Mother’s Day All May: Mother, Sister, Daughter, Runner

It’s Mother’s Day All May, an essay series for May that explores the intersection of parenting and running. Enjoy!

“I’ll never run,” my mother announced about 30 years ago. “Running would jostle my old bones.”

She waved her hands up and down to demonstrate jostled old bones.

At the time, I had just run my first marathon—much to my family’s perplexment. As a family, we valued fitness not athletic achievement. Think 1970s jazzercize not soccer. A marathon? How far is that, anyway?

At the time, my mother, then in her early 60s, had just moved in with my sister in the DC area to help with her kids. Recently divorced and seeking new horizons, my sister signed up for a Women’s Distance 5K.

Said Sister to me: “I figured if YOU could run a marathon, then I could run a 5K.”

Sister ran one 5K, then another. This in turn led to my mother, who would never run because, you know, jostled old bones, entering a 5K in DC. Mother called to tell me she’d won her age group. (She was the only one in her age group but nevermind.)

“What did you win?” I asked, envisioning a mug, a trophy.

“Two plane tickets!” she crowed. “Anywhere in the US!”

What? I have won my age group a few times, and even a (very small) race or two outright, but the most valuable thing I ever got was a frozen turkey.

Meanwhile, life goes on, I kept running. The first complete haiku-like paragraph my 2-year-old daughter strung together was after I came back from a run and swooped in to hug her.

Said Daughter, backing away from me: “Hot and sweaty. I don’t like it. Change!” She pointed an imperious chubby finger toward the bathroom.

Now 16, my daughter for years watched me leave the house and return later: hot and sweaty—I don’t like it!

“I’ll never run!” she announced on more than one occasion. (FTR: She does not share my DNA, so her athletic destiny was not encoded by me.)

Well, we’ve been down this road before, haven’t we? I think it was our third or fourth Thanksgiving 5K together, when dear daughter was 12 or so, that I watched her shoot off the start line, ponytail swishing.

Smug marathoner that I am, I thought to myself, “Oh, sure, go ahead. Let’s just see how long it takes me to catch you.” I imagined graciously allowing her to cross the finish line first. Laughing while crying emoji! She beat me by about 5 minutes.

Mother, Sister, Daughter, Runner.

Turns out there’s science behind this. Called “social contagion,” it basically means we do what we see people around us doing. The closer the connection, the more likely we’ll adopt the behavior. If I eat coffee chip ice cream, so will my daughter (and sister and mother). Turns out running is contagious. If nothing else, it gives us a shared language and safe conversational ground.

Today my mother, now 93, walks a 1.6-mile neighborhood loop every day with my sister, who has completed a marathon in all 50 states. They’ve only missed one day so far this year (because of ice).

My daughter will (occasionally) run a 1.6-mile loop around our neighborhood (not without complaint, let’s be real).

Fellow mother runners, every time we go out the door—and come back! hot and sweaty!—someone is noticing. We are showing daughters (and sons!) and mothers and sisters what can be done. And maybe probably one day they will lace up their sneakers too.

[Happy Mother’s Day, y’all!]

Social contagion is real, and we want to know: who have you inspired to run?