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  Praise for Running: A Love Story

  “Running: A Love Story is Jen’s ultimate faith healer, restoring belief not only in herself but life’s possibilities.”

  —Bart Yasso, Chief Running Officer of Runner’s World magazine and author of My Life on the Run

  “Once, I was running with Jen Miller in Philly when a crusty guy on the sidewalk yelled at her, ‘You run like a GIRL!’ I had no idea what he meant, but in this inspiring, honest and fierce book, Jen finally explains it.”

  —Peter Sagal, host of NPR’s Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me and columnist for Runner’s World magazine

  “Running: A Love Story is a frank and sometimes gritty look inside Jen Miller’s heart. She speaks for a lot of us as she reveals her self-doubts, and then finds the confidence to quiet them through running. How running does that to us is, like love, very simple yet totally mysterious. But here’s the bottom line: It works for everyone.”

  —Kathrine Switzer, author of Marathon Woman and the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon

  “A contemporary coming of age story that will speak to a generation of women, Running: A Love Story is the candid memoir of a young woman’s painful but triumphant search for her place in the world. Skillfully crafted and unsparingly honest, Running is a courageous memoir written straight from the heart.”

  —Amy Hill Hearth, New York Times and Washington Post bestselling author

  “Millions of everyday men and women have a love affair with running. No book I’ve read captures the richness and complexity of this widely shared experience—the exhilaration and heartbreak and everything in between—more faithfully than Jen Miller’s lovely memoir, Running: A Love Story.”

  —Matt Fitzgerald, author of more than 20 endurance sports books, including How Bad Do You Want It? Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle

  “Running: A Love Story is a ballad for anyone looking to discover themselves. Jen Miller is remarkably honest, candid, and approachable in her writing style. She narrates in a way that makes you feel like the two of you are tucked in the corner of a tapas restaurant sharing stories way into the late hours. As someone who has never been “good” at running, I was delighted to find this book to be about so much more than sneakers and mile marks. This is a book about finding love, discovering your breaking points, and letting go. Jen pieces together a moral I think the world needs: only when we fully let go can we finally grip tight to the stuff that really matters.”

  —Hannah Brencher, author of If You Find This Letter

  For my grandmother, Dorothy Miller Bums!

  Running: A Love Story

  Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Miller

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

  ISBN 9781580056113

  Miller, Jen A.

  Running: a love story / Jen A. Miller.

  LCCN 2015040211

  Miller, Jen A. I Runners (Sports)--United States--Biography.

  LCC GV1061.15.M55 A3 2015 I DDC 796.42092--dc23

  Published by

  Seal Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  1700 Fourth Street

  Berkeley, California

  Sealpress.com

  Cover design by Jeff Miller, Faceout Studios

  Interior design by Amber Pirker

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  Author’s Note: The author has changed the names and personal details of some individuals mentioned in this book to protect their privacy. Some timelines have been condensed for clarity.

  Ay me! for aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth.

  William Shakespeare

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

  Haruki Murakami

  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1: Warm-Up

  Chapter 2: Run for the Health of It 5K

  Chapter 3: Ocean Drive 10-Miler

  Chapter 4: Philadelphia Half Marathon

  Chapter 5: Bird-in-Hand Half Marathon

  Chapter 6: Philadelphia Marathon

  Chapter 7: Chicago Marathon

  Chapter 8: New Jersey Marathon

  Chapter 9: New Jersey Marathon

  References, Resources, and Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  chapter 1

  WARM-UP

  MAY 5, 2013

  New Jersey Marathon

  I closed my eyes as we approached the staging area. Mom drove, silent. She knew not to talk to me before races, and the only noise was me softly giving directions to Monmouth Park. It’s normally a thoroughbred horse race track, but that day it was the start line of the New Jersey Marathon and Long Branch Half Marathon.

  Under my sweatpants and sweatshirt, I wore an outfit I had tested in my sixth Ocean Drive 10-Miler five weeks before: two-toned blue tank top, black compression shorts (and Body Glide spread liberally on unmentionable areas that would otherwise chafe over the next four-plus hours), blue knee-high compression socks, black gloves, Timex sports watch. My yellow visor rounded out the ensemble. On my feet were the blue and orange Mizuno Musha 5s that I hoped would carry me over 26.2 miles in under four hours and thirty-five minutes.

  I first signed up to run this race back in 2010. It would have been my first marathon, but I ran myself into the ground and quit halfway through training. That year, temperatures had topped out at a humidity-soaked 89 degrees. This time around, the race was on a freak May cold day, with a forecast high of 53 degrees. If I was planning to blame the weather for not reaching my goal that day, I lost that out. I couldn’t have asked for a better day or better conditions to try, in my third marathon, to put together a race—one where I could take pride in the results, one where I didn’t crash and burn and beg and cry and almost crawl to the finish line in the final miles.

