Ode to running buddies

I was always a solitary runner. I started out alone, with just the company of my mix tape. Yes, I'm old enough to have made mix tapes, and young enough to remember that one of them had "Just Like Paradise" by David Lee Roth on it.

At my university, people seemed to fall into two camps: Very fit, and not at all fit. The people I saw running around campus looked like Olympians or something, and I was most certainly not. I was overweight and didn't know how to breathe and I had to stop all the time, and I was embarrassed that I was so bad at running. Back then I didn't like to be bad at anything or admit that I might not know how to do something. So, I trudged along, alone with my tunes.

And that sort of became my template. I really needed my music to run. Sometimes I was in a U2 mood, and one tape, post-college, had nothing but the grunge stuff of the day, like "Rusty Cage" (man, what a good running song), "Would?" by Alice in Chains and "Chloe Dancer" by Mother Love Bone. I could listen to that song over and over, putting one foot in front of the other and marinating in my early-20s angst.

For a long time, my music and my thoughts were my running buddies -- even when I got faster. So when a colleague, Rachel Charlton, asked if I wanted to run with her after work along the Berkeley waterfront, I was a little hesitant. I mean, what if she were super fast and she had to slow down for me? But it was great to have someone to run with, and as far as I know, we were at roughly the same pace.

Running with someone is a pretty intimate thing. Rachel and I talked about all kinds of stuff -- our husbands, our college years, our families, our co-workers. She got sick on a long run not too far from my house once, and she called me. I came right out to get her. We were running buddies, after all. We traveled to Santa Cruz to run a race together. When she crossed the finish line at her first marathon, I was there to cheer her on, though she was babbling incoherently and saying things like "I'll never do that again!" (I think she did, though.)

I was content to go back to my solo running when Steve and I moved up to Redmond. I was miserable in the gray chill of the Pacific Northwest, as anyone who ever asked "How are you?" found out pretty quick. I was constantly in a foul mood, and I wanted to be alone. So when my new friend Robyn suggested we run together, again, I was hesitant. I was a "serious runner" at this point, and I wasn't sure I wanted to sacrifice one of my runs for the sake of a budding friendship. What if she was really slow?

Uh, no. Robyn wasn't able to do the mileage that I could initially, but man, she was fast. And she was a great talker -- there's nothing more awkward than running with someone you hardly know and having nothing to talk about. She told me about her job, regaled me with funny L.A. anecdotes and stories of her childhood in St. Louis.

When I could catch my breath (seriously, she's like a gazelle, that one), I'd tell her about how hard it had been to move, to leave my friends and family, but also knowing that we needed a change. I confided in her about all kinds of things -- our struggles to have a family, my painful fight with my longtime best friend and my first marriage. We ran on the Sammamish River Trail, in the Redmond Watershed and raced in Bellingham and Seattle. She became one of my best friends, and I have running to thank for it.

When Robyn moved to Atlanta, I mourned the loss of my running buddy. But rather than go back to solo running, I started getting together with a group of women on Wednesday nights, and then Jennifer, a new friend (and Robyn's former boss, oddly) on Friday mornings. I still like to run alone sometimes, with my podcasts and my remixes for company. But I'm a busy working mom, and socializing while exercising is right up my multi-tasking alley. Plus, there's nothing quite like a friendship forged during heavy breathing, pre-dawn rain showers or a summer sunset. Sometimes, those are the friendships that go the distance.