Yep, this means I beat my (admittedly totally arbitrary) time goal of 2:04:25 by more than 2 minutes. If we’re going to operate in the spirit of full disclosure, however, I must confess that I’d really hoped to bring it home under 2 hours. And in the spirit of full-full disclosure, I must confess that I might have gone out a little fast and found myself chasing a 1:55 until about the halfway mark. Ah, newfound wisdom I’ve supposedly gained since becoming a mom – where were you this morning?!

Still, I have no regrets about chasing an aggressive goal – except maybe for that brief, totally delusional period where I ran the first 3k in about 15 minutes (!) – since it means I know I left everything out there, and am still the same Beastie Boys-loving, pace-bunny-hunting, racing fool I used to be. And, for all I like to believe in race-day miracles, where the speed fairies descend from the heavens to plant kisses on my shoes that make me capable of running about a minute faster per kilometer than I did in training, in reality, you get the race you train for, and today was no exception. I raced as hard as I could on the training I’d done, and when I started to bleed time in the second half, rather than becoming discouraged or panicked about my tiring legs, I turned my thoughts to seeing my husband, my baby girl and my best friend waiting for me at the 20k mark. I actually felt a weird relief when the 2 hour bunny finally passed me, since it meant I wouldn’t feel rushed stopping to hug and smooch them. After all, no time goal can trump seeing little Alex beaming at me from her Baby Bjorn, with an expression that clearly meant, “I have no idea where you came from or what you’re doing, but I sure am glad to see you, Mom! Hey, what do you MEAN you’re not stopping to feed me? You better run, woman!”

And screw it up I have, at least prior to previous ‘big’ races in my life. Like that time I thought I pulled my groin doing speedwork while I was tapering for a Boston-qualifying attempt, but it turned out that I had given myself a pelvic stress fracture. (Of course, I didn’t realize that until I had run the race with a fractured pelvis, silly rabbit. Suffice it to say, I didn’t make it to Boston – just the water-running lane at my local pool.) Or that time I stayed out a little too late dancing the week before my first-ever marathon, got coughed on by some random dude, and wound up with a full-blown chest cold a few days before the race. Or that time I ate my own body weight in sushi the night before trying to set a 10k PB, and had to suffer through 47 minutes worth of spicy tuna burps in addition to the screaming cardiovascular and muscle pain that goes along with trying to set a 10k PB. You get the idea. I’m not the smartest sometimes.

Of course, my life has changed considerably since those self-inflicted pre-race mishaps, and as the days tick down to May 3oth, I’ve got my eye on the adorable, little 15-pound saboteur in my house as the likeliest source of pre-race calamity. In my last blog post I described the sleep-deprivation injuries already sustained during this training cycle, and if I’ve come to know my daughter at all in the last four months, I figure she’ll pull out all the stops to make sure Mom shows up at the start line so bleary-eyed, I might actually start running in the wrong direction once the horn sounds.

Then again, if anyone’s taught me the true meaning of endurance in the past few months, it’s my baby girl. From a 15-hour labour (with my husband calling out metaphorical kilometre markers with each contraction), to marathon nursing sessions (to give you some context, we watched all five seasons of Battlestar Gallactica by the time she was 8 weeks old), to strength-building rocking and shushing sessions at 3am, to super-sprints up the stairs to the nursery after catastrophic diaper malfunction, little Alex has taught me that, just when I think I’ve hit my final gear and have to grind to a halt, I can actually dig a bit deeper and keep going.  (Thankfully, all it takes is a smile or a giggle from my girl to remind me – it’s totally worth it!) As our soon-to-be cover girl and Yummy Mummy Club founder Erica Ehm so eloquently put it when I interviewed her last week, “motherhood is a frickin’ marathon…Except that there is no finish line in motherhood – you just have to keep going and going and going!”

Amen, sister.  And somewhere around the 17k mark of my half-marathon, I plan to remember those words.  It should be right around the time I see my husband and daughter cheering me from the sidelines, plant a big, sweaty kiss on ‘em, and find those extra gears for a mean finishing kick. Assuming I don’t eat too much sushi the night before.

