Running into stillness

On time, friendship, and beginning again.

(originally published on Jenny’s Lark, December 2025)

I am running, on a warm, humid day in early March.

I am 25 years old.

I’ve never been much of an athlete, though part of me has wanted it, has entertained the dream since childhood, watching Chris Evert on TV and a movie about Jill Kinmont. But, like my mother, I am the arts and letters type, heavy on the arts, and not an athlete.

From a brief flirtation with step aerobics, I have running shoes and shiny black spandex tights, so I can dress the part well enough (just) to say yes when two friends, who are older and wiser and kind, invite me to join them for a jog in the park near my apartment.

I am invited to go running because they’re concerned that I am wallowing in self-pity and that I need something to do with myself after a recent breakup with a friend of theirs. They are disappointed in him, they say, because this is the appropriate thing to say, but also because they are, truly, disappointed.

They do not say: You will be better off; you will be grateful that this didn’t work out. And I will.

In the meantime, we are running, very slowly, we three, because I need something to do and because they, pushing 40, are beginning to worry about their weight.

They do not say: This will happen to you, too.

We chitchat, to pass the time. In all the years to follow I will remember only one conversation, a funny story about the immigrant grandparents who escaped to the U.S. and, worried their surname, Samelson, sounded too Jewish, decided to change it to Rabinowitz.

Can you imagine? my friend says, and we laugh.

We meet on Sunday afternoons, because we all have commitments that fill the other weekend hours. We make it to late June with these Sunday runs; and then, my friends say: It’s too hot, we need to take the summer off.

I keep going, on my own. I am chasing achievement, getting faster, stronger, more confident.

By September, I have new running friends, all older and more experienced than I. Our introduction has been brokered by a mutual friend, Paul, whom I know as a tennis coach and they know as a runner. They are real runners, and though Paul’s word is enough to get me in the group, I have to work to prove myself. Among these new companions are a dog-loving photographer, a book-loving scientist, and a food-and-wine-loving doctor.

We meet outside the ramshackle golf house at 7 a.m., my new friends and I. We breeze around the hamster loop of a trail: three laps on easy days, four when we push to tempo, which we do at least once a week, because we are runners.

The park is across the street from my apartment, my first. It has big, north-facing windows that look out to an ocean of grass and old trees, without a building in sight. Inside, in front of the windows is a pine table that I bought at ICBargains with the boyfriend, the ex, the friend of my original running group.

The pine table is my art table, when I find time for making art, and a dinner buffet when I cook for my running friends.

I’m invited to a two-person art show, in a local photographer’s gallery, with another artist who is a legendary runner and who intimidates me, just a little.  He helps me build frames for the large pieces, and in between measuring and making miter cuts and hanging our pieces, we become friends.

I host my new running friends and serve them linguine with clams and good wine (as good as I can afford at the time) and a chocolate soufflé that will one day (though I can’t know this) be the link to my sitting at this same pine table, writing, in a house across the street from the scientist and the doctor.

We keep this routine going through Christmas, when we dress up in Santa hats and red tights for a holiday run, and into the next spring before I become antsy, prickled by the burden of unwelcome conversation about politics and uncomfortable questions about what I’m doing with my life.

I become a noon-time, lunch break, solo runner. In the punishing August heat, I run hard, and I sweat, and then I shower at my mother’s house, half a block from my office.

It’s funny, my mother says, that your office is so close but I never get to see you because I’m at work when you’re at work. She leaves fresh towels in the bathroom for me, every day.

I train for the marathon, imagine myself crossing the finish line in front of First Tennessee Bank, earning a place among the real runners.

I return to the park for weekday training, running most often with the photographer, Hud, who has several marathons under his belt. We do hill repeats in front of the museum, discuss various training methods and long run routes.

I run 10 miles, then 12, 15, 19. I am weeks away from marathon day, heading to Paris for a work trip and planning to train along the Seine.