  I had eighteen weeks of training in my legs and lungs. I’d prepared using a controversial marathon training method blasted as dangerous, unhealthy, and unproven. It put me, a middle-of-the-pack amateur, through high-intensity workouts, topping out at fifty-seven miles a week—a volume that had sent me into daily naps and two dinners a night. One of my editors—a longtime runner—wished me luck with the training as if I were about to paddle a canoe into the Bermuda Triangle. I ran that schedule fresh out of a breakup with the man I thought I was going to marry, and somehow kept it up through living with my mother, re-settling my home, trips to Seattle, Florida, Las Vegas—white-knuckle clinging to those runs to keep me from falling over the edge into the black tar pit of my mind that kept telling me I was a failure.

  I had pushed my body to the brink to outrun my pain. And as I planted myself among the thousands of runners who would test themselves in either a half or full marathon that day, I felt more prepared than I had before my last two marathons. My body was humming. My muscles were in tune. I had panicked before most of the races I’d run in the last seven years—dozens of 5Ks and 10Ks and ten-milers and half marathons—but this time my breathing was steady and I was strong, like a horse set to charge out of the gate.

  Except for one thing: Doubt. Would this marathon end like the Philadelphia and Chicago marathons? Maybe I hadn’t rested enough in the taper, or the ankle that was sore last week would give out, or the training method I used really was snake oil, and I’d end up a carcass being picked over by seagulls on the streets of Long Branch.

  No, I told myself. No. Stop. That wasn’t going to happen. That cou
ld not happen. I had no excuses. That day was do or be humiliated. I had the training. All I had to do was push my mind out of the way, get the hell out there, and run.

  Mom stopped just short of the entrance to Monmouth Park. I got out of the car, said goodbye to her with a squeeze of her hand, and walked to the start.

  Teenage me would be more stunned to see me at the starting line of a marathon than if I’d grown up to become a mermaid, a unicorn, a professional baseball player, or a mermaid riding a unicorn picking off runners at first base.

  I detested running growing up, though “detested” might be too kind a description. How about loathed, despised, hated with the burning of a white-hot fire?

  I wasn’t anti-sport. I ran a lot, but that running had a purpose: to chase after a soccer ball or someone with a soccer ball, to get to first base, second, third, home. I was good, too. I was never that big or that tall, but I was stocky and solid, the inheritor of the bone structure of women who, for generations in Italy and Slovakia and Ireland and Scotland relied on their wide hips and matching shoulders to survive both harsh living conditions and birthing the requisite six to twelve children each. I have a huge family on my mother’s side—twenty cousins—so most of the girls and women I knew were related to me and built more or less the same, and I thought all women were like that. I kept up with the boys in games of tag or red light, green light played on the Bellmawr, New Jersey, cul-de-sac where I grew up—or I beat them.

  I knew how to throw my weight around, and was proud of it. I started playing soccer when I was five, the kind of soccer where players on both teams herd after the ball while kicking at each other’s shins. I had no qualms about shoving my way through the herd. I was never the fastest player through middle and high school, but I would still be standing, and running, deep into the game. By then, the skinny offensive players on the other team, who were usually given that role because of their speed rather than their stamina, started to flag. While my ball-handling skills weren’t great, that didn’t matter if I could still physically put myself between an offender and the ball, and if need be, knock her over with a well-placed shoulder to the chest. I was a wall of a defensive player in basketball, too, but gave up that sport because I didn’t like playing indoors.

  My best game was softball. I picked it up in third grade, made the town league’s all-star team that year and then every year after. I wasn’t the quickest in getting down the first base line, but no one on my team could beat me in the haul from first to third. Having the leadoff batter on third base to start the game isn’t a bad place to be.

  Despite all the running in softball and soccer games and practices, I never ran for the sake of running except when forced. That happened either through punishment of laps or suicide sprints for game errors, or from my dad deciding that I needed to get in better shape two weeks before the first high school soccer practice of the year. He expected me to get a scholarship to play softball in college, which is why I went to camps and batting cages in the off-season. Soccer would be a backup if softball didn’t work out, and I needed to be ready for the upcoming season.

  I spent most of my summer in a campground at the Jersey Shore with my mom and siblings while my dad worked during the week and came down on weekends. By late August we’d come back home to get ready for the next school year. Those days, I’d be stretched across the couch after a long day of swimming in our above-ground pool that we jumped into via a step ladder, biking endless loops around our town looking for dirt trails, lawn mowing, or, when it was too hot to do anything, reading a book, usually from the Sweet Valley High oeuvre.

  “Jenny!” my dad would yell when he walked in the front door, his dress shoes clicking on the tiled foyer floor. “Go run a lap!”

  “It’s too hot!” I’d yell back. My father came home from work every day at 5:30 PM, which sounds like a cooler time of day to run, but heat plus humidity plus August in New Jersey meant muck—still—that late in the afternoon. It’s not uncommon for temperatures to be stuck in the 90s until sunset. Going outside was like getting a hot, wet washcloth stuffed into your mouth.

  “You need to start conditioning for soccer!”

