26.2 Mama

My friend Stephanie took up marathoning a while back. What fun to talk with her yesterday for the first time since my husband and I moved away from her neck o' the woods in 1994! After cutting the call short to go get the kids from school, I called her back to hear one of her stories again, this time with tape rolling.

Here's a partial transcript:

My son Austin got into [marathoning] when he was 10, through the LA Unified School District…There’s this special program [called Students Run L.A.] sponsored by Honda. They’ve had it for about 13 years now, and basically what they do is they train junior-high-age and high-school-age kids – many of them at-risk kids – to run marathons.

It’s not about racing. It’s not about having a fast time. It’s about the journey and setting a huge – what we call in graduate school a big, hairy, audacious goal, a B-HAG. [Steph, 44?, recently earned her MBA at Pepperdine.] A B-HAG is something that you think never in a million years could you do – like, these at-risk kids, some of them think, ‘Never in a million years will I amount to anything. I’m going to be just like my parents, I’m going to be on welfare, I’m not going to have a job, I’m going to sell drugs, you know, I’m going to be a gangbanger,’ right? So they take these kids and they say, ‘We’re going to train you to run a marathon.’
And I was a coach…

Now, I’ve gotta tell ya, a lot of kids, they come in to the program and they have attitude, and… they can’t even run a mile. But for whatever reason –remember, they choose to be there; it’s a purely optional after-school program – so for whatever reason, they show up, they run a mile, and they think, ‘OK, that wasn’t too bad.’ Then, the next week we’re up to three miles. Then, all of a sudden, they’re running 16, 18 miles! And their posture changes, you know they stand up straight, they’re proud of themselves, they start doing their homework, their grades improve, some of them start running for office and taking on extra-curricular activities in school. But the coolest thing about Students Run L.A. – for 12-15 years they’ve monitored the kids who’ve done this, and there’s this one girl now who’s training for the U.S. Olympic marathon team. That’s cool, but listen, this is the coolest thing about Students Run L.A.: They have a 99% success rate of these kids going on to finish college.

Doesn’t that give you goose bumps?

…I did it because I didn’t know if I could do it. [laughs] And yet, there I was, I thought, if these little 10- and 11-year-olds can do this, then, by God, I can help them. So I got into the program for my own reasons, but I ended up – I’ve trained, by now, more than 200 kids to finish the L.A. Marathon. And it’s so cool because now I go on the campus near where my kids go to high school – they go to two different high schools, but anyway – I go onto this campus, and these kids I’ve known since they were 11 years old, there they are! And they’re like, “Hi, Mrs. Robey!” It is the greatest feeling in the world, it really is.

So I’m a marathon mom, that’s what they call me. My license plate on my minivan is “26.2 Mama.”