But then, one Monday morning when my alarm goes off, my back seizes and I’m unable to get out of bed. Running through injuries, including an ankle sprain, has put me off balance, the doctor says, as we look at the x-ray image of an unnaturally tilted pelvis and two compressed lumbar vertebrae.

What I believe, because I am 28, is this:

Part of my life is over now, and I will never have it again.

We are running, the late, great Hud and I, in the park, on the golf course, on a hot day in late July.

I am 39 years old.

In the early morning hours before the golfers arrive, we run on the grass with our dogs, who chase squirrels and wind gusts. I, too, am chasing something, but I can’t put my finger on what it is, so I don’t know how to find it.

In early June, I’d woken on a Tuesday or Wednesday feeling miserable and fat and listless and lost, enough so to email my old friend and ask if he were still hoofing it in the park in the mornings the way we had done many years before, back when I was young and single and beholden to no one but myself. Yes, he'd said, come join me tomorrow.

I slipped out of bed the next morning, before anyone in my house was awake, pulled on some too-tight shorts and worn-out shoes, and drove to the park, to the golf house, where the early morning people gathered.

My mother had died the January before, after a long illness. In February, my young family and I moved, prematurely, into a house that wasn't quite ready for any family to call it home. In August I was going to turn 40, and I was very much in need of the kind of friend who could offer gentle wisdom and tough love and unconditional support and constructive criticism, absent any trace of judgment. Also, I needed exercise.

So we are running together again, Hud and I, in our old familiar park, but on a different, softer ground.

With every loop, from summer into fall, we connect the pieces from our time apart. We talk about books and religion and art, counting laps with the dogs as our guides and trees our witnesses.

I ask my friend: Am I a good mother? Does marriage get easier? What’s it like to be 40?

By November we are running fast, for us, and feeling strong. On November the Last (that's how he always said it), I give him a bottle of Heinz 57 sauce for his birthday, to celebrate 57 years of adding great flavor to life. For Christmas he gives me a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking, remembering the morning in September when I was so transfixed by Susan Stamberg and Joan Didion that I was still in my car at 6:05, and he’d rapped on my window and yelled, BABY, WE RUNNING THIS THING OR YOU JUST GONNA SIT ON YOUR ASS ALL DAY?

Through the early spring, fierce storms, false snow warnings, and real snow, we keep running, even when we lose an hour to daylight savings time, until one of my dogs gets sick and our morning runs grow sporadic, and we fall out of the habit.

What I believe, because I am 40, is this:

Our time together is something that can be resumed, reconnected, like the sewing thread that slips through the needle and simply gets fed back through the eye to resume stitching, after the room mother duties, and the crisis at work, and the early morning carpool family trip baseball season PTO meetings afternoon carpool and year that somehow turns into a decade.

After that, we will simply pick up where we left off.

But then, unexpectedly, my friend dies in his wife’s arms one morning in the car on the way to the grocery.

We are running, my children and I, in the park, on a sunny fall day in late September.

I am 60 years old.

We should run the half-marathon together, the kids had said in August, not long after my birthday. They had both become runners, my son in the spring, to blow off CPA exam steam, and my daughter over the summer during an internship in Cape Town.

After a 20-year hiatus, I, too, had been running, a little and very slowly, because it had occurred to me that spending time with my adult children would require doing things they chose to do when they came home, and it looked like one of those things was running.

The kids want me to run the half-marathon with them; can I do that? I’d asked Paul, the only friend who’d known me long enough and well enough, in this particular capacity, to offer advice.

You can, he said, hesitantly. You’ll have to run twice a week, at the track on Tuesday nights and in the park on the weekends; it will be work, but you can do it.

My daughter creates a team and registers the three of us. We’re raising money, she says, right? Yes, I say; we will do that. The group picture she chooses for our team fundraising page is from 15 years. ago, the three of us standing together at a work event.

We have a group text, and my daughter names it: we runnin this shit.

My son writes, to his sister: Mom needs new shoes, so she won’t f-up her knee.

They trade messages back and forth, linking to various shoes and reviews.

