Family/inspiration/parenting/running: A Can of Peas

This story was last published in Radish Magazine in September 2008



A Can of Peas


One summer day a dozen years ago, I stood at my living room window and watched two women walk by on the sidewalk. They were both young mothers, and each pushed a stroller holding a toddler about the same size as Dana, my then two-year-old daughter. It struck me how alike the women looked – heavy and slow, with untucked, oversized T-shirts covering ample butts and bellies. Then my window became a mirror, and I saw myself. I looked just like them.

In that instant, as I stood there in my untucked, oversized T-shirt and elastic waist shorts, I knew I had to make some changes. God was hitting me over the head with a giant foam hammer: "This is an epiphany, Lori. Run with it." And that, more or less, is what I did.

I’d always been a tiny person, able to exercise never, eat whatever whenever, and remain trim and petite. I’d even come out the other end of my first pregnancy smaller than when I went into it. I’d had a hard time just holding onto my first child, a boy. After seven months of nausea, projectile rejection of almost all food save Cheerios and Dannon yogurt, and a stint in the hospital hooked to a nasogastric tube that delivered protein drink through my nostrils to my stomach, my Adam greeted the world two months early. Four pounds and able to fit in the palm of my husband’s hand. When we took our tiny fighter home after his stay in intensive care, I weighed five pounds less than I’d weighed in high school.

Dana stayed in the womb a week beyond the due date. While I carried Dana, she and I ate. About every 20 minutes. With Adam, I felt sick if I ate. With Dana, I felt sick if I didn’t. I embarked on a nine-month, nonstop eating orgy. Steak, peanut butter, baked potatoes with sour cream, hot fudge sundaes. Deli meat, frozen pizza, Cheez-Its by the boxful. Oreos, burritos, chocolate and butterscotch pudding smothered in Redi-Whip. I slept with a loaf of bread next to the bed.

When Dana was born, healthy and beautiful, I was big. And stayed big. And pretended I wasn’t. Had God sent the two strolling mothers any earlier, I wouldn’t have been ready to receive the message. Being in denial awhile had allowed me to keep eating donuts, corned beef hash and bacon while rationalizing the weight gain as a normal, perfectly acceptable stage of motherhood.

Upon my epiphany, I resolved to effect a wholesale, cold turkey conversion. I knew exactly what I had to do: eat less, eat well, move more. Forever. And it’s the forever part that made the whole thing easier to swallow.

Were I to put myself "on a diet," I knew I would fail, ultimately if not right away. I needed to replace "diet," a short term, emergency-infused concept, with "life," hopefully long and good. I would never be on a diet. I’d be on life.

A diet would address only what I took in. But life offered the chance to play with energy, experiment with taking it in and burning it off. A diet held no challenge: Here, eat this measured thing. Life said, "Have some fun. See what happens when you eat a little and burn a little. Or eat a lot and burn a little. Or eat a little and burn a lot. Or eat a lot and burn a lot." What fun! Like being a scientist.

So I banished "diet" from my mindset and lexicon and focused on life. I resolved to do three things: center my meals around plants; choose healthy calories over bad or empty ones; move for at least 20 minutes a day.When time came for my first post-conversion meal, I opened the fridge. I wanted to plant-center my plate, but there wasn’t a fresh fruit or vegetable in that whole Kenmore. I opened the cupboard and took down a can of peas. I found an onion, sautéed it in olive oil, threw in some chopped garlic and lemon juice, and folded the mix into the peas. I poured a tall glass of OJ, sat down on my deck, and tucked into this humble, healthy lunch that would change my life.

The next morning, I dug out an old pair of sneakers, pulled on my elastic waist shorts and oversized T-shirt, and went outside to move. I started out walking, but soon found myself lifting my feet high enough off the ground to approximate a rude form of entry level shuffle-jogging. That first day, I made it once around the block. I felt like I was going to die, but I knew I’d run the race of my life.

Now, after years of salads, fruit, fish, chicken, whole grains and the occasional Oreo or Dairy Queen cone, I wear high school-size jeans and have long since given away my elastic waist shorts.

And that energy experiment? My favorite take in-burn off combination is "eat a lot and burn a lot." That’s what I do when I train for a marathon. I’m preparing for my ninth.

Essay/Inspiration: United we ran

Published widely in newspapers and magazines nationwide and online, fall to winter 2001

November 7, 2001

United we ran

By LORI HEIN
GUEST COLUMNIST

I know where hope lives. I know where strength, endurance, passion and pride live. They live in New York City. On Nov. 4, I ran through 26 miles of these affirmations of our humanity.

This New York City Marathon was not about athletes turning in impressive times. It was only about going the distance — the distance from profound sadness and loss to a point where collective human goodness and hope carry us toward a finish line we still can’t see. In a city pierced through its core by hate and pain, hope is alive and well. There is no doubt it will triumph.

Thirty thousand runners came to New York to fuel that hope. We came from all over the globe to tell New York it doesn’t stand alone. Runners from Kansas and Denmark and Japan and Algeria and California and Scotland and Venezuela came to show the people of Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island and New Jersey and Staten Island and Manhattan and Queens and Yonkers and White Plains and southern Connecticut that their pain is shared. When pain is shared, it is eased.

