Running

When I was seven or eight, my father decided to lose some weight. He posted a chart on the side of the refrigerator that graphed his progress over the weeks. He probably did watch what he ate a bit, but mainly he lost weight by exercising: specifically, by jogging, four times a week, with a group of his friends. My father was 40 when I was born and most of his friends were older than he, some of them retired. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, they'd all get up at 5:15 and jog, slowly slowly, through the suburban darkness.

After a while, they all started running together in 5k races whenever there was one nearby. Once or twice a year, some of them would even do a half-marathon, coming home with nearly all the ribbons not because of speed--even in races they moved always at a snail's pace--but because there were so few entrants in their age class.

I was never particularly athletic, always the last girl picked in gym. My senior year in high school, I decided to start running, and never went out until it was well and truly dark. I didn't want anyone to see me. In college, I ran regularly, three or four miles a few times a week and nine on Sundays. One summer, a friend was going to run a 5-mile run and invited me along. I ran it to keep her company, at my usual sedate pace of nine minutes per mile. That pace was my pace for years, and never really changed. If I ran faster I got tired, if I ran slower I got bored. I always ran a nine-minute mile. At that point, I'd been running for about three years. I had good running shoes, read a running magazine or two, was thinking about training for a marathon. I wasn't fast, but, like my father, I enjoyed it.

I finished that 5-mile run in exactly 45 minutes. A week or so later, I spoke to my father on the phone. I don't think he had any idea I'd taken up running, and was impressed with my time. "But I guarantee you," he said--En garantalom Neked--"that your first mile was six and a half minutes. Your second mile was seven, and your last was twelve. You didn't pace yourself. You have to pace yourself. If you paced yourself, you could have run the five miles in forty minutes."

Logically, the remark wasn't really nasty. He might just have been trying to be helpful, not denigrating. He'd been running much longer than I had, and he didn't know how long I'd been running at all. But it enraged me as few things have. He knew nothing about my running times, my training habits, my experience as a runner, and very little about me. But he assumed, based on nothing, that I didn't know how to run. I had to bite my lip, hard.

It's a similar feeling, I think, when people who don't know me or my kids assume that if I only tried X my kids would sleep with no trouble at all. Because their kids slept through the night after they did this, or this, or this. Because if I only established a routine, let them cry, gave them a bath, tried a white noise CD, got them warmer pajamas, rubbed their backs, made them tea, went to them every time they cried, never went to them at all, or went to them every five minutes like clockwork--if I only did that, they'd sleep. Nekem garantalnak. They guarantee me.