Strolling through Parenthood

Strolling through Parenthood

The running stroller has revolutionized parents’ ability to stay fit through their kids’ early years. And the benefits go both ways.

BY AMANDA PARRISH MORGAN
PHOTOS BY GETTY

The first running stroller was produced by BabyJogger in 1984 when Phil Baechler wanted a way to make running more compatible with the early years of parenting. My mom told me that when I was a baby, just two years earlier, she’d tried only once to run with me, setting out on her usual route through our quiet neighborhood pushing an umbrella stroller, and was met with reprimands from an older woman down the block. When I was pregnant with my first baby, my parents gave me a sleek, safe, sturdy Mountain Buggy I’d chosen for the array of features – shock absorbers and reclining seat, thick tires and canopy – I imagined shepherding my future daughter through my own quiet neighborhood.

Running strollers have a reputation for languishing unused in suburban garages – the baby-gear version of the proverbial treadmill being used to hang off-season clothes. Yet, I knew from the moment I learned I was pregnant with my daughter that I wanted one. Even if I used it only occasionally, the promise it held to bring running, something long central to the way I saw myself and spent my days, into a new life as a mother felt like insurance of a broader, more significant way that raising young children did not have to be at odds with my athletic goals or identity. Yes, the stroller would slow me down and it would be cumbersome on some terrain, but it would also allow me to be more flexible – literally and figuratively – and stronger.

In the early years of motherhood, when I’d just left my job teaching high school English and coaching the cross country and track teams, I was trying to build a freelance writing career in what felt like precious, stolen snippets of time. I learned quickly that I had to save naptime and the total of four hours a week of preschool for writing. After all – I could run six miles with a stroller, but I could not write even a single coherent sentence while nursing (though I tried) or playing peek-a-boo or easing my baby into her crib. Unlike Kara Goucher, who explained to ESPN that because running is her job, she never used a running stroller, it is writing and teaching, not running that are my jobs. I don’t bring my kids to class or try to meet a deadline while playing LEGO.

Running is not my job, though it is central to who I am.

I hadn’t anticipated the ways the stroller would serve as a metaphor much more broadly relevant than in the context of running. Having the running stroller allowed me to have my children with me when I did something I loved. It let me keep them close while also pushing them out into the world ahead of me. Running with the stroller made training possible for me as a new mom, but it also made the intimate landscape of running accessible to all of us. With the running stroller, my kids and I ran through new cities and old familiar parks and at sunrise.

Between the little neighborhood park across the street from where my kids each attended a tiny in-home preschool and the town senior center is a narrow easement, cracked and shaded by overgrown weeds and bordered by the town dump. The path is short, no more than 200 meters long, but in our densely-populated suburban neighborhood, any stretch of land that belongs to neither cars nor a private resident is rare.

On the other side of the easement, just past the senior center, the feeling of the neighborhood shifts, almost imperceptibly. With a few more minutes of running, we could turn down a long, quiet street that led to a hidden beach without concessions or even a parking lot and a tiny playground furnished with the equipment of my own childhood that had elsewhere been replaced in favor of safer structures: a steep metal slide, see-saws, roundabout, and a geometric climbing dome.

When, on hot summer mornings, we stopped at the halfway point of our run to look for hermit crabs burrowing into the sand at low-tide or to spin wildly on the roundabout, it was as though we’d traveled to some other dimension, accessible only by stroller, and separated in a kind of magical haze from the world around us.

I ran the fastest times of my life in the years when I was training mostly with the stroller. In those hours of exploration, punctuated by winded conversation about excavators or the mailman’s new truck, I did get stronger and more flexible, and my perception of effort and focus shifted. The 18:30 it took me to run a 5k seemed shorter, somehow, than it had when I was chasing similar times as a college athlete. The ability to ignore the slow build of discomfort after several miles at half-marathon pace was not so different from the necessity of ignoring a similarly slow build of discomfort as Thea and Simon grew tired of sitting on the last stretch of a six-miler.

My kids are seven and five now, in school five days a week, and so after drop-off each morning I do my morning run and then settle in for a day of writing, grading, teaching, working in the vast stretch of hours that’s available now that they’re older. I am not as fast as I was in those early years – I’m not sure if it’s just the inevitable result of aging, or because I’m focused more on the demands of work and the more complex needs of older children, or if it’s because there really was something physiologically beneficial in those stroller runs.

The playground has been upgraded to the typical green-and-yellow plastic, woodchip-cushioned, safer style of all the others in town and anyway, I’ve given away first the double running stroller, and later, the single one. The last time I led my daughter through the easement, we were on bikes, riding to her best friend’s house, but it still has some of that overgrown, secret magic. Now that my children are too long-limbed and independent for a stroller, I miss that magical world, and the many ways in which keeping my children safe felt so much more straightforward and literal then, when they could ride strapped in and facing out into the world as I pushed them for miles.

