There are people who were born with running shoes on. Just because I wasn’t doesn’t mean I can’t. Yesterday’s course is a turn around course. Runners travel 6.55 miles in one direction, make a U-turn and run the return trip back where we began. The starting line becomes the finish. The fastest runners are coming back toward the finish when I feel like I have barely started. The most amazing thing is actually watching the elite runners run. They compete for a cash prize and running is their job. The travel from race to race around the country and world trying to win and running against the same few athletes each time.

It never fails. We are all running, the half-way turn around still a good two miles away and we can hear the opening race motorcycles and the honking horns. Then we hear the crowd that has gathered along the sides begin to swell with aplause. The cheers that had been for us a few seconds previous now turn their attention to the three men gliding over the pavement on the other side of the street. They are already heading back toward the finish and they aren’t very far from being done.

These men are born with running shoes on, so to speak. One caucasian runner and two African runners, shoulder to shoulder, their feet barely touching down. Every muscle and fiber on their body is directed toward the run. They are made to do this. If they didn’t run, it would be shameful because of their great gift.

They run fast and one of them will win. They are running 5 minute miles and the next runner is only a dozen or so feet behind them. Maybe he will win. Maybe he is reserving a bit of strength for the final sprint. When one of them crosses the finish line, I have barely made my turn around down at then end and begin my way back.

I am trudging along at a much slower pace, giving the race everything I have inside, and I could be discouraged. I might feel unworthy or unfit to even run in a race where these same athletes are registered. But I don’t. I feel the same pride and awe swell inside me and I stare, crane my head to get a better view of them.

They pass, and even in my thirst and fatigue I clap, and hoot and yell for them. To them, as they speed by, the sounds of the crowds must seem like blurs as they focus on one thing only: finishing the quickest. But they deserve it. They are supreme in what they do; they are the best and our honor recognizes this.

But I am running. I am going to finish. Just because my body was not born to do this and I must train and struggle with motivation issues and eating issues in order to run; just because my body could be trained to be semi-athletic, but as a mother I don’t have the time and energy to devote to such endeavors; just because its hard and I must MAKE my body do this — all of this doesn’t mean that I can’t run, or that I shouldn’t.

The elite runners, their bodies and minds are trained for the race. Mine isn’t. But I run anyways. I run in the rain and the wind, and mostly in the cold and the dark. I run, mostly for my sanity. I run so that I can begin my day with a clean mind, a clear thought, and a calmer spirit.

TIME – 1:56:49
PLACE OVERALL – 1889 out of 6334
WOMEN – 677 out of 3702
MY AGE CATEGORY – 136 out of 622

So often I have lived from one pivotal occasion to the next. Graduation: the end of my formal education. Marriage: I was going to have a partner for the rest of my life. My weight loss: the installation of confidence. My first daughter’s birth: the beginning of a new way of living. A marathon run: elation and being able to conquer anything. My youngest daughter’s birth: a new heart of tenderness I had never owned before.

Momentous accomplishments and events. They are milestones. My life shown out on a timeline would name these things as peaks and highlights.

But, I’d rather write my own timeline. Not with graduations and births, necessarily. But with molten-chocolate desserts and laughter. With drives at night through the orange groves and runs in the morning through the eucalyptus trees. With small things, little things, that make up all that is today.

It’s difficult. Humanity begs us to wait and pine for the next BIG thing, the next meaningful event. The next time I can get dressed up and wear heels. Normal life is just so normal, it seems, and common. I don’t want to be common, we scream, I want to be different, to be noticed, to be exciting! I want someone to throw a shower for me, I want to have a birthday party, I want to go on vacation!

Instead, maybe I should nourish a fascination with all things common. I should feed and grow within me a love for the small, most beautiful things. I’m done waiting. Big moments will, in fact, happen. It is the nature of life: happy things and sad things and devastating things. I can’t wait, though, to be in the center of it.

Instead of marking my life from event to event, I want to begin to mark real living in terms of blueberry pancakes, sticky toddler hands and groves of eucalyptus.

There is something basic, something touchable about my relationship with my oldest daughter. To use common words, she is an old soul.

I only have two children. So it is easy for my husband and me to divide and conquer.