The next day, I go to the running store and spend an hour getting my feet analyzed and trying on shoes. I text a photo of my purchase to our group. Good job, Mom! they write back.

Our training is a patchwork of solo trips and schedule overlaps. One weekend my son comes into town for a meeting, and the three of us head to the park together for a long run.

And so we are running, on this fall day, in the park.

Mom, I could walk and beat you, my son says.

I’ll run with you, Mom; I like to run slow, my daughter says.

But soon she, too, outpaces me, and I tell her to go on ahead.

Once alone, I catch myself chasing my familiars and wonder how much of what I’ve said, over the years, now lives in the trees.

We train through mock trial competition and the accounting firm’s busy season and life, which is to say: We are each on our own.

Two weeks before race day, my daughter gets a cold, my son develops shin splints, and my knee buckles on the stairs. We pull back, assured by Google and our running friends that having completed one 10-mile training run (which we all have done) will be enough to get us through.

Paul calls to check on us, and I tell him our sorry state of affairs. The best workout I ever had, he says, is the one I didn’t finish. If you’re not up for it, he says, then don’t run.

Seriously, he says, you might need to sit this out. There’ll be anoth .…

He stops himself, redirects. The most important thing, he says, is not to hurt yourself.

The day before the race, we are all feeling better. We pick up our bibs, take a picture in the photo booth, eat an early dinner, lay out our clothes and Gu, charge our headphones.

I wake at 5, do yoga, ice my knee. A neighbor whose niece and boyfriend are also in town for the race shuttles us downtown to a place where we can keep warm until the start. The morning is chilly and clear.

I have waited for this day, and now it is here.

My son, optimistic about his pace, is in corral 4. My daughter is assigned to 13 and I to 15. That’s the walkers, Mom, she says, and we agree to cheat up to corral 12 together.

Almost an hour after the first runners started out, 40 minutes or so behind my son, my daughter and I finally cross the starting line.

We are hip to hip, elbows sometimes brushing, from beginning to end.

You’re speeding up, she says, at mile 2, and I slow down.

The river is pretty, she says at mile 6, and I agree.

It’s so great when you find your people, another runner says, when a cheering friend bursts onto the course to hug us and run a few paces in stride. Yes, I say, it sure is.

This is hard, my daughter says at mile 9. I tell her that’s all in her head, and she says she’s pretty sure it’s also in her body, and we push on through 10 (where we see Paul), then 11 and 12 (where we see my husband), up three mean hills to the final turn.

We clock through the finish in lockstep: 2:34. We grab our mylar blankets, water bottles, and snack bags, stop to stretch and check our texts.

I’ll wait for you guys at the finish line photos on the right, my son had written, almost an hour earlier, later adding: I lied I’m getting beer and pizza I’m dying.

We find him by the heaters and all head to a sunny spot near the refreshments.

Mom, he says, this is the best beer you’ll ever have in your life, and he is right. We sit on the grass in the sun.

Dad wants to know where to pick us up, my daughter says, and we groan as we try to stand up and walk toward the warm car. Once home, we shower and nap and eat and stretch. My daughter goes to work, my son meets friends for dinner, I crawl into bed and watch TV. We sleep like rocks.

Paul drives by the next morning while I’m walking the dog and asks how I’m feeling. Great, actually! I say, because it is true. We are all feeling great, I say, and ready to do it again next year.

He says: You’ll never have another run like that.

I know this, of course. I have known it from the moment my kids set the idea into motion. Hearing it, though, is a kind of benediction.

My daughter heads back to school, my son packs up to drive back to Nashville. Too late, I realize we’ve missed our window to get a Christmas tree together, all four of us.

You’ll be fine, Mom, my daughter says. We’ve had lots of Christmas tree adventures already; you and Dad can do this one.

In the quiet house, I unroll the garland to decorate our front porch, hang the red bows, arrange the convention of sparkling reindeer and blue Madonnas and handmade angels.

For the briefest moment, I am still.