Ruben Sanca, 35, MA

For me, the stroller has allowed me to have a special relationship with my son, Greyson. He knows I’m a runner, but he’s been able to live it with me, and to see outside from a different view. We would go by playgrounds, and he’d know where there was ice cream, or where there were smoothies, and I’d come prepared with some dollar bills, ready to stop somewhere. I think there’s a different dynamic when you’re running: he’d point things out, and I’d encourage him to say hello to people, just to make conversation and be polite. It’s nice for kids to be out in society like that, interacting with other people – it’s something they don’t get to do a lot.

Where we live is not super diverse, but I think when people see us running, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t ‘there’s a person of color running with a stroller,’ it’s more like, ‘woah, this person is going super fast.’ There’s something to be said about seeing men push a stroller, more so than being a person of color. You don’t often see men pushing strollers: I’d say eight out ten people I see pushing strollers on runs tend to be women. So when you see a guy pushing a stroller, that stands out.

So long as I’m fit, I can finish stroller runs pretty quick, say under six minute pace. A couple of weeks before we ran 4:32.2 at the High Street Mile in Newburyport, when we were on a recovery run, I decided to test the limits to see how fast we could actually go. Four miles into an eight mile run we stopped in a neighborhood where there were a bunch of kids riding bikes. I asked Greyson if he wanted to race them, and he said ‘sure, let’s do it,’ so we lined up, and I pushed the stroller as fast as I could for 150m, just to see. Getting it going is like pushing a bobsled – you need to use both hands, then once you have some momentum you can let your natural stride take over. I actually hit 4:07 pace, so I knew we could go fast, I just had to stay relaxed at the same time. Breaking the record was fun, but Greyson’s getting big – he’s five and he’s tall – so I can’t see us doing it again.

Sarah Mackay Robinson, 39, Tacoma, WA

It’s been almost eight years, but I bet you can still see the path I wore into the 2.9 mile loop of Green Lake. Mile after mile coming home to myself with Penelope along for the ride. The highlight version is this: we stamped down the dirt path with every easy run of the training block that took me to the 2016 Olympic Trials Marathon. But the truest story starts when we very slowly made grooves, and tried to find ours, in the golden melancholy of the end of summer. Infant attachment, car seat clipped in facing me, her eyes wide open. Always absorbing. Always tracking. Never sleeping. Never sleeping. Never sleeping. While I shuffled, wobbly and disjointed, fighting to stitch myself back together after our traumatic birth. Raw and broken, swollen and aching. Wondering if I’d ever run again. If I’d ever be a human again.

When it came time to let the stroller go after Penelope and her brother were done with it, I couldn’t sell it. It had been bestowed on me like deep magic, a portal to the runner and mother I was becoming. Not the runner I used to be. Not the person I was. I ended up reaching out to my old team, and a runner who was pregnant with her first baby sent her mother-in-law to retrieve it. I wonder where it’s taken her. How many stuffies or pacis or fits have been thrown. How many times it’s gifted her those vital few feet between her and the edge. Gently welcoming her back home.

Ben Rayner, 37, New York

I started jogging with my son Elijah during the pandemic when I was stuck in Vancouver, Canada for a few months. I would run in the morning and then jog with him in the afternoons when my wife was working. It was a great way to explore a new city and connect with different places that were perhaps too far to walk to. Eli got diagnosed as Autistic just after we were back in New York City. Even though he is four years old and almost 45lb, I still jog with him all the time. He loves the sensory aspect of it, moving fast and seeing different things. I am forever thankful for our Thule and feel like we have had some great times with it.

Andy Waterman, 41, London

I was excited to buy a running stroller. I spent weeks researching and scouring second hand marketplaces to buy one. Most were in incredible condition – I got the impression there were a lot of good intentions never quite turned into habits. My son was born in January and grew fast, so he was ready to roll by late spring. We started small and built up, my wife and I taking it in turn to run with him, but never too far – maybe up to an hour if he fell asleep. That summer, just as he was getting to grips with solid food we went on vacation and when we arrived home, my wife needed to catch up with some computer work. I said I'd take the baby out for the day as she would struggle to get anything done with him around. It would be both of our first full days without being close to home so he could breastfeed. At about 11 a.m. we set off, and he promptly fell asleep for over an hour. Eight or nine miles later when he woke up, we stopped and played on the grass so he could roll around. When he started to get grouchy, we got back in the stroller and ran another four miles to a cafe I knew that was baby friendly and big enough to accomodate a running stroller. He sat up the whole way, alert, watching the world go by. In the cafe we both ate: him vegetables from a pouch and a bottle of milk, me some kind of focaccia with an egg baked into it. We were enjoying each other's company. When he started to get impatient and before he started to throw food all over the room, we left to run home. Again, he fell asleep so I took the scenic route – six miles or so along quiet, traffic-free bike paths back to our house. In total we covered 19 miles and we were out of the house for almost five hours. That was a revelation: we could have fun together and I could introduce him to new places and experiences, and I could keep running. Both my kids have outgrown the stroller now, but I'm still running – we have a great relationship and they're both super active. I credit our time with the running stroller for a lot of that.

Amanda Parrish Morgan is the author of Stroller, published by Bloomsbury, 2022.

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