{"id":1471,"date":"2012-05-17T18:24:13","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T18:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/?p=1471"},"modified":"2012-05-17T18:24:13","modified_gmt":"2012-05-17T18:24:13","slug":"how-i-accidentally-walked-thirteen-miles-pushing-a-stroller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/?p=1471","title":{"rendered":"How I Accidentally Walked Thirteen Miles Pushing A Stroller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Nik decided at the beginning of the year to set some goals for herself. Among them was \u201cTrain For And Finish A Marathon.\u201d This is a lofty goal for a girl whose doctors have told her the congenital herniated disc in her spine prohibits her from running. I like to tease her that this should pave the way for an awesome nickname like \u201cZombie Bait.\u201d Not out loud, to her face, of course. That would be suicide. What I say to her face is, \u201cIt\u2019s okay that you can\u2019t run. If the zombie apocalypse is ever upon us, I will stay with you and we\u2019ll be devoured together.\u201d<\/p>\n

I say this because by decree of a loving, sensitive wife she has to reply, \u201cNo! I\u2019d have to be the bait so you could get our daughter to safety!\u201d Then I can just look at her like I\u2019m unconvinced but inside I know I\u2019d totally hand her the shotgun and flee to the super awesome treehouse fortress Callie and I set up and I\u2019d look back to see Nik taking down two, three dozen zombies in a really badass way with that shotgun and a tear of pride would slide down my face because let\u2019s face it, shotguns are really loud and she hates loud noises. But she\u2019d brave it out. For me. For us.<\/p>\n

But I was talking about marathons. The vague goal that Nik set out to accomplish turned out to be vague enough to permit her to accomplish it with a few added specifics: namely, she would only do a half-marathon because full marathons are the same punishing distance as half marathons, twice. Also she would walk it because she doesn\u2019t frequently adhere to doctor\u2019s orders but when they say, \u201cThe next time you run you may snap your spine in half and spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair,\u201d Nik is moderately more likely to take them seriously. It does pain me a little that her doctors know the only way to get her to listen is to over-exaggerate like that (at least, I assume it\u2019s an over-exaggeration because a weakness like that sounds like the kind of thing that would offset a super-power, such as the ability to melt steel with her eyeballs or draw a perfectly straight line without the aid of a ruler).<\/p>\n

Still, walking a half-marathon isn\u2019t a watered-down goal. I realize some of you may be thinking, \u201cDude, that is totally a watered down goal,\u201d which is fine, no one is policing your thoughts. But if you actually come right out and say that to me, I will devise a sinister contraption that forces you to walk and I will use it on you for thirteen point one miles and you will have no choice but to agree with me that walking a half-marathon is Serious Business.<\/p>\n

I know this because I walked the half-marathon, too, albeit accidentally.<\/p>\n

What happened was that Nik spent weeks training for this thing. I am not exaggerating in the least when I say that at one point she walked nine miles in driving, icy wind and rain. She came home that day soaked to the bone and took the hottest shower I\u2019ve ever conceived of (I know this because the steam alone in the bathroom when I went in to check on her an hour later scalded me). She walked up a hill so steep that its several hundred yard length was specifically designed by the training directors to equate to an entire mile of the course that week. She got out of bed before nine in the morning. On Saturdays. She was devoted.<\/p>\n

