Hollaback Girl

Over the years, I've turned to running as my form of exercise.  My free-time is precious and I'm an efficient person, therefore running is the most efficient workout I could choose.  I lace up my shoes, turn on my iPod, go out the door, get my heart rate up and approximately 30-40 minutes later I'm home again and in the shower.  Et voila, workout accomplished, therefore allowing me to indulge in Belgian delicacies such as saucisse and frites and of course, chocolate.

This spring, I've decided to start adding a little bit of mileage.  Nothing much, I would just like to extend my workout time to about an hour, three times a week.  I'm thinking about signing up for a local 10k race this summer, and maybe, just maybe taking on a half-marathon at some point next year.  Ok fine, I'll admit it.  The half-marathon I'm thinking about is in Paris.  If I'm ever going to do a half-marathon, how cool would it be to do it in Paris?!

In any event, this morning I took the kids to school, and with a whole sunshine-y day ahead of me headed out for my run early.  Incidentally, the road in front of our house is a complete mess.  Multiple road work crews are tearing it apart to make a bike path and walking trail and hopefully, make it next to impossible to drive the wrong way thereby improving the traffic situation.  Meanwhile, it's a pain-in-the-you-know-what to use it for anything, running included.  But it's the route to the trails at the chateau so away I went.

By the time I got to the end of the road, I was the embarrassed recipient of at least a dozen catcalls and jeering remarks.  As a mother of three approaching 40 in the not so distant future, I'm not quite sure what to make of that.   Should I be proud, that I can still turn heads?  I wasn't.  Should I be embarrassed that I'm out enjoying a much needed workout?  No way jose, that's not my style.  I settled on being proud to be an athlete.

But it got me thinking.  Running is primarily a male sport here in Belgium.  I haven't noticed it that much before, it's not the sort of thing I think about.  I have the luxury of being an American woman born in one of the first generations that can take Title 9 for granted.  But now that I think about it, 9 times out of 10, the runners running by our house are men.  And while it doesn't happen very often, I've noticed that when I do happen to pass a male runner when I'm running at the park because I'm faster than they are, they don't like it very much.

As I ran my 7km route, I thought about one of the greatest experiences of my lifetime.   My four years in college, where I competed on the varsity co-ed swim team.  In the pool we were one team.  Swimming the same workout, regardless of the swimsuit you were wearing.  We respected each other as teammates and fellow athletes and our friendships that were born in that old stinky pool have endured through the years as some of the most precious and valuable of my lifetime.  And as a result, I don't even think about differences in men's sports versus women's sports, especially with sports like running and swimming.

So as I approached the home stretch of my run this morning, I braced myself for the looks, pulled my baseball hat down over my eyes and set my iPod to the ultimate girl-power song  -- Hollaback Girl by Gwen Steffani.  I turned up the volume and sprinted the last 500 meters to my house, grateful and proud to be an athlete.  And from now on, I'm going to have to resist the urge to high-five other female runners that I pass and shout, "you go girl."