ShareThisBy CRISTINA ROUVALIS
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
An overweight, smoking 48-year-old nun named Sister Marion Irvine starts running with a younger friend, and incredibly six years later, Sister Marion becomes an Olympic hopeful. The Flying Nun, as the Californian is dubbed, gets a Nike sponsorship.
Sandy Felt, 46, trains for a marathon at the urging of her husband, Ed. When he dies aboard United Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, she runs a marathon to work through her grief and to be near him.
Sandy Oslosky is jogging when a drunk driver crashes into her husband and daughter behind her on a bike. Haunted by the crash and frustrated by the judicial system, Oslosky starts running seriously, a discipline that gives her the focus to go back to school and become a police officer.
These are some of the inspirational stories about female runners that Jennifer Lin and Susan Warner have compiled in their new book, "Sole Sisters: Stories of Women and Running."
The $12.95 paperback (Andrews McMeel Publishing) contains one stirring vignette after another that will propel you off your couch into the streets to find your runner's high. Or at least your runner's camaraderie.
The book taps into the explosion of female runners. In the last five years, the male/female ratio at running events is roughly 50/50, compared to 62/38 percent in 1993, according to Running USA, a nonprofit group devoted to road racing and long-distance running.
The number of female users of running shoes is about 50 percent, up from 38 percent in 1993.
And for the ranks of women who run in pairs or groups, running is more than just exercise. It also is about female bonding.
"For moms who are multitasking, trying to deal with kids and jobs, running becomes a great release," said Lin, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who worked for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1980 to 1983. "It becomes therapeutic."
Sure, men talk and bond while they run, too, but Lin thinks the camaraderie/therapy element resonates a little more with female runners.
"I hate to say it, but it is because we like to talk. I feel guilty going to Starbucks and hanging out and gabbing with my friends. But if I run and gab, it is OK. It is perfect for the multitasking woman. There is no guilt."
Lin often runs and chats away with Warner, a freelance writer, through the streets of Philadelphia, at a perfect 10-minute pace. "You can set your watch to my pace," said Lin, who has run half-marathons. "I have no delusions of grandeur. I don't want to go much faster. It is too much work."
Part of the everyman and everywoman appeal of running is that the 10-minute miler can compete in the same race as the seeded marathoner or half-marathoner.
"Soul Sisters" tells how running transformed elite runners such as Sister Marion and Grete Waitz. But it also tells how running changes the lives of everyday runners who don't have a prayer of winning a race or getting a shoe deal.
The first chapter chronicles how elite runner and college coach Joan Nesbit Mabe started a running program for moms in her North Carolina neighborhood. The mothers would build up endurance for their first 10K as they shared potty-training tips and child-raising philosophies.
"They had something she didn't always see in young elite runners _ gratitude. They weren't running to get scholarships," the book reads. "They weren't desperate to land a shoe contract. They weren't competing to please their coaches. They were running for the sheer joy of it _ grateful just to be out of the house, among interesting friends, running along a shaded trail, or sprinting down a track as fast as they could."
(Cristina Rouvalis can be reached at crouvalis(at)post-gazette.com.)
