Dispatches from the Home Front: It's a bird -- it's a plane; no, it's a marathon mom! Dispatches from the Home Front: It's a bird -- it's a plane; no, it's a marathon mom! (March 16, 2005)

By Barbara Wood

I came the closest I ever will to finishing a marathon on March 6, which is not really very close at all since I wasn't even there. But my running partner, Darlene Batchelder, did the entire 26.2 miles of the Napa Valley Marathon.

She's 56 and it was her first marathon. I've been hoping it was her last, but I think I'm out of luck.

Darlene is so (justifiably) proud of her accomplishment that she's been wearing the medal she won for finishing ever since. I wouldn't be surprised to find she's been sleeping with it on.

I'm proud of her, too, and it is a really nice-looking medal. But I still have no desire to run 26.2 miles, ever.

Darlene and I have been running together for more than six years now, and we had a comfortable routine going -- five days a week she came to my house and we grabbed the dog and ran to Huddart Park and back, an easy four miles.

Until last October, that is, when Darlene decided she wanted to run a marathon. She wanted me to run it too, but I declined. I told her I'd train with her, but when I found out how much time the training would take and I opted out all together.

Darlene trained for five months, making progressively longer runs one day each week. Her longest run was 20 miles. The dog and I weren't left out, though. She'd usually run from home in a circuitous route to my house; we'd go on our usual run and then she'd run home.

On days when she needed a rest from a long run or to recover from minor injuries, the dog and I would go alone.

Darlene actually had a really sane reason for doing the marathon. "It's something I've considered doing in my life and I realized if I waited too much longer, I'd be too old," she said.

That ambition was nudged along by something else she's doing: training to be a life coach with Accomplishment Coaching.

"Coaching gets people to push through barriers that have been stopping them in their lives," Darlene said. So she put her training into action on herself and signed up for the marathon.

I admire Darlene even without her running a marathon. She has a son with cystic fibrosis, an almost 99-year-old mother who lives with her, and several coaching clients. She is president of the Woodside High School Foundation board, and is rehearsing as a member of the chorus in next month's Portola Valley Theatre Conservatory production of "Fiddler on the Roof." Plus, she is learning to tap dance.

Darlene left a message on my phone last Sunday: "I finished the marathon," she said. "It nearly killed me ... I walked probably eight miles of it, easily, and got to the finish line and got really sick -- threw up, diarrhea; and I'm still in the throes of hydrating and feeling better. But I'm ambulatory."

This does not sound like fun to me.

"It actually was fun," Darlene continued. "I met a lot of really neat people. It was a neat experience.

"I'm alive and I'm officially a marathoner, which I think I will never do, ever again in my life. Once was enough."

That was Sunday, though. Apparently running a marathon has something in common with childbirth -- it's an experience that most people wouldn't repeat, except that one soon forgets the bad parts.

Four days later, Darlene said this to me: "I'm thinking of doing it again." She wants to reduce her time, and she says, "I think having a goal is great."

At least I'll always have the dog to run with.

And I'm saving the telephone message to play back to her.
Barbara Wood lives in Woodside in an old house filled with redheads and animals. Her column runs the third week of the month.

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