Join me as I share my unexpected journey into the world of marathon running. From the restless nights and pain of growth to the mockery of classmates, it was an unlikely path for a skinny-legged, knock-kneed girl to become a marathoner. This episode is about my unlikely introduction to running, my struggles, and my triumphs.
Shift gears with me as we explore the weight of expectations and how they can mold us. Hear the story of my PE teacher, the first person to predict my athletic potential, and how this prediction ignited an unquenchable flame within me. I also lay bare the stark differences between my supportive father and my disapproving mother and how their reactions influenced my journey. This episode is a touching narrative of defying the odds, chasing greatness, and confronting societal biases about women in sports. So, let's rewind the clock and relive those moments together. Prepare to be moved and inspired.
Join me as I share my unexpected journey into the world of marathon running. From the restless nights and pain of growth to the mockery of classmates, it was an unlikely path for a skinny-legged, knock-kneed girl to become a marathoner. This episode is about my unlikely introduction to running, my struggles, and my triumphs.
Shift gears with me as we explore the weight of expectations and how they can mold us. Hear the story of my PE teacher, the first person to predict my athletic potential, and how this prediction ignited an unquenchable flame within me. I also lay bare the stark differences between my supportive father and my disapproving mother and how their reactions influenced my journey. This episode is a touching narrative of defying the odds, chasing greatness, and confronting societal biases about women in sports. So, let's rewind the clock and relive those moments together. Prepare to be moved and inspired.
Speaker 1:
In today's episode of the Lucy Beatrix podcast, I'm sharing with you guys a story about my introduction to running as a kid, and it's a very unlikely path that I've taken in my life to get to where I am today or to have become someone who can say that they've run a 244 marathon or competitive times in other distances, considering it didn't look this way when I was a little kid. So this is a story. It's called giving up before I had the chance to start and stay tuned, because after I read this little piece from my memoir to you, I'm going to talk about what I think it means, what I learned and stuff like that. So enjoy.
Speaker 1:
During my growing years, frequent nightmares haunted my restless sleep, causing me to jolt awake with rapid reflexes. It was then that I would notice that my legs would burn in pain, my shins aching with such severity that I would rush downstairs to wake my father up. My legs, I'd whisper, trembling, they hurt. He would then slip out from his slumber and come to the couch to put icy hot on my throbbing shins and quads. Clearly, I was growing faster than my body could keep up with, and as the ointment sunk in, I'd fall back asleep, dreaming of the giants and fairy tales that I felt I related to. My legs seemed longer than my wave-like frame could keep up with. Despite their toothpick width, my legs were mighty. The first demonstration of this kind of strength was when I was in elementary school gym class. Our gym class held an annual mile run race around the little field behind the school. In class when we practiced running, my classmates often mocked me for how I ran, my limbs flailing around. I tried to see my own reflection in the windows of the school to get a better sense of what looked so funny. It was my shins, the way they splayed out. With every stride I seemed to be knock-kneed. Despite trying to run more normally, I couldn't control my unruly gait and I resembled Bambi on ice.
Speaker 1:
Still, my PE teacher, mr Bird, noticed untapped athletic potential in me. Until that moment he was the only person who presented this idea to me that I could be a talented runner someday. He told me that when the gym class put our times to the test for the mile race in a few weeks that my talent would outshine everyone else. He predicted that I would win the race. Grant the responsibility of holding the clipboard at the end of the race to write down everybody else's times. Mr Bird expected me to finish ahead of all the 7-year-old boys and girls and that I would be the one to write down the finishing times for everyone who was behind me. When he told me this that I'd be the real winner of the race my heart fluttered Me. I was so excited at the thought of winning something real, something tangible, and everyone who ever laughed at the way that I ran would somehow have to face that I was actually good at this. They would have to swallow their jokes and I would defy the odds.
Speaker 1:
For the next few weeks I went to the track behind my house with my dad and he timed me running laps. I had confided in my dad that my teacher seemed to think that I'd win the mile run at school Without missing a beat. My dad believed that I could win as well. It was natural for him to support me, since my dad expected all of his five daughters to be great at anything that we applied ourselves to. While I ran in an unconventional way or it didn't look like, I had the natural finesse and ability as an athlete. It was undeniable then that I was fast, but something happened to derail my spirits. Suddenly there was pressure for something that I didn't know I wanted as badly as I did when my teacher mentioned to me that I could be the winner.
Speaker 1:
In addition to feeling uncertainty to living up to the challenge of a landslide win at the mile race, the reaction from my mother about running was less than enthusiastic. The trips my dad and I made to the track behind the house were frowned upon by my mom. What she thought about running was very old fashioned or simply that women, or all girls, should not run. When the neighbor across the street, a woman in her 30s, was seen out in the neighborhood streets jogging, the rhetoric from my mom was less than favorable. There was always a strong distaste for the idea of females running. My mom came from an antiquated notion that a lot of women of her time did, and that was that it would be bad for a woman's fragile body to take the impact of cardiovascular endurance that running requires. But for me, even then, running didn't feel hard. In fact it felt like one of the most natural things that my body wanted to do. When I chased the dogs in the field behind the house or run around the house in circles, I felt as free and the most peaceful that I had ever felt. But this fleeting feeling of relief I'd find when my body was in motion was completely foreign to my mom and it surely wouldn't grant me any additional praise from her.
