A Runner's Evolution

Five blasts from the past show how we can develop and change

Hello, 2024. A lot of you are new subscribers and probably here for trail-running-related content, so I’ll warn you that this week’s post is less about running advice, and more about athletic development and life stages, with snapshots that reveal some of my background. If you’re seeking more practical advice, you might check out this archived post on peak training or this one on sports nutrition.

Here’s my New Year’s Day selfie mid-run, taken at a vintage British phone booth improbably placed in an alpine basin at 11,600 feet:

“Hello, operator? Can you please tell me what year it is?” The phone is not connected to a live line, but holding that heavy black receiver takes me back decades. It makes me want to dial POP-CORN to hear the Time Lady.

I made time for running December 31 and January 1 to start the new year. Both days, I ran and hiked up steep snowy mountainsides in prep for the February 3 Running Up for Air 12-hour ultra near Salt Lake City.

But running wasn’t my focus. Mentally, my roles as mom, hostess, and housecleaner made me maniacally house- and family-focused. My kids (ages 22 and 25) were back in town, and on Saturday we threw a bonfire party that had been rescheduled from the winter solstice. Some 50 or so people converged by the fire and under our roof. The gathering felt delightfully overwhelming, and then I spent the first half of New Year’s Eve mopping the floors and putting away Christmas decorations.

Then, the cleaning and organizing went into overdrive.

Early evening last Saturday. The crowd and fire grew after sunset.

On New Year’s Day, I plunged into a project I meant to do for the past five years: sorting and organizing “the dump.”

When we moved here, I shoved countless photos, letters, and cards into manila envelopes in no chronological order. All these things used to hang on bulletin boards or rest in my old desk at our former home. I then dumped the envelopes into a deep file drawer. Every keepsake birthday or anniversary card, and the rare photo I get as a printout instead of digitally these days, ends up in that dump. I always meant to create scrapbooks and photo albums, but I don’t like scrapbooking. We haven’t made a family photo album since 2010.

I resolved to sort through the dump and organize the images and notes into hanging folders, which meant first using tools to fix the hanging-folder metal frame in the drawer that wasn’t installed properly. I did it and ripped a fingernail in the process.

Sorting the dump, from start to midway.

I found pieces of memorabilia that now seem like museum artifacts. I also found a folder of journaling from early motherhood that I barely recall writing, and I spent at least an hour re-reading thoughts and scenes from my early-30s life.

Some random memorabilia from our past.

I thumbed through most of the photos quickly, but a few stopped my sorting and made me reflect on places and feelings. Each, I realized, show me at different phases as a runner and a woman, and that’s what I’d like to share with you, because many of us are midlife runners who evolved over the years.

March 1988

It’s a couple of months before my 19th birthday, and I’m in Mammoth on spring break from UC Santa Cruz with my future husband and in-laws. It’s so warm, we’re in T-shirts and jeans and don’t need gloves. Nobody wears helmets or carries a mobile phone. I dress like Morgan because I copy most of what he does. My curly hair is layered on the sides, pulled back with a barrette, and I’ll hide behind a curtain of heavy bangs until my late 20s.

This is only my second or third time skiing, and it’s frustrating and embarrassing, but less so this time since I’m not wearing his mom’s oversized high-waisted ski pants that she insisted I put on the first time. I’m determined to get better on the intermediate slopes to keep up with Morgan, but I’m not good enough to enjoy it yet. I get close to hyperventilating while moving in the thin mountain air, and my thick thighs tremble with fatigue as I struggle to balance and get the skis parallel.

I’m midway through college and smoking a pack of Camels a day, occasionally inhaling lines of white stuff up my nose to pull all-nighters at the student newspaper where I’m an editor. The only exercise I get is dancing at parties and Dead shows or walking off campus to the 7-Eleven, where I buy a frozen burrito and microwave it for lunch nearly every day.

