Running With Your Partner

There are a lot of things I do to get myself to run when I'd rather be sleeping, drinking wine or just enjoying the air-conditioning from the comfort of my couch: I'll lay out my running gear the night before, bargain with myself [if you do this, you can have pizza later], and tell myself that if I'm not into it after 10 minutes, I can turn back [though I feel too guilty to take myself up on that one].

But when all else fails, as it sometimes does, and I find that I've neglected to run for days on end but have no motivation to change that, I turn to my in-home motivator, also known as my fiancé.

We rarely jog together -- he runs a seven-minute-mile, and I'm, well, slower than that. So running together can often be an exercise in frustration. He's practically standing still, I'm struggling to keep up and neither of us is having a good time. We are in no way ideal running partners. But sometimes running together is the only reason either of us makes it out the door.

All it takes is one person to put the idea out there. You don't even need to be fully committed to it; you just have to say it. "Hey, maybe we should go for a run?" The other usually agrees, even if reluctantly, that a run would, in fact, be a good idea.

Next, someone must make a move to put on the running gear. Sometimes I'm the one to lace up the Mizunos, hoping he'll call my bluff. But soon there we are, dressed to run, so we figure we may as well get it over with.

Once we're out the door, grateful to each other for the motivation to move, the pace and distance don't matter. It's sometimes liberating to know that the hardest part of your run was getting started. We take it easy and focus on finishing and supporting each other if one of us (usually me) is having a tough time. We forget about watches and hills and sprinting and just enjoy the sights and the company.

It's on these runs that I usually spot a new restaurant to try. He finds a new bookstore to visit or a grassy place for us to read, and we talk about how our week has been and make plans for the next.

And while these are not the training runs that will help us set a personal record in a race, we're smug and accomplished when we finish, knowing we did something that would have been impossible without a push from the other. Which is why these runs in particular always seem to end on a positive note. No matter how long it took or how many times I slowed us down, we're both better off for our reluctant run.

Read about one woman's quest to become the runner she wants to be.