Speaker 1:
Before the mile race was set to begin, I had lost the feeling of excitement I first had when Mr Bird had predicted my landslide victory. Instead, I changed my tune completely. I ultimately made a commitment to myself that I wasn't even going to run the race at all, but instead I was going to walk the entire thing with some of the other girls in my class and wanted to stop and pick dandelions in the field. Instead, I had decided that I wouldn't even try to run that day at all. The risk of going and spilling my heart out there for something that girls aren't supposed to do it didn't seem worth it to me. Worse was the thought of falling short and not finishing first, as my teacher had predicted. Instead of starting the race and my fight for my life sprint or trying to beat all the boys the way I had in gym class the weeks before, I walked from the start and I took my sweet time for that 1,609 meter loop around the school. Ultimately, I came in dead last. I saw my gym teacher's face drop and look at me confused, wondering why I hadn't even tried to run the mile run that day as I crossed the finish line. I didn't explain myself. I remained quiet as he penciled in the 34 minutes at the bottom of a long list of my classmates and their finishing times and just remained silent. That was the first time I remember giving up on myself before I even gave myself a chance to start.
Speaker 1:
Here is what I love about that story and why I decided to share it. I love this story because it shows that you can be told something when you're really little and completely rewrite and change the script. On one hand, I was told that I was going to be this awesome athlete and I could win this race and beat the boys. That's pretty amazing. It's something that I forgot about as I was reflecting on my youth and where running actually came into the picture and why running came into the picture and also my resistance to running for so long. I was wondering where did that come from, and I think it came back to that moment of you know, having someone believe in me but then also facing this fear that well now if I don't live up to it, what's going to happen? And maybe it's better to not even try in case I fail.
Speaker 1:
Luckily, what I love about that is that things can change and we can grow. And you know, I've learned how to face that fear. I've learned how to show up at races knowing that I'm not going to win. And then I've learned how to show up to races where I have one, and I know what it feels like now to just do what you can do. And I think if I could have told my younger self something in that moment when my gym teacher was telling me that I was going to win a race was I would have told that little Lucy, it's okay if you don't. Like nobody, nobody said that it wasn't okay if I didn't, but I think that if I had just at least given myself a chance, I also think that it's important to reflect on how my mother's impact on me, what it meant to me back then.
Speaker 1:
So it's true, up until I was into my mid twenties, it was heavily discouraged to run as a girl. I would go home sometimes when I would, I was already living in New York on my own and it was like if I went out on a run that morning or if, like my family saw me going on a run, they were just like what are you doing? It's crazy? Like it really was seen as crazy, and I think it's kind of funny now because that has also changed majorly. My mom is not like that anymore. She's seen the light, she's come around the other side. It's really important for me to emphasize this because I feel like she's going to sit here listening to those thinking, oh my God, I was a terrible mother. She wasn't a terrible mother, it was just the way that things were.
Speaker 1:
And I go on in my book to describe how the way that my mom understood the world was very, very, very different because of her upbringing and just how, what she was taught, and so she only knew what she was brought up knowing, like what was bestowed upon her by her mother and her grandmother of. Women shouldn't run. And I was actually talking to my mom on the phone the other day about this, where it was just taught to her that it was dangerous for women to lace up and try to go jostle their body around. It would be really bad for their reproductive health to be running and putting impact on their body. But luckily we know all this stuff is not true. So I look back and I see how things have changed a lot.
Speaker 1:
It's kind of awesome to notice that and to say you can have one idea about something and then have that completely debunked and then in a later phase of your life go I was wrong and actually, you know, I had no idea anything about that. So I also think it's important that because of this because running was something that I kind of like had a glimmer of I could be something, and then completely discouraged and stopped all together, didn't even try that then when I did come into running, it was because I really wanted to, it was from my own internal motivation, and so I think that it's really cool that that is at the heart of why I run. And I look back at even the past year of running and how I've actually been. My training has been on ice because I've been injured and I haven't been racing or competitive like this entire year. But I know that if and when I do run, it's because it's an internal motivation. It's not for anyone else. And I think that the little girl in this story of little me she needed to find that internal motivation later on. So it's kind of cool for me to see that and I don't think of it so much as a sad story when I think about how things ended up turning around where then I found that internal motivation. So, yeah, that is my little story for today.
Speaker 1:
I hope you enjoyed it. I'm just going to keep sharing my book with you guys because it's fun and it's like I'm workshopping and workshopping in real time all these stories of my life and figuring out how they sound out loud, because I obviously want my book to be consumed as an audiobook. I see that for my book. I see people going and logging their easy miles, listening to my story and hopefully having that inspire them in some way. So thank you so much for listening. You can find me on Instagram. I'm at Lucie Beatrix, l-u-c-i-e, b-e-a, t-r-i-x. You can find me and say hi there and until next time, just be fast, win.