Inch by Inch

Lessons from the Slow Lane

I have run ten marathons, but the person who taught me the most about endurance was never trying to win a race. This story is about friendship, patience, and what it means to keep moving, even when the pace feels painfully slow.

Did you ever have a friend who was kind of your hero? Not someone who did anything overtly heroic, but someone whose way of being in the world you admire deeply. I have several of those, but today I want to talk about one in particular. Even though she lives far away, she is on my mind because of how she has been showing up for me lately. I am a few days into my second bout with COVID, and every morning and evening she texts to check in. She is the kind of friend who does not just show up for the good times. She is the kind who listens to me whine. To be fair, she has no hesitation complaining to me when things bother her, too. It is the best kind of friendship, the kind where you show up for each other under any and every circumstance.

I have written about her before, and if I tried to recount all we have been through in our twenty-plus years of friendship, I might have another memoir on my hands. But today I am sticking to the first time I knew that, even though I am older than she is, I wanted to be like her when I grew up.

We met before our graduate program began, and my first impression was that she was intimidating, and I was not wrong. She seemed competent at just about everything. But, as she would admit, not exactly everything. As I got to know her, she told me she could not ride a bike, got seasick the second she stepped off dry land, and never found success on a playing field. School, though, came easily to her.

We connected almost instantly. We shared similar academic interests, and our similarities ran deeper than that. Our backgrounds, our temperaments, and even some of our anxieties matched. Still, one key difference stood out. While we were both disciplined about school, I was the only one disciplined about exercise. I have been a daily runner since I was fourteen. Running has always been complicated for me, but for most of my adult life, it has been part of who I am. When I met this friend, I had already run nine marathons and was logging more than forty miles a week. Running was part of my identity, and, like most runners, I was not shy about admitting it.

Somewhere in those early months, my friend decided she needed a new kind of challenge. Getting a Ph.D., apparently, was not enough. So she asked if I would help her learn to run.

I used to run the two miles from my house to her apartment, and that is where we would start. In the beginning, she could run only a quarter of a mile before she needed to stop. She complained the whole way. Then I ran two miles home. Each week we added another quarter mile, running every other day together. I ran to and from her apartment at my pace, and then together, we went at hers.

She was slow, and she would be the first to tell you it was not always pretty, but she did it. Yes, she yelled at me, with love underneath, and yes, she whined, but she never felt shame about her pace. She was not in it for medals or times. She was in it to prove she could do hard things, that she could push herself beyond her comfort zone and grow. And she did. Years later, she trained for and ran a full marathon. She did not win a medal, but in my eyes she won something much bigger.

All these years later, she still runs several times a week. Sometimes she races. Every time we see each other, we lace up our shoes and go. We run as slowly as she wants, logging miles and complaints in equal measure. Sometimes she wonders why I am willing to slow my pace, and I wonder how she does not know. It is because, even in the depths of my eating disorder, pace has never mattered more than connection. I may be the faster runner, but she is my guide.

Whenever I take on something new and difficult, I think of her. She taught me that a quarter mile at a time adds up to a marathon. A quarter mile at a time adds up to growth. Eventually, it all adds up to becoming a truer, healthier version of yourself.

She never ran to prove herself to anyone but herself. Maybe that is what she is still teaching me: progress is not measured by speed or applause, but by the courage to keep going. So when I sit down to write, or try to grow in some new way, I think of her. I take it a quarter mile at a time. Inch by inch. Word by word. I hope that is what we all learn to do: keep moving, gently, toward our healthiest selves.