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Alamb

Author/Television Reporter

Amanda Lamb is a professional television journalist and author. She covers murder trials by day and reads Dora the Explorer to her children at night. Somewhere in between all of that she writes about those parenting moments that catch each us off-guard in a crazy, chaotic, and wonderful way. Aman...

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Run Baby, Run

Amanda Lamb

Let me start by saying I had no business running a half-marathon.  I did one five years ago in between babies, but I trained for it.  This time when my girlfriends asked me to do it several months ago it sounded like a great idea.  The one thing I didn’t figure in was the amount of time it would take to train for such a race.

My husband leaves for work at the crack of dawn so that he can be home in the evening with the girls because my job requires me to work late.  This leaves me only pre-dawn exercise time.  In the evening I have a finite amount of time with the girls, so working out is not an option.  Our weekends are predictably full of children’s activities leaving me yet again little time to exercise.

So we did what we could.  My neighbor and I would squeeze in a run here and there- mostly four to six milers, nothing even approaching a half-marathon.  She has three children, one who just turned one, and thus has even less time than I do.

But for some reason the stars aligned today.  We were three women determined not to run  fast, but determined to finish.  We were three women with seven children and three careers between us, three women bound by the belief that we could do it, and we would do it together.  Somehow we pushed through the knee pain, the shin pain, and the sheer exhaustion of being up in the middle of the night with kids.  We talked about everything from our jobs, to our kids, to whether or not we dressed correctly for the weather. 

When we crossed the finish line it was about so much more than how fast we ran, it was about setting a goal and accomplishing it.  It was about three mothers who for just a couple of hours got the chance to feel invincible.  It was about our little girls on the sidelines watching their mothers racing across the finish line with their hands in the air, giving them the belief that someday they too will get their chance to feel invincible.

In our post-race bravado on the way home we talked about doing another one, maybe in a few months, maybe this same one next year.  I’m not so sure.  Some things in life you only need to do once (in my case twice...) we’ll see.  The bottom line is we did it, and I’ve got the medal to prove it.