In turn, the 2 million spectators who lined the 26.2 mile five-borough route fueled the runners with something far more nourishing to a spent body and mind than any energy drink or quick-acting carbohydrate. They carried us through the neighborhoods, up the hills, over the bridges, past the buildings, down the avenues, around the corners and into Central Park with their humanity. To say we connected is to understate the pure human goodness that permeated every inch of every borough. When we slapped palms with kids in Brooklyn and exchanged high-fives with teenagers in the Bronx and looked into the eyes of young mothers in Queens and smiled at old men on kitchen chairs waving flags and raised defiantly clenched fists to the firefighters watching from their engines and station houses, we said, together and loudly with no words, " We cannot be beaten. We will overcome. We are united. "

Go to New York if you can. You will hear occasional sirens and see a few haz-mat trucks roaring down the street. You will likely make the unspeakably painful pilgrimage to Ground Zero to try and take in the enormity of the loss and grief. You won’t be able to and you will walk away numb. You will see billboards and walls with the faces of young people gone forever. You will see the tired eyes of cops operating on adrenaline and resolve. You will see fire stations wreathed in purple bunting and covered with drawings from school kids in Lubbock, Texas and Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

But keep walking and looking and you will find hope. You will check into your hotel and be given both a key and a smile that thanks you for coming. You will ask an elevator attendant how he’s doing and he’ll thank you for asking. You will eat dinner in a Turkish restaurant with an American flag painted on its window. You will see the Christmas lights strung across Mulberry Street in Little Italy, lighting the hopeful faces of waiters beckoning you to try their pasta tonight. You will see the pulsing neon of Times Square and the lacy spires of St. Patrick’s and the holiday window dressers already at work on Fifth Avenue. You will look from the Chrysler Building’s gleaming art deco cap to the Empire State Building, doing justice to its role as New York’s tallest building by beaming its red, white and blue floodlit top like a beacon to the city and the world.

I know where hope lives. It lives in New York City. And it lives in all of us.

Essay/Inspiration: Bumps in the road

Originally published in MetroSports Boston (now New England Sports), June 2002:

Bumps in the road
by Lori Hein

I answered the phone, lost my job, and in one swift, silver lining moment, realized my recent string of running injuries and layoffs had been a gift.

When my boss called to say the company I’d worked at for 20 years was downsizing and my last check was in the mail, I discovered, as I stood there in the kitchen with the phone to my ear, that I was oddly and confidently prepared to handle this news and, in that instant, saw my running setbacks for what they really were – strengthening exercises. Lessons that could help me navigate the bumps in the road that is my life.

As I listened to my job evaporate, I got it. I suddenly knew what all the effort, discipline and disappointment had been about. “You’ve been an asset,” said the telephone voice. As the platitude pile grew, so did my epiphany. Those injuries and training heartaches had made me stronger. They’d tested and toughened me, and they’d taught me how to take the long view.

I'd been running a long time. For years I'd go out and do my four miles, often feeling I could go on forever. One day I did, turning in a joy-filled, lactic acid-laden thirteen. I mentioned that outing to my son's basketball coach, an avid runner. "So, you did a half marathon,” he said and, with that m-word, planted a 26 mile-long seed in my head. Before a week had passed, I was contemplating the possibility of going the whole distance and visualizing myself in a marathon t-shirt.

I signed up for a fall race and trained hard. Too hard. After a month of living by the training schedule hanging on the fridge, tendinitis got me.

I found out what a physical therapist does and made a mental note to always have one on my holiday card list. I learned the art and science of proper stretching, strengthening and buildup. My therapist healed me fast and got me back out there with seven weeks to go before the race. I'd cross-trained through rehab and had maintained a decent level of fitness. With work and a little luck, I could be ready.

On the first run of my resuscitated training program, I fell off a curb and suffered a third-degree ankle sprain that looked like a ripe eggplant. My family iced the elevated lump while I cried.

Before the end of this new layoff, I’d registered for a May marathon. With physical therapy, my ankle healed just in time to start training. A bitter winter set in, but I savored every crystalline run. I used an indoor track on icy days and spent one 20-miler running for three hours in a circle, direction changes the only relief.

Spring came. The long runs turned from frigid tests of will to sun-soaked communions with nature. I was mentally and physically ready. On my last truly long run, three weeks before the marathon, my left leg caved in. The physical pain was intense. The emotional pain of knowing it was over, again, was unbearable. I didn't need the official diagnosis of stress fracture to realize I wouldn’t see the starting line.

When my daughter came home from school, she found me, leg propped on pillows, sobbing. Having seen variations on this theme, she knew what it meant and what it meant to me. She hugged me, took my hand, and said, “Don’t worry. There are other marathons. You'll just try again, right mommy?"

Perspective is a wonderful thing. My thwarted efforts to make it to a marathon had taught my daughter something about persistence, patience, focus. And faith. The busted leg didn't hurt so much anymore, and the wounded psyche felt a little hope massaging its sore spots.

I healed and started over. Six months later, I finished my first marathon. While finishing was euphoric, just being there was life-changing. Toeing that start line was a personal best that will never be trumped.

