I never used to consider myself an athlete. Since elementary school, sports and I had mutually avoided each other. It wasn’t that I was not competitive—I was. But I was also a coward, and a perfectionist, and couldn’t imagine anything worse than losing. My inclination to try new things waned whenever there was the possibility of failure. It was easy enough to stick with the things I was naturally gifted at, and avoid everything—math, exercise—that made me wonder if I would ever have what it took.
Lucinda Bowen in the final stretch of the half-marathon in Asheville. (Courtesy photo)
Though I’ve always felt a fair bit of inertia when it came to getting my body out of a comfortable, seated position, after two kids, a difficult career change, and a significant bout of depression, in 2014 my weight was as high and my momentum as low as they had ever been. I knew I needed a change. One April morning, I took myself and my inertia out for a run. I did not get very far before there was a lot of wind-sucking and shuffling, but I made it around the block and back home quite proud of myself. So proud, I posted a selfie in my running clothes on Facebook. Some college friends saw it, and they invited me to join a new fitness group they were starting up. I agreed to join half sarcastically, but they didn’t get the joke. Apparently, these friends hadn’t heard how ludicrous it was to imagine a nonathlete like me being good at or enjoying exercise of any kind. But since they didn’t know, I was not about to tell them.
With my friends’ encouragement, I started running more regularly, and I joined a small-group personal training class at Swymfit. Twice a week Curtis taught me how to challenge and train my body through exercise. I liked the feeling of accomplishment, knowing I had done more by 5:30 a.m. than I used to do all day. But it was running that really captured my changing sense of what might be possible.
Runs filled with fear
I do not make running look easy. Still overweight and slow, even a jog makes me work hard and sweat, showing my effort on my easily reddened face. When I first started, I could go no more than a quarter mile without having to stop and walk, my lungs and quads burning. My brain was worse, full of panic and revolt, requesting more insistently with each step that I call my husband and get him to pick me up and take me back home to the couch. For a year, every run was filled with fear so strong it felt like it came from outside myself, as powerful as weather. But slowly, incrementally, I was making progress. I went from being able to run just a quarter mile, to a full mile, and then two. I started signing up for races. My first 5K, the 2014 Run for the Hills race in Harvard, took me almost an hour to complete, but it felt like a victory. After years of humiliation in gym class, I had never thought anyone would let me into a race. I had never thought I would want them to.
And then sometime last fall, in the midst of training for a 5-mile race, my self-talk changed. What had seemed impossible was not only possible, but enjoyable. Running had become a habit I relied on, not just for exercise, but for stress relief, downtime, and most surprisingly, pleasure. I went from wondering what I was doing out there to wondering what I could do if I decided to train for it. And right around then, one of my college fitness buddies suggested we all meet in Asheville, North Carolina, for a half-marathon. Instantly, I knew I was in.
Off to the race
Armed with a beginner’s training plan I found on the Internet, I started my weekly regimen of shorter runs, cross training, rest days, and long runs. Slowly, I increased my mileage. I started perpetually planning my routes, trying to cobble together loops with the right kind of grade, traffic frequency, and space on the shoulder so I could run safely. I saw Harvard differently when I explored it on foot, mapping the distance to a friend’s house or landmarks like Bare Hill Pond and the General Store. I learned which houses have chickens that might startle me while they grazed in the roadside bushes, and where there are dogs I’d rather run past from the other side of the street. Because Asheville is in the mountains, the course has lots of hills, so I started to seek out the hilliest routes I could find for practice. I ran up Pinnacle whenever I could, or if I was feeling really bold I’d take on the 9 percent grade of Old Schoolhouse, huffing and puffing as I pushed myself to reach the next mailbox or utility pole. Whenever I saw another runner, I’d wave, thrilled to imagine the two of us on the same team.
The night before the race I was seized with nausea so strong I was convinced I had the stomach flu. I woke multiple times, thinking at 11:30 p.m. that I had slept through my alarm, terrified at 2 a.m. that I’d missed the race. Finally I got out of bed. My old fear of failure told me it was improbable—crazy—for me to try to run a half-marathon at this weight, at this age. “All you have to do is start,” I murmured soothingly as I pinned my bib to the front of my shirt, the way you’d talk to a cornered cat you were trying to catch. By the time I reached the starting line, I felt a little better as I made chitchat with experienced runners who were easily as freaked out as I was. No one demanded to review my training plan or told me to drop and give them 20 pushups to prove my athleticism. I no longer felt like an outsider looking in.
A state of flow
And then we were running. The course and all the runners looked beautiful in the misty morning light. Within a mile, we were climbing up one of the huge hills featured in the course. I felt good, working hard but still loose and steady. “This is easier than Pinnacle,” I thought, surprised. And then I stopped thinking at all. For the first time in my life, my mind became blissfully quiet and my senses took over, and for the next 6 miles I ran in a state of flow. I felt attentive, strong, present, and calm. At mile 7, an unfortunate Honey Stinger gel food packet explosion left me sticky, and stickiness is the antithesis of flow. But I got myself cleaned up and by mile 8 felt calm again, eager to smile and wave to my brother and friends when I saw them at mile 9, and again right before mile 11. The course had nearly no spectators, so the few we encountered made a huge difference, and I was thrilled to have my own people clapping and calling my name at both cheer points.
If the first miles of the race were some of the best running miles of my life, the last two were some of the worst. I was having cramps in both calves by then, and the sun was beating down with no shade. We were running single file on a flat dirt path covered intermittently with enormous, golf-ball-sized gravel, and people kept kicking stones, so there was a lot of dodging and side-to-side movements. Unlike the rest of the course, this part was decidedly unbeautiful, a real slog. Somehow, mile marker 12 had disappeared, so what I thought was one long, horrendous mile was actually two. It felt like time had stopped, and I wasn’t sure how much farther I had to go. And then at the crest of a hill I saw my friend Sean standing there to cheer, and he called out the most beautiful words a human has ever said: “You have less than a quarter mile to go, and it’s all downhill.”
My goal in sight
I rounded the turn and there was mile 13 and the finish. I could see in the distance the official race clock, which read 3:00:09. My private goal had been to complete the race in less than three hours, and because I started at the back of the pack, I knew I had crossed the start line about a minute behind the race clock. Suddenly I had a chance to meet my goal, but only if I really hustled. I remembered what Curtis used to say to encourage us when we were doing intervals, which was, “Even a marathoner sprints at the end.” So I took a deep breath and flew, sprinting the last 10th of a mile and crossing the mat with an official chip time of 2:59:38.
Then hugs, tears, and a huge surge of pride and disbelief. After a lifetime of believing I didn’t have what it takes to be an athlete, I find myself in the position of becoming one. I wonder, what else might I be capable of? Before, not knowing my own limits and abilities would have terrified and paralyzed me. But that was then. Now I know I have what it takes to find out.
