In what feels like an eternity ago, August 2009, I was an avid runner training to run a marathon. 4 years, 4 pregnancies and 2 babies later…well, I own running shoes.
Honestly I miss it. The early morning quiet with the pink sun just peeking over the subdivisions. The rhythmic pounding of my feet and the time to just be, to think, to not think, time all alone for me. I haven’t quite figured out how to work that into the busy life of a mom of four, but I need to.
This past weekend I was a blog ambassador for the Dirty Girl Mud Run Chicago. It was my first 5K in five years and so out of my comfort zone. There were costumes and obstacles and mud, lots and lots of mud. I ran it with two friends and we went into it completely realistic. We would run what we could, with the goal to have fun.
And fun was definitely had. We ran some, we walked a lot. We did all the obstacles! We climbed and crawled through the mud, and I even took a tumble down a graveled hill, but we did it. At the end of the race, sore and achy, all I could think of was, “when do we do it again?”
It’s so easy as a mom to get wrapped up in everyone else’s needs, desires, dreams. Your job is to do things for other people and it’s easy to forget you’re a person too. In the dressing and the feeding and the cleaning and the taking to-and-fro it’s easy to forget that you used to have hobbies and desires and passions.
This weekend, dripping in mud I found myself again. Still there, deep down, buried under all the responsibility (and mud!) was the me that got up at four in the morning, not for a diaper, but to run before the kids went to school. Deep down there was the me that met a friend early saturday morning for a run instead meeting a friend for coffee.
She’s still there.
Now I just need to find a way, with less mud, to get her out and let her free.