Morgan is wearing the gold band on his middle finger that I gave him as a high school graduation present, and in two years it’ll become his wedding ring. When we go out to dinner for my birthday in two months, he’ll tell me he wants to marry me right after we graduate. My siblings will buy me a first-generation mountain bike as a present, and I’ll finally quit smoking in an effort to ride that bike up UCSC’s hill to get to class. I’ll experience the glow of satisfaction from an elevated heart rate caused by exercise rather than by drugs. We’ll take up racquetball at the campus rec center during our senior year. But running? No interest, not at all. No clue of how it’ll shape my future.

New Year’s Eve 2004

In the final days of December, we go to Las Vegas for a special weekend getaway and leave our kids, ages 3 and 6, in their nanny’s care. We’re out to dinner on the last night of 2004 at one of the high-end restaurants at Bellagio watching a jumbo TV screen broadcast the Maroon 5 concert that’s taking place outside, next to the choreographed fountain bursts. We have disposable income thanks to Morgan’s success as an attorney.

This is our celebration as a couple after a turbulent, heart-wrenching year in which we came close to separation. I dyed my hair dark a few months earlier after I took a job with a New York-based publisher and had to travel to NYC for work, because I wanted to look more sophisticated. More fundamentally, at age 35, I wanted to change almost everything about myself. Going back to work full time was an attempt to earn the respect that comes with a title and income, and to have an identity beyond wife, mother, runner. It’s been 10 years since I took up running in 1994 as a graduate student.

The Strip grows increasingly crowded, as it does on New Year’s Eve. After dinner, we walk through the gaudy gilded casino, and I spot a glass double-door exit on the side where something clearly is going wrong. A wall of people press against the doors trying to get in—the people in front are smashed against the glass, their hands and cheeks spreading and distorting—while security guards strain to keep the doors shut. The door frame is bulging, the security guards can’t hold the crowd back.

Riot! Mob! We exchange those words as it dawns on us the masses outside are trying to gain entrance to the casino for a safer, less crowded place, or perhaps to loot the gaming tables. This way! and we start running. I take off my dress shoes and carry them in my hands while running in nylon-stocking feet.

We sprint through the casino until we find a side door to the building’s back side, and soon we’re scrambling and jumping over parking barriers in our dressy clothes. Through the parking structure, we keep running until we wind up on the outside by the freeway, away from the crowds. We catch our breath and start walking back toward our hotel, the Mandalay Bay, and I put my shoes back on to prevent my feet from getting cut.

I’m relieved we’re outside, away from a potentially violent riot, but mostly I’m grateful I’m a runner. I have confidence that my legs can get me out of bad spots and carry me to safety, and I can keep up with Morgan now.

April 2008

It’s my 18th marathon, and I’m trying to reel in the woman ahead of me. The Big Sur marathon is extra hilly, but hills are my friend, my ace. Give me hills for lunch, I think. I’m about to turn 39, and I won’t ever be very competitive at fast road marathons, won’t ever run sub-3 (3:05 will be as close as I get). But on hilly courses, I’m a contender.

The prior year, I ran and won my first 50K in the Oakland Hills with a sub-5-hour time. I also won and set a course record at a trail marathon. This taste of recognition and triumph motivates me to train and race in a way that feels more dramatic and thrilling than anything, even more than galloping and jumping horses, more than illicit drugs and sex.

In the final mile, spectators on the side are yelling, “You can get her, catch her!” I’ve been out-kicked before. Not today. I pass her in the final meters and finish seconds ahead, enough to earn the third-place podium spot.

October 2009

We didn’t plan to be here, in this tiny ski town called Villa La Angostura near Bariloche, Argentina. We have a loose itinerary for a year of round-the-world budget travel, and we’re making up the details as we go along. We landed in Buenos Aires in early October, ran the Buenos Aires Marathon, and then an Internet search revealed this inaugural trail marathon happening a couple of weeks later. It was full, but I emailed the race director in Spanish and asked if we could have a couple of entry spots. He wants his race to gain an international reputation, so he lets us two Californians join only a couple of days before the start. We are the only Americans around.

Morgan and I have departed our regular lives. Left our jobs, pulled the kids out of school, rented out our house, leveraged our savings. My daughter and son are 11 and 8, and I got an independent study contract from their school to teach them the equivalent of 6th and 3rd grade while we travel. We pare our lives down to the basics. Every day, our only job is to get from one place to another, learn about the area, buy groceries, read, write, do a little schoolwork, edit photos, and find a small rented space to share. Our stuff for the year fits into one bag each.

