14 Trial Lawyer • Spring 2022 during the wee hours of the morning before the gyms in my neighborhood were open. I could go out for 30 to 40 minutes and be back before my kids had begun to stir. The fact that no one even knew I was gone made my running workout completely guilt free, a gift at a time when the length of my list of responsibilities often left me feeling like I was falling short in one or more areas of my life. I also found I was able to stick with running this time around, largely because I found in my across-the-street neighbor, Santha, the perfect running partner. Santha and I had always been friendly but we weren’t particularly close. Twenty years later, neither of us can actually remember how the notion of running together first developed. She and I were about the same age. Like me, she had a small child at home, a full-time job, a working spouse and a busy life. If I were to guess, I would say one of us likely shared with the other a desire to get in shape and a frustration that it was hard to devise an exercise regimen that fit within our time constraints. That spurred one of us to propose to the other that we would run together a few days a week. We agreed on a schedule and then we stuck to it, rain or shine, summer and winter, through head colds and hangovers. We met at 5 a.m. each day. The conviction that she would be standing on my front porch at the designated time was the impetus I needed to get out of bed on those all-too-frequent rainy and dark winter mornings. For the first time, I appreciated running as much more than a means to an end. It guaranteed me regular one-onone time with a friend who I could talk to about everything from parenting frustrations to the news of the day. Running is one of the few sports that you can engage in while carrying on an extended conversation. Over the years, Santha, who is not a lawyer, has also been a oneperson focus group for every case I’ve tried. She has been an objective voice when I’ve felt frustrated by a challenging client or opposing counsel. Pursuing new goals Once running became integral to my weekly routine, I found myself hooked. Before I knew it, Santha and I had been running regularly for more than a year. We decided we needed to mix it up and to structure our workouts by training for races. We opted to train for a half marathon. If you had asked the elementary school student who dreaded the Presidential Fitness Test whether she would ever run 13 miles, she would have said it would never happen. Yet in my mid-30s, after a few months of training, I not only completed a half marathon but did so with a time well under the 12-minuteper-mile pace that seemed an impossibility when I was young. Having accomplished the milestone Running Continued from p 13
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