In the months and weeks leading up to your 40th birthday, people ask you two things: 1. How do you feel, and 2. What are your plans. They don’t mean how do you feel physically, they mean are you emotionally and mentally equipped to handle the shameful injustice of being shoved forward into the next decade, lumped with others one can squarely define as “middle-aged.” And they don’t mean what are your plans for the future, they mean in what grand fashion have you chosen to mark this incredible milestone of being a day older than you were the day before your biological clock struck “40.”
What are you doing for your 40th?? Are you OK? Where will you go? What do you want? They don’t expect you to answer with, “Well, I’ll probably wake up and feed my kids breakfast, do some laundry, squeeze in a few freelance assignments and field phone calls from my family.” On the contrary, they expect you to offer plans for a girls-only spa retreat or a raucous party or a weekend getaway with your spouse.
I never had a good answer for all those well-meaning people, and the more they asked, the more I felt like I should do something. The number, and the day, kept getting weightier somehow. I should go away somewhere! I’m turning 40! I’d think, before remembering the size of my bank account and the limited number of friends who live nearby, not to mention the two kids who, annoyingly, need breakfast every morning and still can’t reliably pour their own milk.
But in the back of my mind, I kind of knew what I wanted. There was this one thing, this thing that had been poking me softly, unflinchingly, since last summer.
I wanted to be a runner.
I didn’t say it out loud for a long time, mostly because we’re talking about a birthday here, not a New Year’s resolution, and when you attach some sort of goal to your 40th birthday it doesn’t sound ambitious and awesome, it sounds suspiciously like a percolating midlife crisis. Plus, it’s not something someone can give me. It’s not a present, and it’s not a party. It’s not even a thing.
But I kept thinking about it, which I suppose is easy to do since runners are everywhere. I couldn’t escape them. At least a half-dozen of my friends have taken up the sport in the last year or two, and I couldn’t escape their happiness. I couldn’t escape their RunKeeper workout posts, their sweaty post-race Facebook photos, their viral inspirational quotes and taunting “At least I’m out here … what are YOU doing?” graphics.
I couldn’t escape the Runner’s World magazine that appeared in our mailbox every month, each with a taut body on the cover and insider stories, written in a language I wanted badly to speak. (For the record, though, I have no desire to try anything called GU.)
But mostly I couldn’t escape the fleeting feeling I’d had last June, which was the first time in a dozen years I’d given running a try. On a whim, I had laced up some new sneakers my sister had given me, dug out my old sports watch, walked off my front porch steps one hazy afternoon and started to run. I was not smart.
I had flirted with running in the past, had sporadically jogged through college and tried to run off and on for the first few years after college. I’d never done more than maybe 3 miles, always fighting an internal barrage of self-defeating insults the whole way, a constant hum of “stop I’m tired just walk this sucks I hate running my shin splints hurt my knees hurt I think that’s far enough turn back this song blows let’s walk.” I hated running. I did it because I felt like I had to, like I needed to exercise and the sidewalk was right there and my significant other was doing it so why not just run.
But that day last June felt different. I was choosing to run. I was excited to run. I ran 2 miles in 17:08. Holy shit, I’m a runner, I thought when I looked at my watch. My knees instantly responded to this twinge of self-confidence by swelling up to twice their normal size. For the next day, it hurt to bend. A lot.
Two days later I ran the same 2-mile loop a full 30 seconds faster, but with the same result – limping, swelling, pain. I waited nine days and tried again, and then a fourth time, a 3.05-mile run in 26:22 that left me exhilarated and debilitated. That time my knees stayed swollen for days. I iced. I elevated. I cried. And I gave up. I guess I can’t run, I thought, returning to the elliptical machine and free weights and heavy bag in my basement, all while the mousy athlete inside my head stammered something in a whisper about how maybe that wasn’t true.
Fast-forward seven months, to the precipice of 40. Sometime in mid-January, when it was clear there were no weekend getaway plans in my future, I finally told Chris what I’d been thinking about. He had been hounding me for weeks to tell him what I wanted for my birthday, and I imagined him immediately dreaming up gifts of running shoes and gear and perhaps even a surprise race registration.
“I want to be a runner,” I said, almost apologetically, knowing I sounded crazy, waiting for support from someone who already is a runner – a good one. He chuckled.