We needed to get out of our house to get out of our ruts and reassess our career paths and values. It’s a kind of radical marriage and family therapy. It emboldens Morgan to leave his firm and come up with an idea for a new company, which I’ll help him launch in a year.

We took a bus from Buenos Aires to here and rented a cabaña in a gnome-themed lodge made of oversized shellacked logs, where a kindly couple lives with their teenage daughter. My gut tells me they’re trustworthy, and they are, so we hire them as babysitters for the day. The kids have become each other’s best and only friends during this trip and play almost all day, every day, their imaginations and education cut loose from the constraints of school.

Morgan and I get to the start line next to Lago Espejo wearing the requisite race shirts by Salomon that match the bright blue of the lake water. We take off as runners around us shout, “Vamos!” “Corre!” and “Suerte!”

For the next four-plus hours, I am not a competitor. I am an explorer and adventurer, dazzled by the rutted, slippery forest trails and panoramic lake views from these summit overlooks in the Andes. My brain works on overdrive to interpret the language around me. I don’t care about speed, don’t care about how I perform or what others think of me. I revel in anonymity. The only time I feel a twinge of competition is when a man says, “Corres bien para una mujer” (“You run well for a woman”), and I speed up to drop him.

As I approach the finish line, I feel elation from liberation and strength, mixed with disbelief. We made it here, we are really doing this. The announcer says, “Sarah Smeeeeth de Caleeeefornia!”

I am the 10th female and first in the 40-49 master’s category, and I receive a trophy that I squeeze into my backpack for the rest of our trip over five continents. It sits on the side of my desk now, a reminder that we can journey in ways that at first feel impossible and impractical.

July 2011

I have been coming to Telluride and living here for months at a time my whole life, because my family roots are here, but I’ve never been up here on Oscar’s Pass, on this ridge between Telluride and Ophir. I can’t believe we have to go over the mountains in the backdrop, and then over yet another mountain pass above 13,000 feet to get to the finish line in Silverton.

A friend asked me to support him by pacing him in the final 30 miles of the Hardrock 100, but really he’s doing me a favor. He’s my mentor, introducing me to graduate-level mountain running. This is my baptism by Hardrock. During the afternoon, I become drenched in a monsoon downpour with ear-splitting thunder.

To bolster my confidence, I wear my hat from the Argentina trail marathon and my shirt from the East Bay Area’s toughest 50K, where I won awards in prior years. The hat and shirt remind me I can do hard things. But this is the hardest yet. I need trekking poles to keep from sliding down snow traverses and to prevent my ankles from rolling on chunky talus.

“Running” is a loosely defined term in this high-altitude environment. I learn that “running” means any kind of locomotion, whatever is most efficient. “Running” includes using my hands while crawling up a headwall made of loose, pebbly scree.

I keep up with my friend and his friends with whom we buddy up along the way. I want to be one of the guys, I want to run this thing in its entirety, I want to explore more of these San Juan Mountains like my intrepid grandmother did 80 years ago. I feel a sense of belonging along with yearning. I want to live and age like an old mountain goat here.

I glimpse my future, and eventually we make it happen. We build a home outside of Telluride next to the cabin my dad built when I was a little kid. We settle into a new life in our 50s, and I continue to pursue my dream to run the whole Hardrock someday. I run to stay healthy and to feel young. I run to be a part of these mountains. I no longer run to perform or to escape or to get high but just to be, because this sport became what I do and who I am.

Pieces of my past, better organized now.

I hope you enjoyed these stories from the past and that it might inspire you to review and organize your old things. Happy new year!

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Recommended : I felt moved by this essay on iRunFar, in which an over-70 runner reflects on how his running has evolved. If you read it, be sure also to read the discussion thread that follows—everyone touched by shared feelings and reflections. Maybe I’ll write a similar essay in 15 to 20 years!

I welcome your comments below on new-year reflections, nostalgia, changes, or anything.

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