In December, I will stand at the starting line of the California International Marathon for the eleventh time.
Eleven times. They have a name for people like me. They call us Loyal Runners. I think I just call it stubborn.
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| Back with my pace group. |
If you're new here, welcome. If you've been here before, welcome back — I've missed this. Either way, I want to tell you who I am and why I'm writing again, because this chapter of the blog is different from the ones before it. It's more honest. It's more personal. And I think, for the right reader, it might matter.
I am 58 years old. I am a triathlete, a marathoner, a wife, a mother, and a novelist working on a book about women who lose themselves when their kids grow up and have to find their way back. I live near one of the best bike trails in the country, which sounds idyllic and is — except that the reason I moved my riding from the road to the trail is that a driver hit me and two friends from behind on a country road in 2017 and kept going.
He left us there.
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| Thankfully, the emergency people found us! |
I won't relitigate all of that here — there's a post from December 2017 if you want the full story. What I will say is that part of my left side has been numb ever since, that road cycling as I knew it ended that day, and that finding a safe trail a few years later felt like getting a piece of myself back that I had quietly grieved.
I tell you this not for sympathy but for context. Because this blog is about a body that has been through things. A body that keeps showing up anyway.
Menopause doesn't get talked about honestly enough in athletic circles. I didn't suffer dramatic mood swings the way some women describe. What I got instead was quieter and in some ways more maddening: I ate the same. I trained the same. The weight came anyway. Nobody tells you that the rules change without warning. That the body you knew — the one you had negotiated a truce with through years of training and discipline — quietly renegotiates the terms without consulting you.
I have fought my relationship with food my whole life. I won't pretend otherwise. That fight has taken different forms at different times. What I know now that I didn't always know is that the fight isn't about willpower. It never was. It's about figuring out what your body actually needs, at this age, in this season, under this specific kind of stress — and then doing the hard, unglamorous work of meeting it there.
Right now my house is being remodeled. My routine is disrupted. My stress is high. I stepped on the scale this morning and it hadn't moved in a month.
I'm writing anyway.
There are moments — at the neighborhood gathering, at the doctor's office, in the mirror — when I catch a glimpse of a version of aging that I am not ready to accept. The slow retreat. The quiet surrender to "I'm too old for that." I understand it. Some days I feel the pull of it myself. But I am not ready. And I don't think you are either, or you wouldn't be here reading this.
Here's what the next eight months look like: I want to get to my race weight before my CIM training block begins in earnest at the end of July. I'll be documenting the journey here — the Oura scores, the training, the nutrition experiments, the weeks that work and the weeks that don't. I'll be writing about what it's like to train for a marathon at 58 with a partially numb left side and a remodel happening in the background and a novel due and a God I'm trying to stay close to.
It won't always be pretty. It will always be honest.
If you're still fighting — for your fitness, for your health, for a version of yourself you're not ready to give up on — this blog is for you.
I'll see you at the start line.
— Tracy Loyal Runner. Closet Athlete. Still here.
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