Witches on the run

Three paths into and out of a practice

After absolutely despising running for the first 28 years of my life, a trainer/friend showed me how to do it without peeing my pants or coughing up a lung. I was then a runner for a little over ten years, running in three half marathons, a few ten-milers and other shorter-distance races.

I loved making a race plan, following it and having it pay off. I loved the endorphins and the up-and-down of getting through a crappy run to know a good one was probably after. I loved a snappy, frosty morning that felt like the weather version of what mint tastes like, and the hot shower after. But some time into COVID, I couldn’t shake a deep ache that traveled from my back through my butt and down my thigh and made driving a car excruciating. I wasn’t willing to do intensive rehab for my typical 20-30 minute runs. So I quit and never looked back. Long walks give me the outdoor/meditative time. You can get your heart rate going very well in Orangetheory by walking at an incline. Golf is also good for that “I suck”/ “I’m so glad I did this” seesaw.

I saw a post awhile ago from a witch talking about how hard it was for her to also quit running but how glad she was to pick up her yoga practice in its stead. This got me thinking about how personal running is to so many people that we beat our bodies up to do it and grieve when we can’t. How it’s much more than a time or a distance or being “in shape,” whatever that means. So today I’m speaking with three witches, each a mom of 2 kids who works jobs outside the house, about their different ways into, through, and away from running.

When I first mentioned this issue a lot of readers mentioned having their own tales to tell so we will do a follow up issue in the future! Please feel free to share your story in the comments or reply to this email with your story of how your running practice merged with or veered away from your path into aging/parenthood if you have something to add.

Also, the ladies I spoke with recommended some favorite gear and resources so I’m going to include those at the bottom as a perk for the paid subscribers. (Another good reason to be a paid subscriber if you’re not—I’m doing a callout for classified ads very soon.)

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Emily Gray Tedrowe in Chicago: A lifelong runner who quit and came back.

How did you get into running?

I started running really young. My dad was a runner, and he invited me to join him. I joined the track and cross-country teams when I was in middle school. I ran very competitively in high school, and then I was recruited, so I ran for Princeton. That was a difficult time because I was a really big fish in a small pond in high school. Then you get to this giant amazing college program, and I was barely on the team and always one step from getting cut.

I was pretty burnt out after college, so I took the next 10 years away from running. I got into it again when my kids were 10-ish and 8-ish, and I’ve been running again in this second phase pretty much since then. That would be the past 10 years or so.

Now I’m 51, and I’m starting to see what running can be for me in this next phase of my life because it’s hard. I definitely can’t run nearly as much as I want to. I’ve been up and down with injuries, probably for the last few years. There’ve been two marathons I’ve trained for that I’ve had to shift down and run the half-marathon distance instead of the full. I don’t know if running a full marathon is in my future anymore because I just get too injured now when I try to keep up that weekly mileage.

Running has really shifted into this thing that I have to do a lot of stuff in order to be able to run. Whereas it used to be the thing that was my whole exercise always and I never did anything else, now here I am doing all these stupid little rehab exercises just to be able to run my slow 30 minutes along the lakefront and it can be so frustrating sometimes. Like, really? Do I really have to do all of this in order to run 30 minutes? But the answer is yes, I do.

I put in a lot of miles on the Chicago lakefront and that’s my happy place. I remember one time last summer I was training for a race and it was the perfect weather, the perfect sunny day and I was just cooking and I was blasting all my nineties R&B in my headphones and I just remember being so happy. The running and I met in the same place, and it was great.

What was your path back into running post-kids?

It was through races. I did a couple of training plans and did a few half-marathons and I felt like something about the race length and the training seemed like enough that I felt like a badass and not too much that it wiped me out because when you have kids, your weekends can’t just be about “I want to run” and then lie around. You’re taking them to birthday parties and all that shit.

Was there any moment or what was it that you decided, “I’m going to give it a go even with having to do the annoying prehab?”

Honestly it was probably just mental health stuff. I’d had maybe a very stressful day and I was walking home and then talking about all this to my husband and I said something like, “I do not understand how people handle their lives without running. How the fuck do you handle all this stress? This is how I metabolize it.”

He was like, “I mean most people drink probably.”

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Christina Martinson in Durham North Carolina: A post-motherhood runner

What got you into running?

I started running from never-having-run-before in between babies. My older son was about 18 months old. You know when you try to start going back to the gym, but all the classes are at bedtime, and you still want to do bedtime? You’re stupid, and it’s your first kid? That was basically me.

There’s a beginning runner’s clinic in Durham called RunBuds. It’s every week for 11 weeks. The owner gets speakers to come in and talk about nutrition, running form, and gear, and how to buy a sports bra, and all this stuff. I call it A.A. for people who don’t know how to be nice to themselves because it is women from age 25 to 65, all different sizes and all different fitness levels, sitting in a room. They all cry and talk about how they didn’t want to do bedtime anymore, or they hadn’t been active in years, or they just wanted to meet other women. The second week, I was like, “Oh, my God. This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life. You get to talk to people, and the adrenaline high is so great and running can be anything. You can walk, run, you can do all these different things.”

