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?
Definitions
- august
- In the month of August where I live summer peaks and the days are often relatively hot (in the high 20s or low 30s) muggy, smokey and dry. Rain is infrequent, but when it arrives it comes in the form of drenching downpours and epic thunderstorms. We begin our runs earlier in the day because the local marathon runs late in the month and our training distances are maxing.
- dreadmill
- If I've gotta get some distance in and there is no other choice, I'll run on a treadmill. I get it. Convenience. And you can watch a little TV while you run. But damn, I do it for the adventure and the joy of being outside, so being stuck on a treadmill to log the distance for the sake of "fitness" is my personal torture device.
- gps watch
- This is not an endorsement for any particular brand or model. I'm a Garmin guy myself, but owning a dedicated watch that tracks all your running metrics is pretty much standard fare as a modern day runner.
- klick
- As a Canadian I run in metric. As a writer, I find the word kilometre clunky and clinical. I'll usually use the colloquial "klick" or "klicks" to substitute in for this.
- october
- Fully into autumn, October is a month of shifting seasons, short days, long shadows, and gorgeous sunsets. The cobwebs are hung on the eaves in preparation for halloween, and here in Canada we're running off Thanksgiving dinner for a couple weeks after a proper good meal mid-month.
- race
- You train and train and train some more, and then for no clear reason you pay a bunch of money to run as fast as you possibly can at a very specific time with a bunch of strangers along a course lined with more strangers (or along paths lined with trees if you are an ultra runner) at the end of which you are handed a medal and a banana and a sense of achievement unlike anything you will feel again (until you sign up for your next one.)
- september
- The days are noticeably shorter when we realize that September is upon us. The post-summer routine kicks in and people are back to regular work schedules and kids are back in school. It can still be warm, but the hottest days are behind us and most of the biggest races of the year are in the rear view. We savour September knowing winter is too soon to come.
- tapering
- Training is done in distinct phases, and tapering, or easing off in the week leading up to a race to allow for a mix of maintenance and recovery, is as much a reward for a successful effort as it is a vital part of a strong race.
- the kid
- I'm father to a daughter who has often been mentioned in my writing. She's an adult now, but I'm still not going to dox her on this or any site. She'll remain as anonymous as I can make her and you shall only know her as "The Kid"