“You need to give up that dream,” he said. It was meant in defense of my knees’ apparent weakness at running, but to me it just sounded dismissive. I seethed for a few days, then circled back around to the conversation. This time he knew I meant business, and he fell in step behind me.
“I mean if you really want to, you should go and see a specialist first, someone who can analyze your stride and see if there’s anything wrong with your knees. Because running shouldn’t hurt like that.”
Until that moment I’d kind of assumed if I just went about things differently this time – if I got the right shoes, if I stretched, if I warmed up and cooled down – I’d be fine. I never thought about there being a fatal flaw in my body’s composition and movement patterns, something I couldn’t fix with extra arch support. For a moment, I faltered. My stupid legs, I thought, a decades-old trigger of self-hate eager to bubble up.
But then something happened that showed me maaaaaaybe 40 was going to be good for me after all: I didn’t succumb to the self-doubt. I decided I’d figure out a way to do it anyway. And in that “eh,” that simple mental shrug of blowing off my own disbelief, I realized 40 isn’t a cliff I’d be thrown over, as our ageist society seems to suggest. Instead it is, for me at least, that point in the hike where my muscles are warm and my body finds its rhythm and I’m at last high enough to see a peek of the view and I secretly know there really is no summit but I don’t care because finally, FINALLY, my mind is not yelling “just stop let’s walk I’m tired go back I can’t this is hard.”
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still there, the low-frequency hum of negativity and self-doubt. But it’s distant now, so distant I’ve begun to wonder if it’s actually an echo, merely kept alive by my own memory of how real and painful it used to be. Like the grain of sand that irritates the oyster. How long does the oyster keep trying to cover that grain of sand? It must be long after the actual irritation can be felt along the shell’s inner lining. But it keeps going and going and going, covering and fretting and trying until suddenly, startlingly, by the grace of God it realizes it has transformed that tiny annoying speck into something much bigger, something lustrous and imperfect but really quite amazing.
I’m not saying the act of turning 40 has created an instant change in my subconscious, or my self-confidence. (If that were the case I wouldn’t be worrying so tirelessly about these deepening laugh lines.) But when I turned 35, I asked for a really expensive pair of sweatpants. I’m not kidding. They were designer label, $78 embroidered “lounge pants” that have since faded from a deep red to a sad dark pink. (I’m wearing them right now; they’re still quite comfy.) For my 40th, I asked for running sneakers, and if that contrast isn’t clear enough for my own psyche, I don’t know what would be.
Maybe my body is flawed, maybe there’s something wrong that means running will hurt, maybe it will make me limp and curse and cry and eventually force me to find something else. But it’s been eight months and I remember as clear as yesterday the “I can do this” euphoria I felt after that first 2-mile spin. After years of hating my legs because of how I think they look, I spent two weeks appreciating them for how efficiently they moved.
I want that back. I want to be a runner.
Shortly after the conversation with Chris about specialists and strides, he got in touch with a running shoe store and made an appointment for me to be fitted for the right shoes. I told a handful of friends that I was nervous at the thought of running in front of professional runners, being watched and analyzed and critiqued. But on the way there I realized it wasn’t nerves making me fidgety. It was excitement.
The store’s owner put me in four different pairs of sneakers, then watched me run in each. “You have a great stride,” he said, and I experienced my own kind of runner’s high. Finally, I picked a pair of gray and red and orange Sauconys, not having any idea how to pronounce the name but loving them more than I remember loving those red sweatpants five years ago.
On Feb. 13, my 40th birthday, I got up before dawn and took the dog on a 3-mile loop through the neighborhood wearing my new shoes. I did much more walking than jogging, partly because I’m taking it slow on purpose and partly because holy cow I didn’t realize how many hills are here. But it felt great.
I watched the sky lighten and thought about what a blessing it is to have been given 40 years to experience life. I thanked God for every step of it. I thanked Him for all the grains of sand, real and imagined, that have vexed me for so long. I know I will likely always feel them, phantom irritations of origins unknown. I thanked Him for opening my eyes to the beauty inside me, and marveled at how easy it is to miss.
I thanked Him for the power of momentum, and for making my birthday wish come true.