I never stopped after that. I got pregnant, and I stopped at 25 weeks. But I picked it right back up again after I had my second son. Now, I’m a group leader in that program. When I think back to all of the hard things that have happened since 2012, there’s a run associated with it. When my friend died in 2016, I basically cried through a whole half-marathon training program, and it was so nice to have people to listen to me and an outlet that made me feel good also. It has changed the way that I eat, the way that I sleep, my relationship with alcohol, my relationship with... everything, really.

I really do believe that running can work however you want it to. It’s like when people do the write-1000-words-a day-thing, and you can say, “You’re a writer.” It’s the same thing.

Do you coach your kids, too?

I help out. I love cross country. I stand at the finish line and cry when everybody finishes. I just think it’s the most inclusive sport because they don’t cut anybody. You’re not running against other people, you’re running against the clock. You’re running against yourself, what you can achieve. It’s very personal, but there’s also a team vibe. So, I get very emotional.  

I run with my boys on Sunday morning. I make them go for a short run with me because otherwise, they just are screen time monsters in the morning. I’m like, “Okay. You can watch TV, but you got to come run.” My son will complain. But then once he does it, he’s great and so happy afterward.

Do you have goals for yourself for your races?

Mine’s always a feeling. If I trained for 17 weeks or something, I just want to feel like I did the best that I could on that day because I put all this time and energy, and sometimes money, into achieving that. Lately my goal has been to not pressure myself to feel like I’m always getting faster because I know that that makes me kind of a drag.

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Rebekah Raleigh in Chicago: Quit running post-motherhood but now can do yoga “party tricks”

Tell me when you first got into running.

I had started running kind of casually as a little kid. Sometimes, I would run with my dad. I used to run the 600-yard dash or whatever the distance run was in junior high. I used to have the fastest time of all the girls in my middle school. A lot of times I would beat a lot of the boys, and I was very proud of that. I ran pretty consistently, except I stopped running for two years when my dad died in my early 20s.  

With my first baby, I ran almost until the day I delivered. The second time, I ran for about 36 weeks. I was running 35 miles a week most of the time. I ran pretty consistently until I was about 40.

What was it that brought your running career to an end?

I had this nagging hamstring injury that started in my late 30s; I could just feel it, and then my leg would warm up, and I would be okay. I would run through it; then it got to a point where my hamstring would get so tight that sometimes I would stand up, and it would lock up, and I would have to sit back down and have to stretch out my leg. I would feel it when I was driving, too.

In physical therapy, I got diagnosed with tendinosis, and then they did these strength tests and realized that my right hamstring was only half the strength of my left. We did make a lot of progress. But every time I tried to run, it would twinge and twinge and twinge so I finally just said, “I’m too young to be in constant low-grade pain, and I just don’t want to.” I just stopped doing it.

Was that a grieving process for you?

Oh, yeah. One of the things about running is that for my own psychiatric and mental wellness, I just need a lot of exercise, so running was incredibly efficient. You can tire yourself out and get focused. I loved running so much that for many years I didn’t even wear headphones. I would count because it would get very rhythmic, and there was something sort of meditative about it.

At about 31, I started to pick up yoga as something that I would do in addition to running. I could go at lunch from my job, and I had friends who went. It was social, and I knew that it was good for me, so I think after my daughter was born, I was starting to get good enough at yoga that I could get the same amount of deep physical exercise out of it. I’m not suggesting that this is the right way to do yoga, but it does bring me a lot of relief. I go to class five, sometimes six days a week. It’s heated, so that just amp up how physically stressful it is, in a good way.

Are any particular positions or yoga moves, or whatever, when you’re like, “I know I really got it”?

This is not a particularly yoga way of thinking, but I really love arm balances, and I call them party tricks because there is no world that I live in in which this skill is going to do anything for me. But I am so proud of it, and I don’t know why.

What do you mean you don’t know why? Because not everyone can do it.

In running, you have these very finite points of reference for how you are doing. That’s harder to come by in yoga because the growth is so incredibly incremental.

But in the arm balance, there’s an aha. It’s like this one thing that you either did or you did not do, which is very different than in a lot of other yoga poses.

You told me your mom keep up a running practice through later in life.

She doesn’t run anymore, but the reason she stopped running is because she had this terrible fall when she was running, and my sister and I told her that she had to stop. She was 64. My mother’s marathon time is significantly faster than mine. She ran a 3:30, and she ran Boston once or twice. My sister is also a better runner than I am.

Did they give you shit for stopping?

The grieving was my own. It was a really beautiful day on the lakefront not long ago and my husband asked me if I missed running. I was like, “This is the perfect day to go running.” But I think my sister and my mom are similar to me, where running was just this very personal thing.

Was there anything else you’ve been meditating on in terms of that transition out of running?

Running was a metaphor for me to understand so much. It helped me understand what long-term goal-setting was about. It helped me understand how to manage setbacks and disappointment and also weigh calculated risks and live with the consequences of that. Like, “I really shouldn't skip that long run, but I’m going to because I want to go out with my friends. And now I’m running hungover, but I’m like 25, so I’m going to run through it anyway.”

Running was a great physical manifestation of so much of the way that we function in contemporary life, for me. When I think about the transition into yoga, I try to remind myself that there are other ways to find what you need.