  No, he didn’t call it running. Conditioning. The name comes from the training boxers did to get ready for the ring. “Jog” first appeared in The Taming of the Shrew, but it wasn’t applied to running until done so by New Zealand running coach Arthur Lydiard. “Jogging” made its way to the U.S. in the 1960s after University of Oregon track coach and Nike founder Bill Bowerman went to New Zealand to meet Lydiard. Bowerman brought the word back with him, and slapped it on his 1966 running book called—aptly—Jogging.

  When I was a teenager in the mid-1990s, only skinny weirdos in tiny split shorts and calf-high white cotton socks “jogged.” I looked at joggers the same way I did guys who freaked out that my high school chemistry class had Mac computers and/or played Dungeons and Dragons: antisocial losers with bad hair and a special interest in antisocial behaviors, who self-selected to stay away from other people, especially girls.

  Running wasn’t exactly popular then, not like it is now. In 1995, there were 239,000 finishers in U.S. marathons and 420,000 in half marathons. By 2014, those numbers ballooned to 550,600 marathon finishers and 2.05 million half marathon finishers.

  The 1995 New York City Marathon had just over 26,000 finishers. By the time I ran it in 2014, I was one of more than 50,000—and thousands more had tried to get in (in 2015, runners had an 18 percent chance of making it into the race through a lottery system, according to the New York Road Runners, the nonprofit organization that puts on the race). Back in ye olden 1990s, when Pearl Jam was young and our family computer didn’t have a hard drive, there was no such thing as Couch to 5K or Color Runs, or even regular running groups that would have had people like me as a member.

  And by people like me, I mean women. I didn’t see women run anywhere other than my high school’s track. TV coverage of running was mostly limited to the Olympics, and marathons were condensed for broadcast. So even if I caught sight of women distance runners, they weren’t on TV for long. Today, according to Running USA, women make up 57 percent of all U. S. road race finishers, but then? They only dented the sport’s fender. Just 26 percent of marathon finishers were women in 1995, and women didn’t even have their own Olympic marathon when I was born (that came in 1984 when Joan Benoit Samuelson, with her brown short hair plastered to her face by sweat and white painter’s cap in hand, leapt across the finish line in Los Angeles to show that not only could a woman run long distances without passing out, but also that she wouldn’t leave her uterus on the track behind her).

  Still, running should have appealed to me. I enjoyed activities that were so boring they blanked my mind, like the solo walks I took on the beach in the summer, and weeding. I didn’t mind cutting the lawn, not just because I made $20 for doing so, but because it was monotonous. I’d spend the time making up short stories, usually about a poor but not impoverished girl saved from an always-tense family by a handsome man who may or may not have looked like Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid.

  But running? Never. Why in the world would I want to run just to run? Boring.

  Which brings me back to that couch reading about whatever mischief those perfect size sixes Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield were up to in that particular Sweet Valley volume. Of the four Miller kids, I was the most athletic, which is why I was pressed to condition while my two brothers played video games in the family room and my sister locked herself in her bedroom to mimic looks from YM and Seventeen and belted along to the soundtrack of Newsies.

  “Go. Now,” my father said, nudging me with his foot.

  He was not a man to be defied. By the time I was old enough to form memories, I knew my parents as a couple always on the brink of another fight so loud that I’d hide in my room. They’d been high school sweethearts and married after my father finished college. Mom took night classes but didn’t finish because that’s not what women in her str
ict Catholic family did when there was the possibility of marriage and babies on the horizon. She had four kids by the time she was thirty-one. When my father hinted he wanted a fifth, she had her tubes tied.

  When Mom started a part-time job working for a financial planner, this became the axis around which many of their fights turned, and they launched at each other with gusto (my mother might have been at a disadvantage because she was financially dependent on my father, but she had an Italian temper and a spine of titanium and could more than hold her own). My dad said she didn’t need a job and that it looked bad that his wife worked. She said she wanted to work and he should let her. But she wasn’t there during the day to scrub the kitchen floor, clean the bathrooms, or do the laundry at perfectly timed intervals, which threw him into a rage, which threw her into a rage right back, which in turn sent toys flying out the back door and me into my room to blast Meat Loaf on my Walkman and bang on a manual typewriter to get down my latest Prince Eric-inspired story.

  So as I lay on that couch trying to ignore my dad but hearing the pressure and volume build into his voice, I knew I had to go or that temper would turn on me.

  I put on my sneakers without bothering to change my clothes, then opened the front door into the furnace. A lap was one quarter-mile loop, as measured by the odometer on my father’s Oldsmobile, around the block that surrounded our cul-de-sac.

  I did a few soccer stretches in the driveway, then headed off down our four-house street, turning onto Oakland Avenue. That took me past the home of the mean girl who once told me my thighs looked fat when I sat down. Then a right turn past the house with the dogs that threw themselves against the fence as I ran by, to the corner liquor store, then another right onto the Creek Road, which was a two-lane artery between a couple of two-lane roads that served as alternate routes to the Jersey Shore. I wasn’t even halfway there, but already sweat popped out on my forehead and dampened the straps and cups of my training bra.