As for me, I slept in and hung out with Callie. You want to know what we were doing while Nik was fighting the sleet and hypothermia and possible ankle ligament damage? Wait, did I mention that the week before the training began, Nik sprained her ankle? Yeah, that totally happened. She was on crutches with an air cast the week before she started training. It didn\u2019t stop her. But while she was fighting with the elements and her body to achieve her goals, Callie and I were eating Cocoa Puffs and watching cartoons. In a way, I felt like I was showing support. I have no idea what way that was, looking back. It probably seemed like I was showing the opposite of support. I really seems now like I was showing\u2026 I dunno, what\u2019s the opposite of support? Neglect. Yes, I was showing neglect. Although I wasn\u2019t neglecting our daughter. Maybe that\u2019s where I was coming from? It seems really fuzzy now. You know how it is when you get too much sleep.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Nik trained and I watched cartoons with Callie. And then the big day arrived and we all got up early and drove over to the course where the marathon would take place. I knew Nik was nervous and it didn\u2019t help that I decided to be a colossal jerk the night before. What happened was that we were in Target, which is a store that I\u2026 well I don\u2019t hate it. I don\u2019t like it, either. I mean, it\u2019s a store. I can\u2019t really direct strong emotions toward it. But let\u2019s say this: It\u2019s a store that Nik thinks of as a kind of second home, like a combination of Mecca and Disneyland. She can spend hours there. Days. I think the highlight of her year to date (and I\u2019m including meeting this lofty marathon goal in the equation) was when they opened a new Target, a few exits down the highway from the old Target. She was so excited when she walked in she was buzzing. She made plans\u2014plans!\u2014to visit a Target in San Diego when she went down there. This is a town that boasts one of the most famous zoos and waterpark\/aquariums in the country, and she\u2019s made sure to put, in ink, Target on the itinerary. My point is that she takes her Target shopping very seriously. So we were in Target so she could get some appropriate marathon-walking pants. And I got cranky.<\/p>\n

I always get pretty cranky when I\u2019m shopping. I just don\u2019t like it. I don\u2019t like spending money, I don\u2019t like not knowing exactly what needs to be purchased when I step into the store, I don\u2019t like the fact that shopping with a toddler is kind of like going to the DMV with a rabid wolverine tucked under your arm. It bugs me, and Nik and I shop in completely different ways. By that I mean, Nik shops and I walk into a store and scowl at everything. So I was in a bad mood and Nik was stressed and nervous because it was getting late and she still hadn\u2019t found the perfect pair of marathon-walking pants so we started quarreling and didn\u2019t stop until long after Callie had gone to sleep and the clock was saying ridiculous things like, \u201cHey, Nikki, you have four hours until you\u2019re supposed to trek 13.1 miles and you aren\u2019t asleep yet, and in fact you\u2019re still arguing about whether or not it is perfectly reasonable to spend $13 on a tarp to keep the neighborhood cats from pooping in your daughter\u2019s sandbox!\u201d Our clock is pretty much a punk.<\/p>\n

We had sort of kind of smoothed it over at some obscene hour and we were all kind of under rested and tense but we got to the park on time and Nik had her cool little number bib on and her time-marker strip laced into her shoe and her new (admittedly very fetching) marathon-walking pants and Callie was blearily rubbing her eyes while I looked on proudly. And then the announcer guy got everyone started and Nik took off and we watched the crowd disappear and hung out for a few extra minutes before I told Callie, \u201cOkay! Let\u2019s go get some breakfast and then we can go find a spot down the path to watch Mommy go by and cheer her on!\u201d<\/p>\n

To which Callie replied, \u201cNo!\u201d<\/p>\n

I laughed and walked out to the parking lot. She\u2019s two, so her answer to most things is, \u201cNo!\u201d It\u2019s actually cute the way this is such a default setting for her that you can ask her something where the answer is clearly yes, like \u201cHey Callie, do you want to eat candy for dinner?\u201d And she\u2019ll say, \u201cNo\u2014um, yes!\u201d So I didn\u2019t think much of it. Until I got to the car.<\/p>\n

\u201cOkay, up you go!\u201d I said, trying to get Callie out of her stroller and into the car seat.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo! No drive! No car! No!\u201d<\/p>\n

I tried to reason with her. \u201cWell you can\u2019t stay in your stroller all day!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo drive! No leave Mama!\u201d<\/p>\n

I kind of understood her concern, since her mother had just wandered away with a crowd of strangers, but it\u2019s not like she\u2019s so attached that she has some kind of crippling separation anxiety, so I tried to explain again the concept of a marathon, of Mommy doing something important for herself and to raise money for the American Heart Association. And I tried to reiterate the idea of breakfast, which was really where my heart was at \u00a0in the initial plan. She was steadfast, and she broke down in tears.<\/p>\n

