How I Accidentally Walked Thirteen Miles Pushing A Stroller

I should clarify that the “rest room” is distinct from the “restroom” because the latter suggests that I took a nap in a public toilet. That’s actually maybe not all that out of character for me to sleep while sitting on the can, but in this case my work has this room with a fully reclining leather chair that has no windows and can therefore be made pitch black. It’s called the rest room and it’s awesome. Way better than the gym, that’s for sure.

So it turned out that just by happenstance, I have a fresh set of workout clothes (ideal for walking a half-marathon) and a jogging stroller. Now, I make it a point not to lie to my daughter. About anything, really. I know that it makes my life more difficult, especially when you get to the grey area of half-truths and make-believe. For example, it makes Christmas particularly dicey because Nik insists that Christmas isn’t Christmas for a kid unless Santa Claus is involved. However, I refuse to go through the theatrics of perpetuating the illusion of the existence of Santa for some nebulous benefit of my daughter. My thought is, how can I tell her down the road to believe me when I say that promiscuous sex and drug use are bad and she just has to take my word for it when she could say, “Yeah, like I took your word for it that some fat guy could bypass the sanctuary of our home security to eat our snacks and drop off some unknown packages? This was a post-9/11 world, Dad! Anything could have been in those boxes!” It makes it difficult because I see the appeal of a happy holiday tradition but I don’t want to set a bad precedent. And here I was again, facing the choice of whether to admit to my daughter that we didn’t actually have a valid reason anymore to get into the car, and could actually do what I had suggested, even though at the time I hadn’t really meant it as a viable option.

In the end, I did what any reasonable parent faced with the prospect of changing their pants in a parking lot and then walking thirteen miles pushing a jogging stroller would do: I tried to talk her out of it. The crux of my argument was this: If we started down this path, if we actually tried to catch up with Mommy, she would be stuck in her stroller for hours. Literally, stuck. For hours. Because we have one car, which would be back at the starting line, and once we got to about the five mile mark, it would be functionally no different to us to simply finish the entire looping course as it would be to turn around and head back. Plus, I reminded her, that would be cheating and against the spirit of what Nik was trying to accomplish. It was a solid argument, I think. But she was unswayed. “Yes,” she decreed, “catch Mama.”

So I took off my pants in the parking lot, transferred Callie to her jogging stroller, collected as many bottles of water and random snack food as I could find in the trunk (which was actually a lot because Nik is like a super mom wrapped in a Boy Scout with all her preparedness… and I just now heard that simile the way most of you probably heard it and realized how icky it sounds so let’s just move on and forget I ever said that), and set off. Now, it should be noted that by this time Nik had a forty-five minute head start and it took me quite a while to figure out exactly where the course was because they had altered it to accommodate the fact that the starting line is also the finish line. So I wandered around a bit lost for another fifteen minutes or so and finally got on course about an hour behind Nik.

My thought was to run as much as possible until I caught up, but I had also forgotten an inhaler and for whatever reason the primary triggers for my asthma are (in order): running, laughing, cats. I love laughing and we own a cat, so the only one I can usually ever really avoid is running. In this case though I felt it important to at least make the effort to try and catch up with Nik before she reached the halfway point and turned around. Even still, I assumed I would probably just meet her coming back and since I wasn’t wearing one of those timer loops on my shoelaces, it wouldn’t matter if I went the full distance or not. But then as I was half-walking, half-jogging the trail, I sent a text message to Nik and after a few status updates on my progress, she decided to stop at a rest station around mile four and wait for me.

It still took me close to an hour to catch up with her, even with my half-jog, which she explained by saying that she had been in power-walk mode until I told her I was coming up behind her. I mostly took it to mean that I am a really slow runner, although I got to blame a lot of it on having to push Callie.

Once reunited, we started walking together and although Nik kept saying how glad she was that I decided to join her, I wasn’t so sure. I mean, I was afraid that I was kind of trampling on her accomplishment, you know? Like, she trains for this thing for weeks while I watch cartoons and eat cereal and then on the whim of a persuasive two year-old I decide to just do a half-marathon for no real reason as if it were the kind of thing I randomly decide to do all the time. Like, “Oh, hey, I have eight hours to kill, why don’t I just swim to Petaluma?” Let me tell you something: That has never happened. Actually, I don’t even know if that could happen. I’m surprisingly dense about my regional geography. Also, I’m pretty sure that the coastal areas near me are all marshy, salt ponds. But I’m getting off the point. The point is, deciding to do feats of physical endurance—unless you count eating three bags of Fritos in one sitting or playing World of Warcraft for sixteen hours straight physical endurance feats—is not my modus operandi.

I’ll spare you the step-by-step re-enactment of the trek, but let’s just hit the highlights:

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