It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon last week, so my husband and I decided to take our baby girl for a walk along the canal. We were all feeling a little peaked, as Alex’s recent growth spurt meant we were up every two hours every night the week before – sometimes every hour, in fact. But the sunshine (and the big, ol’ coffees we obtained at Starbucks prior) promised to cure all that ailed us. It was a little warm, so I started to slide my hoodie down my shoulders to take it off and put it around my waist. And just like that -bam- I’d rolled my ankle in about the only pothole in the history of Ottawa’s obsessively-maintained canal path, failed to steady myself with my hoodie-occupied arms, and landed shoulder-first on the ground. Well, technically, both my knees and right hand took a lot of the impact, but my shoulder was the real clutch player, saving me from smashing my face right into the asphalt. (Although, of all the people ideally suited to have a concussion, the new mom waking up every two hours with a hungry baby is right up there!) Apparently, as I lay, bruised and bleeding on the ground, I managed to holler “don’t let the stroller roll into traffic!” at my startled husband…good to know I can still bark orders from the prone position!

I assessed the damage as I limped back home: Two skinned knees and the beginnings of a nasty bruise on the right knee; road rash on my hand and shoulder, and pride that might never heal if I missed race day because of a pratfall. I skipped my run that day for obvious reasons, but the next day managed to hobble my way through what should have been a 10k tempo run. (I managed 10k, but the “tempo” best resembled that of an elephant marching band.)  Thankfully, the sore spot giving me the most trouble – a tweaked right knee – was sufficiently mended by my Sunday long run that I managed to pull off  my longest training run yet – 21.1k (precisely), proof positive that I can go the distance on race day, even under less-than-ideal conditions.  And I’m now quite certain that, if I ever manage to string together more than four consecutive hours of sleep sometime before my daughter heads off to university, qualifying for Boston will be a breeze.

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The question becomes, then, how to set a motivational-yet-realistic goal when I’m 1000% certain that I’m not going to be back in prime racing form by race day. “Prime racing form,” as defined by my pre-baby personal best, is a 1:42 half-marathon, though I considered anything in the 1:40’s to be a strong racing effort. These times were typically run during peak marathon training, though, when I was about ten pounds lighter and logging nearly double the mileage I am now – approx 70-80k a week, vs, the 35-40k of the present day. Oh, and those training miles were WAY faster.

To re-work my expectations in an appropriate way, I’m starting from the place of knowing that WHATEVER time I run on May 30th will be what my friend Tori terms a PPPB – a Post Partum Personal Best. I love the notion of the PPPB because it acknowledges how much our physical and emotional lives have been transformed by having a baby, and how any race effort thereafter is an unquestionable personal best. If I show up at the start line, I get a PB. And given how little sleep I’ve been getting lately, it will no doubt be one of the hardest fought PBs of my life.

That said, I always like to have some sort of number in mind. So, in order to make things interesting, I fed my 5k time from when I was 6 months pregnant (26:55) into the McMillan Calculator, and it’s given me a projected half-marathon time of 2:04:25. I figure as long as I can run faster than I did heading into my third trimester of preggo-ness, I’m doing alright. And if it takes me longer – well, you’ll know I decided to take the scenic route in order to dodge one more diaper change.

Then, baby Alexandra arrived, and precise training schedules were replaced by demand feedings, erratic sleeping, and a newfound fixation with diaper absorbency that has by far outstripped my old obsession with moisture-wicking running clothes. How, exactly, was I going to manage to follow a training schedule when I couldn’t predict what the next 15 minutes would hold, let alone the entire day or week? In the wise words of my training partner Sylvie, a multiple marathoner and mom of two, the new mom’s training schedule can only consist of “running whenever you can, sleeping whenever you must, and accepting that you will just always, always feel tired.”

And so it has been. I’ve ditched a tidy training calendar and its comfortingly boxed workouts to be crossed off week by week; instead, I’m training for the Ottawa Half-Marathon according to the following guidelines (since calling it a “schedule” is just too much of a stretch):

Run at least three times a week; although sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less.

Don’t let more than two days pile up between running days; although sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t.

When you have a chance to run…RUN! Even if it’s the day after a tough long run, or an especially sleepless night. If I waited for an ideal opportunity to get out the door, I just wouldn’t. Ever. Even to pick up the newspaper.

