Wendell Berry wrote: “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” If so, then nowhere do I know myself better than when I am on the Vineyard. If I stand at the corner of South Summer and Davis Lane, my feet planted firmly at the front door of the building this paper calls home, I know my parents got married one block South and that my brothers were born six miles Northwest. I know I was raised in a house four blocks Northeast and that my grandparents are buried a mile due South. I know I learned how to skate on a pond a half-mile to the North, back when the ponds used to stay frozen all winter long, and that I learned how to drive in my grandmother’s 1963 Volkswagen beetle in a sand lot by South Beach.

No one holds space like a woman. Our ability to hollow ourselves out and build a life – at our very core – is a gift and a responsibility. It is all at once empowering and exhausting, intimate and public, unique and universal. In short: it is complicated. Never more so than for those women who have chosen the path of the professional runner and for whom the two decades that span 20 to 40 years old are both their optimal reproductive window and their highest-earning years as athletes. What follows is an anecdotal accounting of what the female athlete is putting in the balance – the quiet questions weighed, the choices made, the control ceded – in an effort to solve the competing realities that her healthy body is her vehicle to make a living and a life.

Grace Moore was nervous when she toed the line of the Trials of Miles Half Marathon in Rockland Lake State Park on March 25, 2023. She didn’t know the course or any of her fellow competitors. The start time was early and she was accustomed to afternoon and evening races on the track. She hadn’t practiced fueling on the run. And perhaps most pointedly, she’d never raced a half marathon before – or any distance over 10k, for that matter. 

It’s hard to say whether the marathon is, for Cook, a nut he’s trying to crack or if it’s the pearl he’s making in the oyster: that bit of grit that, over time and with patience and persistence and refinement, yields something valuable. One speaks to a performance, the other to a process.

Track is a cooly objective sport that has, since its inception, sought to resolve uncertainty and conflict by taking refuge in the binary: you can either run a qualifying time or you can not; your drug test is either positive or negative; you either finish in the top three and make the team or you do not; you are either female or you are male. The very geometry of a track—its painted lines and numbers marking perfectly even ovals—telegraphs the sport’s rigidity. Pick a lane, the sport seems to say, and stay in it. And Nikki Hiltz says, No, thanks.

Tammy Hsieh says that if given the choice among late, punctual or early, her family and friends would probably say she runs late. “Or maybe on time. They might say I’m on time,” she corrects herself, with a quick and comfortable laugh.

Sport favors the optimists among us, the problem-solvers, the ones who believe their best race is ahead of them and that the current rough patch is only temporary. Nowhere is this more true than in the life of a marathoner, who must at once be a meticulous minder of minutes and also a time amnesiac. Become too attached to a single moment — a memory, a result, a mid-race feeling – and time will cement itself around your feet.

I’m a mother, but I’m also a coach. Before that, I was an athlete. When I was in high school and college, still developing as a competitor in every sense, the voices I heard most frequently belonged to my coaches. Their words were the drumbeat that animated our team’s performance and their encouragement was the wellspring from which I drew my confidence.

Family lore has it you took me cruising in Maine when I was six weeks old. Five of us set sail on a 24-foot fiberglass boat: you, my mother, the man who would become my godfather, his new girlfriend and me. The boat was named Apteryx — a small, flightless bird from the other side of the world, now nearly extinct.

Kathryn Schulz inherited her love of language from her father. Her love of running she discovered entirely on her own. What follows is a wide-ranging conversation about running, writing and the ways in which the two practices can work in tandem.

In 1675, a young Isaac Newton penned a letter to his mentor Robert Hooke. In it he wrote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That line has since come to be used as shorthand for all of us wanting to pay homage to our forebears: We stand on the shoulders of giants, we say, by way of honoring those who paved the road we now travel.

I wrote an essay about the way ambition can rise through generations. It focuses specifically on my grandmother and my daughter, two women separated by 93 years and several lifetimes of change. It’s titled “Family Poker” and it was recently named an Editor’s Pick in the annual writing contest hosted by Solstice Literary Magazine. I’m grateful to Richard Hoffmann for dragging this story into the light.

In the late spring of 1994, during the interregnum between exams and graduation, two teams met on a Princeton athletic field. The field was grass and its surface was rough, neither putting green nor even fairway quality. It was worn to bare dirt at both ends and the gulley on the far sideline was prone to flooding after a good rain. There were no stands at the edges of the field, just a simple yellow rope strung on wooden stakes, cordoning off the playing arena from any spectators. The rope defined the field. And that season, the field defined us. If Virginia Woolf had been an Athletic Director, she would have pointed us in the direction of this acre of unloved grass and declared: “It is a field of your own.”

Running is its own classroom, one in which the runner is teacher, student and subject. No one knows this better than Phillips, who has always hewn closely to the education available in full stride. She is a teacher after all, a profession she chose for herself in fourth grade when her aunt – one of her mother’s five sisters – was a teacher’s aide in her elementary school classroom.

We look to our Olympians not just for inspiration, but for confirmation. Olympic athletes tell us who we are in the world at that moment in time. Jesse Owens' superlative performances in Berlin in 1936 reset the national baseline for courage. Joan Benoit's gritty gold medal run in the marathon in 1984 announced the irreversible arrival of women on the sporting scene. Our country's best athletes remind us that we are strong, capable and determined. This year, though, the U.S. Olympic Team is telling us something else: we are tired.

Years ago—before my daughter ever stomped her sneakered feet on pedals and discovered the joy of setting herself in two-wheeled motion, before she comprehended what it meant for a cyclist to wear the stars and stripes jersey, and long before she understood the enduring honor of making a U.S. Olympic Team—I buckled her into her car seat and drove her North to spend an afternoon outdoors, just the two of us.

If you want to know how fast someone is, put them on a track.

If you want to know how tough they are, put them on a cross country course.

“You know, the freaks come out at night,” joked a fellow runner to Patrick Pressgrove late one Saturday evening.

Sushi during pregnancy? Fine.

How about coffee? Also fine.

Breastfeeding? Not the slam-dunk panacea we’ve been led to believe.

Screens? In moderation.

Spanking? No.

Vaccines? Yes.

Kids in school? Oh, yes. Definitely yes.

*photo credit to the incomparable Aisha McAdams

“I felt like a broken toy,” Molly Seidel said when asked about the end of her collegiate running career. She won four NCAA titles in her final two years at Notre Dame, but suffered just as many injuries, each one contributing to the feeling that her body was made of glass.