Step by step, day by day, run run run
Cambridge moms have been running every day for more than two years
CAMBRIDGE— Every day, they run. At least two kilometres. There are no excuses and no days off.
Kristy Goss and Jo VanGroningen, two Cambridge moms and yoga instructors, dismiss the pesky elements as they jog the trails of Cambridge and Puslinch Township and beyond.
They run apart during the week. They run together on weekends.
“We just sort of talk about stuff,” Goss says of their shared trail excursions. “There’s no apologies between us. There’s no judging. We’re just mulling things over while we’re out. It feels like all your problems are solved at the end.”
The solutions and the days are piling up with every pine tree passed.
Goss, married with a son and soon to be 40, is set to mark 1,300 consecutive days of running by week’s end. VanGroningen, a 42-year-old single mom raising a son, plans to make it 1,000 days in a row of running on July 20.
They run anywhere between two and 50 kilometres a day. It all depends on time and weather and tendons. The strides and the worn-out sneakers add up. So do the tears.
“I’ve had some good run cries,” VanGroningen says after running Tuesday on her late father’s birthday. “It’s pretty cathartic.”
Weather hardly fazes them. Snow and ice and rain and wind is just bluster. Post-triathlon and marathon weariness are tiresome excuses shooed away as easily as mosquitoes.
Life’s more bitter strokes are the biggest threats to their running routines.
Only months after the VanGroningen began her daily dashes through the Cambridge’s woods, she lost her brother Jason to suicide. The next year, she lost her father William to a heart attack.
She took those two kicks to the emotional kneecaps and kept running. Every day.
“I’m a very emotional runner,” VanGroningen says. “Those days were significantly harder to put one foot in front of the other. But I know, at the end of the day, if I didn’t run, it would impede my emotional healing as well. If I gave up on that while I was going through stuff, it would be harder for me.”
So she ran quietly and cried hard. What would her trucker father say in his trademark colourful language if he was still around? Probably what he always said: Be somebody nobody can imitate. That was his guide to life.
And her gregarious brother? Jason loved without restraint, she says. His boundless love inspires her to raise awareness about mental health issues.
Running, with Jason in mind, soothes her soul and honours his memory.
“It helps me process my emotions,” says VanGroningen, an addictions counsellor. “The work I can do can be kind of heavy.”
Goss, an office worker raised in Bright, pulled VanGroningen into this cycle of seeking solace and serenity on the run. At a fundraiser Goss organized for the Haven House women’s shelter in Cambridge, the two hit it off as friends. They cheer each other at races now. They listen to each other’s problems on the trail. It’s been that way for 2 1⁄2 years.
The benefits of running are hidden jewels, Goss insists, adding that it is difficult to sell someone on it.
“Trust me, you’ll figure it out in a year,” says Goss, who got back to the long-distance running of her school days a decade ago as she prepared for marriage by quitting smoking.
“You start to have a whole other level of confidence in yourself. You start to realize all those days in the past where you were kind of lying on the couch and were like, ‘I can’t run today, I feel like garbage. I have a cold, I can’t run. Or, it’s raining, I can’t run.’ You just slowly, quietly build up this whole other sense of resilience.”
Nearly 1,000 runs later, VanGroningen has it figured out. She sorts through her emotions on those runs. For Goss, a run is like those moments at the end of yoga when all the contortions and poses are complete. You lie on your back, calm and clear.
“It slows your mind down,” says Goss, who admits she began her run streak as an egodriven endeavour on Dec. 6, 2015. “That’s what running does for me.”
But perspective can still get lost. Doubts rise like ankle blisters, jeopardizing the streak.
“What does it matter if I do this? Nobody cares anymore,” Goss says. “It’s been 3 1⁄2 years. And then, just when I think it’s dumb and pointless and not one cares ... there will be a message in my inbox from some random person ...”
And that person is inspired by her latest Instagram post to start running. And Goss in turn is inspired to continue her run streak.
“I don’t think there’s going to be anything slight that’s going to stop me,” says Goss, thinking of her ill brother Mike in Oxford County. “My brother is sick so I may be donating a kidney in the fall. I guess that would stop it.”
Until then, Goss and VanGroningen run every day. At least two kilometres, with thoughts of fathers and brothers and sons to keep them company.