Fast forward to my kitchen. Phone in hand, I let my boss finish telling me how sorry he was about the job loss.

But I was already thinking about the future. I knew I’d land on my feet and toe the start line of some new challenge. As there are other marathons, there are other jobs.

The world brims with possibility. Once you're confident about your potential, there's no race you can’t run.

Sports/Inspiration: Marathoners race for cancer research

Published in a half-dozen Boston Herald-owned dailies and weeklies, March 2003:

Marathoners race for cancer research

By Lori Hein / Norton Mirror Correspondent
Friday, March 14, 2003

As a correspondent for this newspaper, I often use column space to write about interesting or noteworthy things local people are involved in. This week, the paper is letting me share something I'm involved in.

I'm running the Boston Marathon as a member of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's team. About 400 Dana-Farber runners hope to raise nearly $3 million for the Claudia Adams Barr Program, which funds promising cancer research projects.

Training and fundraising run side by side through the winter, and by April 21, when the gun goes off in Hopkinton, both your body and fundraising account need to be in peak shape. I'll do my best with the first, but welcome your help with the second. Many of you have already helped, and I thank you.

Let me take you on a quick run through the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge (DFMC). Marathon training is a curious mixture of exhaustion and euphoria. For some reason, the balance tips just enough toward euphoria (which always follows the deepest exhaustion) to make you keep doing it. When you bust through the hardest points is when you feel most alive. At such moments, I know that the energy to run is a gift. It seems right to use the gift to fight something that steals energy from others.

Most marathoners train for three months, some longer. I train for 10 weeks. This will be my third marathon, but my fifth time in training. My first two attempts ended in injuries close to race day, the result of doing too much, too fast, for too long.

I do my long runs, the heart of marathon training, on Thursdays. That's when I strap on my survival belt packed with Gummi Bears and Gatorade and go out looking more than a little goofy for a few hours. I often have golden packs of PowerGel pinned to my belt.

One day, while running up Mountain Street toward Lake Massapoag, one of my favorite routes, I ran by a group of kids at a bus stop. The gels, bouncing at my waist, caught their eye, and they screamed, "Runner! Hey, Runner! Why do you have candy? Mom! Why does she have candy?" When the bus passed me a minute later, I laughed at their dozen faces pressed to the window glass.

You know you're ready for the marathon when anything under 15 miles is "going short," and anything under eight feels like a day off. You're good to go.

Easton's Elizabeth Puopolo and Kathy Strange, and Kaitlin Hoffman of Mansfield, are going through their own variations on this training theme. They're running Boston for Dana-Farber, too. (And likely eating large amounts of pasta, beans and whole grains, like I am. I appreciate my family's patience during this period of culinary tedium.)

An army of volunteers helps the team. Two of those volunteers are Kaitlin's dad Richard Hoffman of Mansfield and her boyfriend, Joe Coughlin of Easton. Last year, they set up water stops for winter group training runs and helped set up on race day. They plan to do the same this year.

When you support a DFMC runner, your money does great things. First, you're helping your friends and neighbors. Over 42,000 Massachusetts residents received care at Dana-Farber in just the last five years, and nearly 300 of them were from Mansfield, Norton and Easton.

Dana-Farber scientists are responsible for many breakthrough treatment advances. They established the principles of chemotherapy, achieved remissions of a common childhood leukemia, pioneered self bone marrow transplants, introduced tests for both ovarian and recurrent breast cancers and developed cancer treatment methods used as models around the world.

The Barr Program, to which all DFMC funds go, supports doctors and scientists like Jeremy Green. Dr. Green and the other Barr investigators conduct studies that hold promise in improving cancer treatment and cure rates. Your donations help set up and run their labs.

I heard Dr. Green speak at a fall runner's meeting, and he, among others, convinced me this was a cause worth running for. He recently took a break from writing a 16,000-word proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to share, via e-mail, the impact of the funds raised by the marathoners and their sponsors. His NIH proposal is to follow up work currently funded by the Barr Program.

NIH needs "preliminary data." Without the Barr Program and the DFMC, Dr. Green might not have any. According to Green, "They provide the seed money that gets the big projects rolling." This money "is an absolute necessity to the research effort."

He described how the spirit of the marathon buoys the researchers: "Although our research output has to be emotion-free, we scientists are just as emotional as anyone else and just as touched by the cause of curing patients and by the dedication of the runners."

Green will watch at least some of the marathon, as he always does - even if he's in the lab on Patriot's Day.

One of Dr. Green's final comments was "...Cancers are so unfair, but I genuinely think that cures are within reach. It's an exciting time in cancer research." That's all I need to lace up my shoes.

If you'd like to help, you can send your tax-deductible gift payable to "Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge" to: Lori Hein, 40 Williams St., N. Easton, MA 02356, or visit www.dana-farber.org/DFMC, click on "Support A Runner," and enter my name (some of you know me as Lori Belanger - Mike's wife and Adam and Dana's mom - but I'm running as Lori Hein) or eGift ID, which is LH0025. You can make eGift contributions to the other local runners there as well. Together, we can beat cancer to the finish line.