Give each run each week a purpose – short and zippy, long and easy, I try to change it up each time I go out in the vain hope that a bit of variety is at least sort of like having a training schedule.

Everything counts. I used to think anything under 5k wasn’t worth it; now I secretly count a brisk jog across the street to catch a traffic light towards my total weekly mileage.

No matter how many other runs I miss that week, the long run is sacred. And yes, there are weeks where the long run has been my only run.

Am I out of my comfort zone by taking such a relatively-unstructured approach to training? You betcha. But I also feel oddly liberated, like I’m truly setting my own course for the first time – one that fits me as both a runner, and a mother.

Lance on SNL

(Thanks to NBC’s ridiculous practices re. video file sharing outside the US, the only clip I could find of the sketch is part of a homemade montage of SNL sports sketches; Lance’s is third, after Peyton Manning.)

Since I returned to running a few weeks ago, I feel a little like Celebrity Ironman Lance: I’m never sure what to do with my hands when I run. As any new mom will tell you, on the rare occasion you find yourself NOT holding/feeding/carrying/cajoling/diapering/wiping/soothing/swaddling/burping or bathing your new baby, you’ll be frantically running about the house making use of your newly-freed hands to accomplish all of the things you can’t do whilst baby-wielding – sort of like the Tasmanian devil, but clutching a bottle of Febreeze. Anyway, heading out for a run unencumbered has come to feel all kinds of wrong, so to keep my arms from flailing in the air a la Lance, I’ve devised a few other activities to keep them busy. They include, in no particular order:

-Clutching my iPod so tight it jumps songs with almost every footstep

-Waving at stroller-pushing running moms like a lunatic; though since I don’t have my babe with me to identify myself as one of the tribe, most of them look at me like I actually AM a lunatic

-Yanking my too-tight running tights up in the hope that they’ll finally settle somewhere resembling a “waist.” Ah, someday.

-Doing the double-guns finger point and making high-pitched “pew-pew-pew” laser sounds at anyone who passes me – which is, let’s face it, everybody.

-Use my free fingers to count the number of things I’ll have to attend to simultaneously the minute I step back through the door.

At very least, unlike Ricky Bobby doing his first interview in Talledega Nights, I don’t just let them float slowly into mid-air. Thank goodness for that.

Ricky Bobby\’s floating hands

Nope, Run, Baby, Run is actually a three-word description of my running history to date. I ran (a lot; 6 marathons and countless halfs in the span of four years); then I had a baby (the delightful Ms. Alexandra, born in early January); and now I’m running again (slowly, sporadically, and humbly.) Against the advice of pretty much every sane person I know, I’ve registered for the Ottawa Half-Marathon at the end of May – in part to ensure that I actually *do* start running again, but also to test out how something that was once so all-consuming as my run training could be re-worked into a teeny bit of balance in an otherwise chaotic, sleep-deprived existence.

Of course, but a few weeks into the journey (to use my favourite reality show parlance – have you ever noticed that everything on reality shows – from finding love in a herd of catty bachelorettes to sustaining drunken head injuries -  is referred to as a ‘journey’?), I’m already ready to hoist on my shoulders any mom who manages to get out the door in a pair of running shoes, even if it’s just to run to the curb to grab the newspaper. I hope to use this blog, not just to tell my own little training story, but also to share the experience and wisdom of other new moms who are trying find some sort of physical and emotional equilibrium through running in these already-grueling post-partum months. Oh, and I’d also kind of like my old jeans to fit again.

Since I’m already a week late in posting my first entry, I also know finding the time to blog consistently will be a challenge. So forgive me in advance if, some days, my entries are more the cryptic scribblings of a an overtired lunatic than paragraphs upon paragraphs of eloquent blog-prose. See the description of my Monday workout, below, for an example of what I mean.

Hours slept: 5

Most consecutive hours slept: 1.5

Kilometres run: 3

Most consecutive kilometres run: 1 (had to stop three times to adjust the speed on Alex’s swing, which sits next to our treadmill. She’s still too little for the jogging stroller. )

Thoughts on race goal: What was I thinking?!