The Race Belongs Not To The Swift…

But to those who just keep effing running.

Sorry to mangle Ecclesiastes, but this is how I feel lately, for many reasons…

Yesterday afternoon, Hubby took Babygirl on the Target run, and Babyboy and I found ourselves with a few hours of free time. Unscheduled time with only ONE kid doesn’t happen very often. I asked him what he wanted to do.

“I want to go for a run in the stroller… to Boston.”

Yes, we live near Boston, but not THAT near. And, he was serious.

Babyboy has been extremely focused on maps, and where we live in relation to just about everyplace… especially Boston. Plus, he’s enthralled with the buildings and highways of the city. For weeks, it’s been Boston this and Boston that. He’s even become enamored of the band by the same name. (Can I tell you how many times you hear “More Than A Feeling” before going nuts? More than you’d think, actually. I’ll take Brad Delp’s frenetically angelic vocals over The Wiggles any day.)

So, lately when we’ve gone for runs, he’s wanted to run to Boston.

Now, I love to run. I’ve run three marathons, but, those were well over a decade ago. When I got pregnant for the first time, I didn’t move, I ate everything, and I gained sixty pounds. I worked very hard to lose some of that weight, but then… in my second pregnancy, I gained fifty pounds. My first attempt at running after Babygirl was born… Well, suffice to say, I described myself in a post as “a mooselike creature in ill-matching baggy pants and her husband’s rain jacket toodling up the hill like a manatee on land“.

Since then, I’ve just been working and working myself slowly back up to where I was pre-pregnancy. So, I take the kids on runs. We have two jog strollers, a single and a double (both free to us: one was a gift, the other a hand-me-down). This summer, I’ve been pushing my limits in distance while simultaneously pushing either one or both kids in one of these baby joggers.

It helps to have an unrelenting trainer in Babyboy. A few weeks ago, I had planned an easy run with him… But Babyboy spurred me on. Every single time I tried to turn around, he freaked out.

He would repeatedly scream, “I want to run to BOSTON!” and start throwing himself around in the stroller, to the point of almost tipping it over.

Though I had had absolutely no intention of doing so, we just kept running. We ran down to the train tracks, along the river, and then under the highway, to a park literally right next to the major artery of the city.  The park’s proximity to the highway and the views of the city on the distance apparently satisfied Babyboy’s Boston sensibilities. He was thrilled… and so was I, actually.

I was thrilled because I hadn’t run that far since before he was born. We were both thrilled, because it’s a really beautiful park that we had never been there before: an urban reservation, oddly quiet and yet at the same time, it feels safe. We’ve never run this without also running into other baby jogger runners, people walking their dogs, and random picnickers.

We’ve done this “Boston” run several times now…. and again yesterday. I tried to turn us around at several points, more because of the time than anything else, but Babyboy wouldn’t hear of it. We did the “Boston” loop, he was happy, and I logged in a 7.5 mile run, with a jogger stroller.

7.5 miles with a baby jogger… Take THAT, Lance… You wouldn’t have needed the steroids if you’d had my son as a trainer!