Running builds bonds, friendships
“If life hasn’t been a box of chocolates, you can draw from that motivation.”
If someone had asked Anne De Leon a year ago if she would ever run a marathon, she’d have said, “No way!”
Her motivation for running was simply to spend more time with her boyfriend. She thought training for 26.2 miles was too stressful on both one’s body and one’s social life.
But since then her attitude has changed, dramatically. De Leon, 38, finished last month’s Tunnel Light Marathon in North Bend, Wash. — her first — in 3:25:20, placing fourth in her age group and qualifying for the prestigious Boston Marathon by more than nine minutes.
That her first marathon featured a 2.4-mile tunnel seems particularly appropriate, she says, as a metaphor for her life.
“One of the craziest things is that it does really feel like the light at the end of the tunnel for me.”
Shortly after moving to Houston from Dallas in 2009, De Leon joined Kenyan Way because the man who was to become her husband was training with the group in preparation for the Chevron Houston Marathon. Though she didn’t consider herself a serious runner, after a few years she had entered the 2013 Aramco Houston Half Marathon. Her clothes were laid out for the race when she discovered she was pregnant. She didn’t run the next day.
Making time to run quickly became a luxury. De Leon’s son, Durban, named for her hometown in South Africa, was colicky, and her husband, who had left a law firm to start his own, was drinking heavily. The strain was too much for their marriage, and they divorced in 2015. Two years later, he was dead at age 42, from cirrhosis of the liver. She was left to raise her son alone.
Last year, she met her current boyfriend, who also ran with Kenyan Way. So De Leon rejoined the group. “It was a gesture saying, ‘Hey, I want to spend time with you,’ ” she explains. When her boyfriend decided to enter the Washington marathon, she signed up, too.
“If life hasn’t been a box of chocolates, you can draw from that motivation. It really helped me,” she says.
Training for and finishing a marathon has changed her, De Leon says. The formerly casual runner now owns a Garmin watch to record her workouts. She enjoys reading stories about running science and books by athletes such as Olympian Meb Keflezighi. She spends more time on Strava, which pairs activity tracking with social media, than on Facebook. She’s forged a bond with not only her boyfriend but also with a group of running friends whose support she cherishes.
But the deeper changes mean more to her. De Leon says she is less judgmental and more selfish, in a good way.
“I’m in control of my own life. I don’t have to do everything for everybody anymore.” She has moved in with her boyfriend and gone back to school to finish her undergraduate degree. She says she may become a lawyer, like her first husband, someday.
“I’ve done stuff, but I’ve never tried 100 percent and put myself out there,” De Leon says. “Now that I’ve done that, I’m so much more confident in what I can accomplish.”