True, saying a toddler broke down in tears when she didn\u2019t get her way isn\u2019t exactly headline news. But amid her blubbering, snotty, red-faced and mostly incomprehensible fit, I caught the notion that she felt she would be abandoning her mother if we left. It didn\u2019t matter how much I tried to explain that we were actually going to go ahead in the route so we could do the opposite of abandonment and could in fact cheer for her and encourage her to keep going, she was steadfast.<\/p>\n

Now, I outweigh my daughter by some hundred and (murfle murble) pounds, so I could have forced the issue then and there, plunking her down in her car seat, trying to block out the wailing protestations and gone and gotten breakfast. This was my first inclination. But I try to be reasonable with her, try to encourage her to feel like she\u2019s a part of the decision making process so she can take pride in her choices and we can all live together a little more harmoniously. So, looking for opportunities like that, I made a terrible miscalculation. I said, \u201cHoney, our only option is to go try to find a spot to see her pass by, or try to catch up with her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes it\u2019s freaky how a child who will ask, \u201cWhat you say?\u201d as if she is a foreign exchange student who has memorized but a single phrase in an English dictionary when you tell her to clean her room or get into bed or brush her teeth, will suddenly have a very comprehensive grasp of diction and implication when it serves her purposes. \u201cYes,\u201d she said enthusiastically, \u201ccatch up with Mama!\u201d<\/p>\n

I laughed, because that was absurd. Nik had been gone for well over thirty minutes at this point and I was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. Plus, Callie was in her umbrella stroller which I had already had to fight to push across a three-foot stretch of recently mowed grass. \u201cAnyway, I said, we\u2019d have to get in the car just to go home and get the stuff we need to try and catch up with her.\u201d A couple of things should be pointed out here. It had been discussed previously, the possibility of me doing the half-marathon in an unofficial capacity. I didn\u2019t really want to bother registering or fundraising. Wait. That sounds bad. It\u2019s not that I didn\u2019t want to raise money for a good cause. But Nik and I have been together for so long that we don\u2019t really have social circles that don\u2019t overlap. So if I had to try to raise a certain amount of money on top of what Nik was raising, we\u2019d be double dipping into our same friends and family. The point is, this wasn\u2019t something I needed to check off my bucket list, but it was possible I could support Nik in a direct way by going along with her. In the end we had decided not to because Nik had plan A which was to walk with a person she met through a friend who was also in the half-marathon and she had plan B which was to enjoy her carefully crafted playlist as she went head down and got into the zone for the whole course. Besides, we didn\u2019t find anyone to watch Callie and we weren\u2019t sure how she\u2019d do for hours in her stroller.<\/p>\n

So the idea of me going on the walk itself wasn\u2019t fully out of the question, it was just that it didn\u2019t make sense at the time.<\/p>\n

And then I saw my gym bag.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s significant to note that my gym bag is never in the car. As in, this was probably the first time it had been in there since I brought the bag home from the store (Target, natch). It is also worth noting that it was improbable that not only was the bag there, and fully packed, but the workout clothes inside were unused. The bag was there because Nik had picked me up from work the day before and the items were still laundered and usable because I had brought the bag to work intending to go to the gym but hadn\u2019t made it due to some work crisis or another. And by work crisis I mean that when I got to work Friday morning I threw the bag on my desk and walked upstairs to the rest room and took a nap.<\/p>\n

I should clarify that the \u201crest room\u201d is distinct from the \u201crestroom\u201d because the latter suggests that I took a nap in a public toilet. That\u2019s actually maybe not all that out of character for me to sleep while sitting on the can, but in this case my work has this room with a fully reclining leather chair that has no windows and can therefore be made pitch black. It\u2019s called the rest room and it\u2019s awesome. Way better than the gym, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n

