I was born in the wee hours of April 29, 1952.
        Running didn’t enter my life till I was nineteen, attending a small liberal arts college in southern Illinois.
        At that time, in 1971, there was no women’s track team. Women didn’t do sports like track; it wasn’t ladylike. However, a couple of foresighted blondes in my dorm and one very intelligent brunette asked me if I’d like to help them form a women’s track team.
        I wasn’t sure. Though I’d always enjoyed field hockey and basketball, I hadn’t noticed anything that made me want to take up running.
        I’d seen the cross-country guys training and they always looked gray, emaciated and haggard. They fell asleep during class. They ran in all kinds of despicable weather. They wore these funny-colored flat dirty shoes with no socks.
         I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a charter member of a team that looked like that.
         "Who would coach us?" I asked one of the cute blondes.
         "Joel Selmeyer and Timmy Wasson from the men’s team said they’d work with us," she said trying to persuade me.
         "I don’t knoow, " I hesitated.
            I was envisioning long training runs over very hilly terrain. The campus sat atop 300 foot bluffs overlooking the Mississippi floodplain. That topography didn’t appeal.
          "We’ve slated you for the 440," the other blonde said, "You’re strong and fast," she continued in a persuasive tone.
           Well, flattery always works with me. I felt nudged.
           "You’re tall. You’d probably do well at the long jump, too," the brunette piped in.
         I still wasn’t convinced.
         "Plus, have you seen those women runners’ legs? Aren’t they gorgeous? We’d all lose weight and have gorgeous legs if we ran," the first blonde smiled and showed me a magazine picture of a woman sprinter, slim and toned.
          That was the clincher for me, a wannabe cute blonde 19 year-old who wanted gorgeous legs.
          I was rather plump and had always wanted to be part of the "in" group. The fact that two cute blonde dancers and an intellectual brunette were interested in recruiting me was flattering. The deal was sealed in my mind by my thoughts about the gorgeous legs I’d get from running. I signed on.
          Joel and Timmy, our "coaches" from the men’s track team were committed to making strong runners of us girls. They yelled us up and down hills, shouted at us to pump our arms raise our knees.
          " Watch out for the third corner on the 440, " advised Timmy, You don’t want to go out too fast and hit the ‘wall’." I heeded all instructions and ran hard.
          I don’t know what we wore for shoes. I have a vague recollection of wearing my field hockey spikes…or was it my heavy leather Converse All Stars from basketball? It might have been my navy blue Keds.
          At any rate, every day at 3:30, we hit the track for sprints after our hilly three mile warm-ups. I did 220’s and 440’s. I learned how to pass the baton as anchor woman on the mile relay. I felt fast and athletic.
         I fell asleep over dinner. When my roommate woke me and I tried to get up from my chair, a strange pain spiked up and down the front of my legs.
          I ran the whole track season of my sophomore year with shinsplints and no one ever told me running wasn’t supposed to involve that kind of pain.
          At the end of the 1971 season I vowed I’d never run again, be it for exercise, pleasure or even emergency.
          And it was 24 years later before I did.
          When pressured by stress from teaching coupled with the aftershock of a horrendous relationship, I desperately looked for a way to relieve the emotional pain. The memory of the 1971 shinsplints lingered. I had to be desperate to take up running again, but it seemed like a fast way to release tension and gain a sense of peace.
           New Year’s Day 1995 I started jogging on Siesta Beach in Sarasota, Florida. Bolstered by encouragement from the lifeguards and from the new friends I discovered by joining the local running clubs, I’ve been able to keep running ever since. 
          Running still isn’t fun for me. Tennis and swimming are fun.
          I do run because I can. I do it because I think I’ll recapture my youth. I do it because it’s a discipline. I do it for the status. ( The fact that I run puts me in the top 1% of the nation’s fit people.) I do it because I know it can benefit my spiritual and mental health.
          I’ve learned a lot since 1971. I no longer run with shinsplints, and now my shoes are $90 Asics, not $5 Keds. My goals have changed: I set new times and distances for myself. And I’ve witnessed my own progress in many concrete ways.
          But I never did achieve getting those gorgeous legs.

Copyright 2000 © Sheri Bedford