Remember that it’s never too late and you’re never too old to get the body you were born to have.
~David Kirsch

My daughter is a runner. When she was a baby, she didn’t just learn to walk; her first steps sent her running. I ran with her, or rather after her, to guide her past obstacles, but I was never built for running. It was obvious by the time she was eight that she could run circles around me and nearly everyone else. I used to call her my “deer.” Not dear, but “deer” — she was that fast.

She was on the track team in school and never walked anywhere if she could run there instead. Of course, she was lean and sleek. Even in college, she had time for her morning run. If she was the family Greyhound, I was the family Pug.

She lived with her intended, a very nice fellow she met in college. The wedding was nearly a year away, but they could not wait to begin their life together and got a little apartment off campus while he finished his master’s degree.

Since I’m a widow, Jenny and I used to have dinner together once or twice a week when her beau had a late class or a paper to research. But college and our separate to-do lists left her little time for leisurely eating. And she had races to prepare for. She asked if I wanted to go running with her, which made me laugh.

“Run?” I chuckled. “I haven’t run since I used to chase you all over the neighborhood. I’m 20 pounds overweight and out of shape.”

So, she didn’t ask me again. She was training daily for a fall marathon.

One Saturday, she called and said she was going on a run with friends, who were also training for the marathon. “Lonny will be studying for an upcoming exam, and there’s no one I can get to take out Bolo. Could you?” She was referring to her dog.

Bolo was her fiancé’s dog. He was part Boxer, part something else, probably more “something else” judging from the haphazard way he was put together.

“When I come home, I’ll bring Chinese,” she said, bribing me.

It worked.

“Be sure to get his leash on him before you open the door,” she warned. “Bolo means ‘Be-On-the-Lookout-For.’ ”

Yeah, yeah.

I got to her place, re-met Bolo, and then my daughter was off on her run.

Bolo slept on the sofa while I cleaned up the breakfast dishes. Then it was time to take out the dog.

“Come, boy, want to go for walkies?”

He sure did. He was dancing, prancing and slinging drool from his floppy jaws. I got out his leash, glad it was a sturdy one, and prepared to clasp the hook onto his collar. He was wiggly, but I thought I had managed to clip the leash onto his collar. I opened the back door at the same instant that I saw the leash had only snagged a bit of his neck hair, not the collar. Before I could do a thing about it, he was out.

“Bolo!” I yelled, but he was gone like a flash. That huge pony of a dog was galloping down the walk. I yelled again, but I could just as well yell the sun out of the sky as stop that racing dog.

There was no way I could catch him. He was at the corner of the block and across the street into the small park before I had gone 100 feet.

“Bolo out again?” a boy on a bike asked.

“Yeah,” I gasped back, running faster than a 40-something, over-weight woman should ever run.

“I’ll help,” he said, grabbing the leash and pedaling toward the park.

I was gasping by the end of the block. I’m going to die right here, I thought.

“Bolo on the run again?” a man, mowing, shouted. I nodded. I was too winded to speak.

“Try down by the lake,” he said. He shut off his mower and took off after me, passing me as we crossed the street. “Sometimes, he likes to play in the water,” he called back as he raced ahead at a pretty good pace for a guy who looked to be in his fifties.

The boy on his bike, the able 50-year-old man and the puffing woman strung out across the park, chasing after the dog.

“Bolo!” the boy called.

“Bolo!” the man repeated.

“Puff-puff,” I gasped as we neared the lakeshore.

Sure enough, Bolo was splashing happily in the shallows of the lake.

The man caught up to him and held him as the boy brought forth the leash and clipped it on his collar.

I thanked the boy, who nodded and whizzed away on his bike without so much as one hard breath.

“I’ve run my first and last marathon,” I puffed out between gasps.

The man laughed. “You’re about a block from where your daughter lives.”

“I was taking Bolo out for his walk. My daughter is training for a marathon.”

“And he slipped away. Yes, he does that now and then. Are you Jenny’s mom?” he asked.

I said I was, and he told me what a funny, joyous, bright girl my daughter was. He was right. I could have added that I was once like that.

I thought about that as the nice man, David, walked me back to my daughter’s place. Bolo behaved nicely once on his leash.

We stopped and continued to chat.

“Jenny said she’d bring Chinese on her way home,” I said. “You know how they pack so much food in those little boxes. I’m sure…” I started to say, and then realized what I was doing. I know I blushed. I could feel the heat on my face.

“I’d love to,” David replied.

“My daughter said she’d be home around six.”

He waved and went on to his mower, and I walked Bolo back to my daughter’s apartment. Every bone in my legs, knees, and back ached with that sudden wild dash… yet, there was a new sort of exhilaration, too. Was that what running did?

I doubted it, but for once I felt free of my dirge, the sameness of my life. I would never be a runner, but maybe a nice, brisk walk now and then… Who knows where that could lead?

— Nancy Lee Davis —