The Kid ran her first ten klick training run recently.
My life as a dad-runner has come full circle in the last few months. I often tell people I got more serious about running when I became a dad. The Kid had just recently been born and we were rocking late night routines and feeling older and a little bit broken in our early thirties—I spontaneously signed up for a local running clinic to lock in the casual neighbourhood jogging I’d been attempting, and the rest is history.
The Kid will be nineteen shortly after this post goes live, and after spending the last year in the gym working her way up to a comfortable five klick run on the dreadmill, she invested in a GPS watch and has been running outside. Often she goes out on her own, but occasionally she joins the running crew on one of our training outings.
As I write this on a Monday morning, she joined us for a Sunday training run, swearing she was going to turn back for something shorter, but persisting of her own volition to finish a little over ten klicks. We were tapering for our upcoming race, so it was a comfortable ten klicks and it was pretty perfect weather, besides.
Over the years I’ve seen running become family business for many of my running friends. Their kids hit the right age—usually late teens or early twenties—and they show up for a while, figure out that while our steadfastness is motivating our speed is a generation gap. Many of those kids have gone on to amazing finishes and crazy running adventures.
Running, it seems, can be a family business in more ways than one. Who’d have thunk it?