So it turned out that just by happenstance, I have a fresh set of workout clothes (ideal for walking a half-marathon) and a jogging stroller. Now, I make it a point not to lie to my daughter. About anything, really. I know that it makes my life more difficult, especially when you get to the grey area of half-truths and make-believe. For example, it makes Christmas particularly dicey because Nik insists that Christmas isn\u2019t Christmas for a kid unless Santa Claus is involved. However, I refuse to go through the theatrics of perpetuating the illusion of the existence of Santa for some nebulous benefit of my daughter. My thought is, how can I tell her down the road to believe me when I say that promiscuous sex and drug use are bad and she just has to take my word for it when she could say, \u201cYeah, like I took your word for it that some fat guy could bypass the sanctuary of our home security to eat our snacks and drop off some unknown packages? This was a post-9\/11 world, Dad! Anything could have been in those boxes!\u201d It makes it difficult because I see the appeal of a happy holiday tradition but I don\u2019t want to set a bad precedent. And here I was again, facing the choice of whether to admit to my daughter that we didn\u2019t actually have a valid reason anymore to get into the car, and could actually do what I had suggested, even though at the time I hadn\u2019t really meant it as a viable option.<\/p>\n

In the end, I did what any reasonable parent faced with the prospect of changing their pants in a parking lot and then walking thirteen miles pushing a jogging stroller would do: I tried to talk her out of it. The crux of my argument was this: If we started down this path, if we actually tried to catch up with Mommy, she would be stuck in her stroller for hours. Literally, stuck. For hours. Because we have one car, which would be back at the starting line, and once we got to about the five mile mark, it would be functionally no different to us to simply finish the entire looping course as it would be to turn around and head back. Plus, I reminded her, that would be cheating and against the spirit of what Nik was trying to accomplish. It was a solid argument, I think. But she was unswayed. \u201cYes,\u201d she decreed, \u201ccatch Mama.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I took off my pants in the parking lot, transferred Callie to her jogging stroller, collected as many bottles of water and random snack food as I could find in the trunk (which was actually a lot because Nik is like a super mom wrapped in a Boy Scout with all her preparedness\u2026 and I just now heard that simile the way most of you probably heard it and realized how icky it sounds so let\u2019s just move on and forget I ever said that), and set off. Now, it should be noted that by this time Nik had a forty-five minute head start and it took me quite a while to figure out exactly where the course was because they had altered it to accommodate the fact that the starting line is also the finish line. So I wandered around a bit lost for another fifteen minutes or so and finally got on course about an hour behind Nik.<\/p>\n

My thought was to run as much as possible until I caught up, but I had also forgotten an inhaler and for whatever reason the primary triggers for my asthma are (in order): running, laughing, cats. I love laughing and we own a cat, so the only one I can usually ever really avoid is running. In this case though I felt it important to at least make the effort to try and catch up with Nik before she reached the halfway point and turned around. Even still, I assumed I would probably just meet her coming back and since I wasn\u2019t wearing one of those timer loops on my shoelaces, it wouldn\u2019t matter if I went the full distance or not. But then as I was half-walking, half-jogging the trail, I sent a text message to Nik and after a few status updates on my progress, she decided to stop at a rest station around mile four and wait for me.<\/p>\n

It still took me close to an hour to catch up with her, even with my half-jog, which she explained by saying that she had been in power-walk mode until I told her I was coming up behind her. I mostly took it to mean that I am a really slow runner, although I got to blame a lot of it on having to push Callie.<\/p>\n

Once reunited, we started walking together and although Nik kept saying how glad she was that I decided to join her, I wasn\u2019t so sure. I mean, I was afraid that I was kind of trampling on her accomplishment, you know? Like, she trains for this thing for weeks while I watch cartoons and eat cereal and then on the whim of a persuasive two year-old I decide to just do a half-marathon for no real reason as if it were the kind of thing I randomly decide to do all the time. Like, \u201cOh, hey, I have eight hours to kill, why don\u2019t I just swim to Petaluma?\u201d Let me tell you something: That has never happened. Actually, I don\u2019t even know if that could happen. I\u2019m surprisingly dense about my regional geography. Also, I\u2019m pretty sure that the coastal areas near me are all marshy, salt ponds. But I\u2019m getting off the point. The point is, deciding to do feats of physical endurance\u2014unless you count eating three bags of Fritos in one sitting or playing World of Warcraft for sixteen hours straight physical endurance feats\u2014is not my modus operandi.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll spare you the step-by-step re-enactment of the trek, but let\u2019s just hit the highlights:<\/p>\n