember those words.  It should be right around the time I see my husband and daughter cheering me from the sidelines, plant a big, sweaty kiss on ’em, and find those extra gears for a mean finishing kick. Assuming I don’t eat too much sushi the night before.