My race is in 5 days. I use the term “race” very loosely as I will be in a crowd of a few thousand people running for 13 miles and I will be merely attempting to finish somewhere in the middle. A real race, in my opinion, is something one might have the chance to actually win. It IS a real race for a handful of people. Those guys are about 24 years old and they will be running basically twice as fast as me. Winners of half-marathons finish in under an hour.

Somewhere in the middle. I know I won’t be fast. Last year I completed 13.1 miles in 1:52. That, for a 33-year-old, post-pregnancy, amateur-runner, was fast. It was probably my personal best. I know this year will be much slower.

I am realizing that now as I have been “training” by myself, squeaking out 6 or so miles every other day and succumbing to fatigue and measly four mile runs on the days in between. And knowing that my race in ’07 might have been my zenith feels a little strange. It makes me feel old, as if I am running down the other side of the hill.

This morning I actually managed 8 miles on the treadmill and I surprised myself. I began telling myself I would just run for 10 minutes, then I thought I could go at least 3 miles. By then I felt warm and good and strong, so I made it all the way.

I won’t win. I know that. My body is not made for it and I am not a professional runner. So, on Sunday, I will run my race, not to win, but to finish well. I want to run with as much effort as is possible and push myself farther than I think I can go. I will finish and I will not win. But hopefully, I will have run well.

My little one is sick, so my life stops. Sort of.

Right now, in my life, I feel a fluidity in my writing. Many times I write things in my head when I am running or as I am waking up in the morning. After the alarm, before I pull myself up and out, is a time of clarity for me many mornings. And then, I just sit down and all the filler words and the beginnings and the endings, it all just comes.

I looked over at my oldest daughter this weekend as she was enjoying something related to her birthday and something suddenly began to weigh on me. I write with such candidness because she is too young to understand what it is I am communicating. I write openly because I can.

Like all little girls, she is maturing fast and her mind is racing through the paradox of growth that includes both triumphs and pain. She is understanding larger ideas and more comprehensive issues each week, it seems, and she remembers everything.

This weekend I realized that there is a future fear lurking in me that someday, when she can understand it all, I won’t be able to be as candid in my writing (especially if she is the subject). Perhaps the writing will cease. I don’t know. In ten years, she will be sixteen and completely capable of reading my musings on motherhood and mistakes I’ve made. She might not accept me or wonder why I wrote about her so much. I won’t be able to write about the failures I feel as a mother or a wife, at least not in the same way.

But then, the next thought…

Perhaps my frankness in communication will clear a path for an open relationship during potential difficult years with my daughters. Maybe my openness as a mother might pave the way for future communication. Maybe there won’t be the awkwardness that can accompany sentimentality, even among family members. And possibly, just possibly, my daughters will read the things I’ve written about them and see my humanity with a keener eye.

They might understand that I was once a little girl, that I liked to play with horses, and that I still feel scared sometimes. Maybe future connections can be made because of what I do today.

The cousins from England have been here for a couple weeks sharing in late Christmas exchanges, trips to Disneyland and birthday celebrations. They are gone home now, on a flight headed east, away from the warm winds of California.

The leaving is the hardest when there are no trips planned, nothing to look ahead toward. There is nothing to point to to say, THEN, we will see you THEN. There is nothing tangible to place a finger upon. There isn’t a future calendar box to hightlight, to circle to show to my six-year-old.

For her, in her six-year-young mind, all is lost. Her cousins are gone, and her aunt and uncle (with whom she has formed special bonds) and for her, it might as well be forever. We have no more trips planned to Europe any time soon and they are not sure when they’ll be back to California.

For Naomi, she loves them NOW, but my heart aches because I know a toddler’s memory is short. Even if we look at photos of her family, a first meeting sometime in the future will be unfamilliar and uneasy for her. She won’t remember them well.

But they were here. And we rode the roller coasters and we went to the park. We had special lunches with just the girls and opened gifts that had been brought from 5000 miles in a suitcase. The adults shared a relaxing dinner by the ocean and we talked and forgot what time it was.

It will be difficult to convice my daughter (and myself) that they are never far away in our hearts.

Happy birthday, dearheart.