Someone to Run With

I think this month's edition of Runner's World magazine may be the best I have ever read.

In it, Sara Corbett chronicles the importance of women having a girlfriend they can rely on.

Naturally, it didn't speak to me so much, but I thought some of our women readers might appreciate it.

Teasers:

Before the race, Clare and Sue and I gathered at dawn in Union Square where someone announced on a loudspeaker that about 10,000 women would be running the race that day. We huddled in close to one another, joking, telling meaningless stories, waiting for the starting gun. I was happy to see Sue and Clare, who'd never met, gabbing like old friends. It hit me that I have been running since I was 15 years old and that truly all of my dearest female friendships have been built around running. I was thinking how lucky I am, how unique this was, how sustaining. But the sun was coming up and all around us there was a sound starting to mount, a murmuring that seemed to reach across every corner of the city square, ballooning through the open spaces and growing slowly louder. I recognized it then and knew it was something to marvel at-a familiar force that would carry us all once the gun went off and we started to run.

I looked at my friends. "Do you hear that?" I said, a little bit incredulously. "That's the sound of 10,000 women chatting." . . .

Lily and I meet on a trail by the ocean regularly and crank out a bunch of miles without pausing one single second in our talking. It's fall again. The trees throw their leaves at our feet. Lily is my Laura. She makes me faster and stronger and happier about life. Or maybe Lily is my Clare, as much as Clare can never be replaced and I still call Clare every time I finish a run. But Clare was once my new Sue, who will always be my first old running pal. And maybe Laura is Clare's Sara. And Clare is Laura's somebody else. Maybe there's really only one thing to say about all of us women who run in tandem or in groups, who configure and reconfigure like kindred constellations moving across the sky. Maybe it's that we're all wrapped up in the same cosmic downhill-but-not-really marathon and more than anything, we just don't feel like doing it alone.