I am so very, very sore.

I am a kind of sore that I don’t remember ever being before – though it’s likely that I was this kind of sore many times when I rowed on the crew team my freshman year of college. But that was eleven years ago now, and I don’t remember it.

This is the kind of sore that makes me understand what it must be like to be old, with a body that you don’t feel you can trust: I need to lean on something in order to stand up, stairs make me flinch, and I caught myself walking down a hallway with my hand on my hip for support. I feel eighty and then some.

The sad part of all this is how little it took to get me here. I ran just three and a half miles. Slowly. It didn’t even take an hour. Just as a refresher here, a marathon is twenty six point two miles.

My Saturday morning started at seven o’clock. Did you know that it’s still dark at seven o’clock in the morning? It was news to me. Which tells you something about my usual schedule. But on this particular Saturday morning my room filled with the rousing Dutch favorites Acda en de Munnik at seven on the dot. I wasn’t as bleary as expected, because nervousness about the running had kept my sleep light and nervous. I fumbled around my room, edgy and distracted, pulling on those items of my hiking gear that I thought could transition to running: a wicking nylon jersey, clunky trail running shoes, clingily unflattering pants that I would usually never think of wearing all on their own. And I drove to the park.

About twenty people, similarly outfitted, were huddled on the sidewalk, blowing into their hands and making quiet introductions. It was clear from the bright eyes and high ponytails that many of them were intimately familiar with this time of the day, but there was a fair share of stunned and sedate as well.

I assumed that, since so many of us were beginners, our coach Phil would lead some sort of physical and emotional warm-up – stretching, advice, and so on. Instead it was more of, “Well, let’s go!” And off we went. I actually stood there for a moment thinking, so, I just run now? And, since that seemed to be what everyone else was doing, I did.

We ran on a bark trail and on the roadsides, under gray but mercifully dry skies, passing dog walkers and lots of cars. I started out in the front with a regular runner named Tracy who chatted casually to my increasingly brief, breathless responses. Then I fell back a bit and introduced myself to Jenny, a graduate student I had coincidentally met the day before on campus. She, too, seemed to carry a disproportionate role in our conversation, and I started to worry that my teammates will think I am uninteresting instead of just terribly out of shape. When she mentioned finishing up her dissertation, I was able to croak out with my first genuine optimism of the morning, “Really! Tell me all about it!”

For the last half or so I ran on my own, somewhere in the middle of our stretched-out pack, trying not to feel too sick and telling myself that my only goal for the day was to finish the run without stopping to walk. And I did.