Jayne Rodgers
We are mother and daughter fitness bloggers who’ve trained for marathons together. This tends to prompt reactions along the lines of: “I could never run with my mum. I’d kill her! If she didn’t kill me first, that is …” It’s true that the mother-daughter dynamic can get a bit fraught at times but we find running together more of a bonding experience than a burden.
In truth, we haven’t always had such fun running together. I can break the journey into three stages: from my daughter Bibi hating it with a passion, through her starting to think maybe it might be OK, to at least half of our conversations being about kit, splits and mileage.
Bibi loathed running when she was a teenager. She tried to like it because (I hope) she liked me and I tried to make her like it because I did, and thought she would, too. Dismal parenting fail on my part. I’ve been a runner for years and used to persuade, coax and cajole, guilt-trip her into running with me. “It’ll be fun”; “You’ll enjoy it”; “It would make me so happy,” I’d say – all the usual useless parenting cliches. This inevitably resulted in tears on her part, while red-faced and panting on some godforsaken urban trail I’d dragged her out on. The outcome for me was always guilt, plenty of it. Those runs weren’t fun for either of us. She’d be upset because she was letting me down and I’d be upset for upsetting her, while also slightly frustrated to be skipping workouts from my training programme.
Lesson learned (a totally obvious one but sometimes you have to be an idiot to understand something): you can’t make someone else run; they’ll do it if and when they want to. And I’m not a total fool or heartless wretch of a mum; I also know that upsetting your kid is far worse than missing out on a mile or two.
Training together has been a lot easier since Bibi became a runner in her own right a few years ago. We’d signed up for a 10k together but I got the chance to go overseas for a while so I said so-long, farewell and left her to it, convinced she’d never do it without me. She did run it, though, with none of the angst of her teenage runs. I’d like to say this was because she wanted to please me, but I think in reality it gave her the chance to discover running without pressure from me. Bibi found a training plan and stuck to it. No need for my advice, however annoying or well-meaning it might have been. If the plan told her to run, she ran, and when race day came she had a brilliant time. Suddenly, she was a runner and it was absolutely nothing to do with me.
At the moment we’re marathon training together again (her idea, by the way), and she’s easily as knowledgeable as I am about the whole process. I’m not always the expert any more, which is fine by me. Having a daughter who is either running or reading about it is something I dreamed of for years. It’s music to my ears when she says, “Do you fancy coming for a run, Mum?”
Bibi Rodgers
Asking Mum what she wanted for Mother’s Day, year-on-year, I used to get the same response: “Not much, just for you to come on for a run with me.” Though her way was cheaper for me, when I was 14, I would have preferred that she asked for a bath bomb like my friends’ mums.
When Mum moved to Buenos Aires, I started to notice that I actually missed our runs together. I surprised myself by lacing up my shoes and properly training for the 10K we’d signed up for before she left, ticking off sessions on a spreadsheet and timing my tempo runs with the Garmin I nicked off her. I think she was pleasantly surprised when she returned and I could almost keep up with her (and to realise where her watch had been).
I still need Mum to be a mother rather than a training partner sometimes. Thirteen miles into my first marathon, she had to have a stern parental word with me after I threw a roadside wobbler when it hit me that I still had another 13 to go. She continued to run with me through to the 19-mile stage, when I realised that she wasn’t going to match her personal-best marathon time if she stayed with me, and with much persuasion she trotted off. As proud as she was of me for eventually finishing, I was of her finish, too. None of my friends’ mums run marathons, much less nearly half-an-hour faster than their offspring.
Jayne and Bibi’s blog is Veggie Runners
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