Running With Your Spouse and What It Means

"Want to run?" means many things in the secret language of the married.

Nigel Buchanan

Is there nothing sacred? Although I've never heard anyone actually ask that question out loud, I've always imagined the proper vocal delivery would be one of such exaggerated outrage that it teeters on the thin line between tragedy and comedy. The preacher asks the question and it cracks you up. The comedian asks the same and it makes you think. Regardless of delivery, the answer to the question for me, apparently, is no.

One evening a celebrity friend of mine, who knows me as a writer and has stridently hidden his children from the press, peered over the top of his drink and shook the cubes in his glass. "Don't ever write about your children," he told me.

"Definitely," I said. I had just written a column about my youngest son. I'd written an entire book about his brothers. "I mean, absolutely, right? Of course not."

"Good man," he said, nodding back. "Some things are sacred."

My wife, Susan--well, wives are sacred. Everyone knows that. My friend didn't even whisper her name over his drink. Some things don't need to be said. You don't bathe cats. You don't sit backward on a horse. You don't drink beer in a playground. And husbands and wives have a secret, mysterious language between them, the depths of which cannot be fathomed by the outside world--a sacred language that you don't share with anyone and you certainly don't write about. I mean, absolutely, right?

Susan began running in college. It was one of her many habits that initially drew me in. But I've always been attracted to my weakness. I wasn't a runner, so I admired the way she'd disappear in the morning and toss off four or five miles before the coffee was on. I liked it when we took a spring break together and she did a 10-mile beach run that left her sweat-soaked on the floor while the other girls drank wine and loaded on makeup. I caught her eye as her girlfriends stepped around her, holding bright pink booze in one hand and bright green eye shadow in the other, and we exchanged a like-minded glance that began the secret language between us that I would never write about.

By the time I finally started running, she had finally stopped. Life, as they say, caused both changes. Life kept her beautiful but made her busy, so she quit. Life left me not quite as beautiful but just as busy, so I started. "Remember when you used to do this?" I said one day after a run--my mysterious, sacred way of saying, Babe, you haven't turned sloppy like I have, but running would still be good for you.

She smiled and turned and said, "Right," a word that's extra sacred when the wife says it to the husband because you could write a whole book about all it means. And I know what I'm talking about there because I wrote a whole book--about my children. For example, the word right in this instance translates to I don't like you, which is a sacred, secret way of saying, Do the laundry as long as you're so full of terrific ideas.

She came to my races and clapped from the sidelines and drove me home when I was dazed with exhaustion. She poured the wine and made the toasts to each new distance. She stood at the end of the driveway on midweek runs and did old cheerleading routines as I came in. She biked beside me on nights too dark to run alone. Long into the miles when the run devolved into a pathetic caterwaul, I'd shout, "Tell me, 'Way to go!'"

"Way to go!" she'd shout.

"Tell me, 'Keep it up--you're amazing!'"

"Keep it up! You're amazing!"

"I am!" I'd say, even as I slowed to a double-digit pace.

"You are!" she'd say.

She lied for my benefit, convinced me I was occasionally epic, kept track of my miles, and bragged about them to our children and her friends, but the one thing she wouldn't do was run with me.

What flipped in her is more secret and sacred than I'll ever know, but one day flip she did. She rescued an old sports bra from the bottom of her dresser and slapped it against her knee and told me to find a pair of our son's old running shoes for her. "I need to do this alone," she said, walking out the door. She came back 15 minutes later, red-faced, panting, and covered with sweat, but mostly irritated. "I really used to do this?" she asked.

"How'd it go?"

"Awful," she said. And a flood of sacred communications drove between us, too numerous and too deep to describe. For example, a single drop of that mighty river from me--You're taking care of yourself, Babe, which means you're taking care of us. And from her--If you think this means I'll wear the same skirts I did in college, you're dreaming, pal. And from me--Don't you know that you are a shooting star, don't you know? And from her--I stopped running when we moved in together so you wouldn't have to smell this bra. And from me--Hold me closer, Tiny Dancer. And from her--Right.

One morning, after several weeks of consistent runs and slightly less returning irritation, she allowed me to join her. "We'll do a mile together, then you keep going and I'll walk back," she said. I was so glad to have her, I couldn't imagine running off alone. I told her I'd walk back with her. "Well, it's not like how it used to be for me, running," she said. "I'm not the '10 miles in a bikini' I once was."

"That 10-mile bikini-runner is still in there," I said. Like an idiot. I was trying to encourage her but understood too late that a husband should never encourage his wife to be the person she was 20 years ago, no matter what he meant by it. She raised a single eyebrow and told me not to get my hopes up, and I said I didn't mean it like that, and we headed for the road.

She stayed two steps ahead of me. "We're going too fast," I said. She said this was how she wanted to do it. I tried going slower and soon she was four steps ahead. I raced to catch up. "Way too fast," I said again. She told me her lower back hurt. I told her she was leaning too far forward. "Try sitting on your hips a little more," I said, and she flashed a look like she'd kill me.

"How does a person sit on their own hips?" she said, panting. "Really? 'Sit on your hips?'"

"And we're going too fast," I said.

"So walk!" she said, breaking into a walk about as fast as I thought the run should be. I struggled to keep up, and she maintained a two-step lead until I broke into a much easier jog. Then we ran again quickly to the one-mile turnaround and she asked me--begged me--to go on without her, and I, the ever-supportive husband, insisted on accompanying her back. She threw her arms out in exasperation when she realized my support for her was undying, and we turned around and made our way back, together and apart like every good husband and wife--not two peas in the same pod as much as two pods in the same garden.

I jogged slowly and Susan walked, if you can call it that. We kept the same speed in our own way, and remained at each other's side, the rest of the way home.


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