My sister, daughter, and I did a 10K this weekend, which has put running on my mind. I would describe my running career as follows: I ran for a few decades, hated every minute of it, felt my knees begin to crumble, and finally quit. This is all true, I suppose, but also a little flip, and it discounts a few happy moments pounding the pavement.

At a 5K in February 1997, I ran my usual time but felt off the entire way. When the race ended, I found the nearest trash can and threw up. The moment that I thought, “That has never happened before.” coincided with the moment that I thought, “Perhaps I am pregnant.” As it turned out, there was no “perhaps” to it. I kept running until I couldn’t. (I also kept lifting weights until, at 7 1/2 months pregnant, I brought the entire gym to a screeching halt by balancing on a small seat to change out a pull-down bar above my head (anonymous, annoyed, insistent man: Any one of us — he said, pointing to the assembled masses — any one of us would have changed that out for you if you had just asked).) And six days before I delivered, I walked a 5K with another woman, eight days before her own child was born, waddling in misery, shouting at a clump of walkers who made a short cut to avoid being passed by two hugely pregnant, terrifyingly hormonal women. An ambulance followed us the entire time.

I ran while pregnant with my second child. I ran with friends, I ran alone. I tried to run with my first dog, Harris, until he abruptly sat down on his 92 pound butt one-half block into our first run. As I sling-shot past him, I realized that it was a terrible idea.  I ran with a group, all of us in green, along the St. Patrick’s Day parade route in Savannah a few hours before the parade, enjoying the cheers of the spectators and waving at the crowds.  I last ran on April 4, 2009 — a 10K where the unthinkable happened: I won my age group. It was a victory in the sense that I rolled out of bed that morning and laced up my running shoes, for I must have been the only person in my age group actually running. As I collected my prize, I had visions of running a half-marathon, and then a marathon. And then I took two weeks off and quit.

Here was my fundamental problem with running: If I couldn’t have speed, I wanted joy. And I had neither. So at some point I started to walk. Alone. With my dog. With my children. With friends. With Chris.

It has been funny — and by funny, I mean hard — to switch from being a runner to being a walker. It has seemed somehow like a massive cop-out, a surrender, a waving of the athletic white flag. I have felt like I was channeling my grandmother Doris — who, as a sassy septuagenarian, became an avid early morning walker at the Greenwood Mall, her perfectly coiffed hair and metallic gold sneakers making her very easy to spot indeed.

It all got easier for me this weekend. Like I said, I did a 10K with my younger sister and my daughter. I had groused about it some, for it seemed like a very expensive way to take a morning walk, another T-shirt that I did not need a lousy trade-off for the entry fee. But I loved it: The only pressure was to finish, and to not finish last. If you have no real skin in the game, and all the time in the world, it is easier to marvel at the fast runners flying by and the wheelchair racers whizzing around tight corners. I found myself encouraging people running their first race, listening to another walker and my sister talk about Continental Giant rabbits, dancing to a Gorillaz song with a volunteer handing out water, laughing at someone playing  “Running on Empty” at the second mile marker. I enjoyed the time spent with two of my favorite people, from my daughter’s asking me the night before, “Are we going to win it all in the morning?” to asking my sister for some walk-up music, whereupon “The Bitch Is Back” played from her phone.

I had sold walking short because I associated it with growing older — a physically unappealing concept that nonetheless beats the alternative. But at spare moments on this walk, I thought about the Most Interesting Man in the World — the beer spokesman — because Dos Equis had announced that it was discontinuing that ad campaign by sending the Man on a one-way trip to Mars. In an interview, the actor’s agent mentioned that at the audition, there was some reluctance to cast the actor due to his age, and the agent, thinking quickly, said, “How could the most interesting man in the world be young?”

Even though I miss my knees, I loved that response.

I faced a different kind of race the next day. The airport is 90 minutes from my sister’s house, a straight shot up the interstate. Unless, of course, 30 miles of interstate is unexpectedly closed due to a fatal accident, as it was that Sunday morning. My daughter and I had a flight to catch and a rental car to return. So I panicked, and then railed against Google maps, and finally acted like it was 1982: I stopped at a convenience store and begged for help from a stranger. He told me to follow him to a different route and waved me on. When the road dead-ended, I had no idea of which way to go, so my daughter and I sat at a stop sign for a moment. A Greyhound bus passed. It was an anomaly — a Greyhound bus on an unmarked back road in Northern Kentucky — so I followed it. Soon, there we were, a little convoy of the Greyhound bus, my rental car, a few semi-trucks, and another Greyhound, trying to get past the closed interstate and make it home. With the back roads and the convoy, there was no choice but to go slowly.

As I drove, a 90 minute drive ultimately taking almost three hours, I thought about what would happen when we missed the flight. At first, all I could think about was the expense of new plane tickets, the uncertainty, the wasted time, the delayed arrival home. And then I thought about it like I thought about walking the 10K: My only goal was to make it home, preferably not in last place. I could rent another car, drive through horse country, visit my mother and brother. I could see my father in Nashville, friends and family in Atlanta. I would have my daughter with me to keep me company, beautiful weather, good music. I might not have speed, but I would have joy. And that seemed like enough.

But we made the plane — just barely — and as the safety instructions hinted professionally and coolly that we could all die unexpectedly, it hit me that life is like a race: The shorter the distance to be run, the faster the pace becomes. So I settled in, and I squeezed my daughter’s hand, and as the plane went up, up, up, I dreamed of all the many ways life would surprise me, and force me to adapt, and make me become more interesting. Bad knees and all, that seemed perfectly fine to me.

ALC

P.S. — Here I am after the race, with the funniest Chick-Fil-A cow to ever wear the costume. (The other cow was one unintentional mishap after another. It is fitting that he is clutching his stomach in this photo.)