Paul and I were having brunch with friends, talking about upcoming travel plans, when he mentioned that we were flying to Berlin in September so I could race the marathon. Naturally, the conversation shifted to running. As we chatted about dessert- flavored gels, running through NYC’s boroughs, and the 20-mile-long run, someone asked, “Has Paul ever raced with you?”
I shot my partner an incriminating look as he offered back a pained smile.
Back in November 2022, I was shopping for a half marathon when Paul, who’d never run a road race, said he’d enter the Love Run Philadelphia Half Marathon with me. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. Finally, I thought, he’ll understand why I’m crazy about running.
Before he registered, I made sure to be up front about the training, the weekly mileage, the ups and downs that earned the course its nickname “Hilly Philly.” I didn’t want to scare Paul away, but I also didn’t want him to experience a sufferfest, crawling to the finish, reaching for the seams of my shorts as he whispered, “Never again.” But he was all for it. I crafted a beautiful—beautiful— 14-week training plan.
“Fourteen weeks?” he exclaimed after I emailed him the spreadsheet.
It was a rough start, but we carried on.
I studied his runs on Garmin Connect, revising workouts on the spreadsheet accordingly. I waxed poetic on the merits of sunscreen and caffeine gummies. When his miles wavered over 10 minutes, I gently suggested that he should push the pace. If he skipped runs, I’d casually ask, “How’s training going?”
Dear god, I’d become Captain Blood.
Merely a month into training, Paul broke his pinkie goalkeeping at a soccer match. After waiting hours past midnight in the ER, a doctor looked at his x-ray and advised us to cancel an upcoming ski trip. “Can I still run?” Paul asked.
“Running,” the doc said, “is the only thing you can do.” I smirked under my face mask. Nevertheless, Paul’s training derailed after that night.
Yes, my boyfriend broke his pinkie to get out of racing the Philly Love Run with me.
They say quitting is for losers, but honestly, I’m all for it. Lance Armstrong once said, “Pain is temporary. Quitting is forever.” And look where that got him. Paul’s strategic DNS reminded me of a crucial moment when I quit at something—and changed my life.
Long before I worked at Runner’s World, I was a baker at Boston’s Flour Bakery. It was my dream job second to working at the magazine. On my own, I plowed through the Flour cookbook, impressing friends with homemade Oreo cookies, waiting for bananas to overripen so they could be macerated into banana bread, overbaking a tray of “Mom’s Granola.” I had a B.A. in writing, and had worked as a food editor at a Florida magazine, but I was set on becoming a baker, the way Flour’s founder Joanne Chang had switched from being a management consultant to becoming a James Beard award–winning pastry chef. Baking is a science. Like running, it relies on numbers. At first, I was fascinated by how a professional kitchen operated, how we vied for oven space and yelled “corner!” and “knife behind!” to avoid collisions or an accidental stabbing in a fast-moving environment. I fed Mom, the mother sponge, in the mornings. I became acquainted with our cookies by snacking on raw dough. I learned that pastries continued baking after being removed from the oven. I thought, with all I was learning, that things would get easier day by day. Instead, they only got harder.
As I watched fellow bakers adeptly decorate cakes and bake off 500 cookies, I struggled to meet my daily objectives. Trays of chocolate chips—our most popular cookie—were incinerated under my watch. There was the great chocolate ganache disaster that set me back hours behind schedule. Haphazard fruit tarts I put in the case were removed and redone.
At one point, after I was scolded for another baking mishap, a coworker commented, “You are either going to be the best baker ever—or kill us all.” One morning, I was weighing cookie dough at my station while Rachael, the pastry chef, stood at the stove stirring pastry cream. “We had another food magazine editor who also quit her job to work for us,” she casually said. “She left after a month.”
I had already outlasted that editor, but I decided I wouldn’t quit working at Flour at any cost. When Rachael had hired me, she told me to read a page from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook on hardbodies: “A hardbody never complains—a hardbody isn’t afraid to work through the toughest of times. A hardbody keeps cool and keeps creative.” Still, no matter how many times I tried to complete all my tasks, how many times I scalded my skin on an oven door or baking sheet, how much I kneaded to become a hardbodied baker, the bread never took form.
After my shifts, I ran along the Charles River to train for my third Boston Marathon. I brought up training with the savory chef, Ricardo, who worked at the station next to mine. I told him about how running was how I spent most of my time outside of the bakery. He didn’t understand why I liked running so much, so it was a shocker when he said that he’d like to try racing a half—but only if I coached him. Something in me felt lighter, and before I realized it, 10 names—including Rachael’s and Joanne’s—appeared on a stained page torn from my notebook, pledging to enter Boston’s Run to Remember in May. Except for Joanne, who’d raced several Bostons, most of the staff had never even run a road race.
I uploaded a training plan for beginners, scheduled and created weekly group runs on MapMyRun, and wrote long emails on hydration, static and dynamic stretching, and injury prevention. Training commenced in December 2014, and continued despite a polar vortex. Staff would stop by my workstation with shoe questions. Ricardo began calling me Coach. During another stressful shift when I once again was crunched for time baking cookie orders, Ricardo said to me, “You know, I still really hate running.” My heart sank. “But I wanted to let you know you write really great emails.”
It would take another year until I applied to NYU’s master’s journalism program. Before going to J-school and hanging up my apron temporarily (during school, I worked at Levain Bakery and Petee’s Pies to make ends meet), I ran the half with my coworkers. Every teammate finished. I couldn’t have been prouder.
Running continued to be my escape as I planned my exit from the bakery. I’d complete my shift, ride the subway home, go for my run, then study for the GRE. Races like the Chilly Half Marathon and Super Sunday would pop up. For some of my Flour teammates, the spark lasted. We ran together. Finally, as I tapered for my fourth Boston Marathon, I received my letter of acceptance to NYU. As a going away gift, Rachael gave me my first Boston Marathon Celebration Jacket. To this day, I visit her and her wife, who had also run Boston’s Run to Remember, every Patriots’ Day. I’d thought sticking it out at Flour, no matter what, would make me a hardbody. But it was quitting, and starting again from scratch, that took real bravery.
Nowadays, I’m my own harshest critic when I bake, much to the confusion of my coworkers who flock to the office kitchen when I bring in cookies. Ricardo, who moved to the U.K. before I left the bakery, dropped me a DM back in 2020.
“How are you, Coach? I got this feeling of running a marathon lately.”
“But, Chef, you hate running! What’s this quarantine doing to you?”
“I guess I started to like it since this pandemic. I already ran two halfs on my own. Even got running shoes. I’m a new man.”
Maybe someday, like Ricardo, Paul will come around. For now, I look for him in the crowd, and wave when I hear him call my name.
Amanda Furrer, one of Runner’s World’s Test Editors, has qualified for and run in the Boston Marathon consecutively since 2013, won the women’s division at the 2022 Atlanta Marathon, and joined the sub-3 club at the 2022 Chicago Marathon (2:56:31). She is training—without progress—her one-eyed cat, Fiona, to be the first feline to compete in Canicross.
Amanda is a test editor at Runner’s World who has run the Boston Marathon every year since 2013; she's a former professional baker with a master’s in gastronomy and she carb-loads on snickerdoodles.
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2023-12-29 14:58:48Z
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