Adrienne Board Final
To celebrate our first four stops on the Tales From Another Mother Runner Tour (#TAMRTour for short…TAMR rhymes with BAMR, btw), we’re going to profile four essayists on the East Coast who are going to be celebrating with us in person. 

First up this week is Adrienne Martini, who you already know from Martini Fridays.

A few things before we get to Ms. Martini:
—She’s going be at the party in Andover, MA (RSVP here!) tonight, and at the party in Syracuse, NY (RSVP here!) on Tuesday, March 10.
—While Adrienne has to head home to her 2 kids and 1 husband and 1 corgi, we, along with other writers, are going to be in Freehold, NJ on Wednesday, March 11 (RSVP here!) and in West Hartford, CT on March 12 (RSVP here!)

Finally, if you can’t join us, but have purchased and found the time to read Tales From Another Mother Runner, we’d love, love it if you could take a minute a put up an honest review on Amazon, which, reasons we don’t understand, is huge in spreading the TAMR word and helping women find the book. Thanks in advance!

Ok, enough from us.

My running history: I was the kid who got a doctor’s note so that I didn’t have to run the mile in high school gym class. Yet, I hit 40, saw a very round woman in some vacation photos, and started a couch-to-5K. Now I’m three half-marathons in and would be bereft if I had to stop.

My writing history: started in Austin, Texas, where I wrote theater reviews for The Austin Chronicle. Five years later, I was the Arts and Entertainment editor for a newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee. Freelance jobs for outlets like Cooking Light and American Theater followed. Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood and Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously, my two non-fiction books were published in the 21st century by Simon and Schuster.

My essay, “Recipe for Double Digits” talks about: My first 10-miler. It was  psychologically overwhelming – or it was for me, at least. I’d run 9.5 miles the week previous and should have had confidence that I could push through that last half mile but spent far too much energy worried about my legs exploding (or something) when my GPS clicked over to ten. But pushing through that fear and running that distance which leads to thinking deep (and not so deep) thoughts.

Writing Martini Fridays: has given me a deep appreciation for the tribe of mother runners who take the time to engage with my words. I felt their strong hands firmly push me through my first half marathon and knew they’d also support me if I fell. Plus—and this can’t be understated—the column gives me a place to put all of the wacky things that wander through my head on even the most simple of runs.

My corgi has never run with me because: She’s too easily distracted and we’d likely wind up in a tangled heap on the sidewalk.

Recent horrible run: One of my most recent long runs was seven miles on an indoor track, which was the less horrible option than seven miles on a treadmill at the Y. The run wasn’t so much “horrible” as “existentially crushing.”

Next up on my running calendar: The Pittsburgh Half Marathon on May 3 and the Wineglass Half in Corning, N.Y., in October.