Allen Is Running A Marathon
It's race day, and it'southward freezing. Connie doesn't have gloves or a hat. She wears blackness yoga pants and a cotton sweatshirt. On her anxiety are a pair of bulky five-year-one-time white Nikes she bought at a Human foot Locker. The oversupply around her buzzes with strange talk of Garmins, and racing flats, and PRs, whatever those are.
At the gun, her friend says: "Just run. Only follow the people."
It's 2013, and Connie is 24. When her friend suggested a few weeks prior that she register for the Valentine's Twenty-four hour period 5K in Brooklyn'due south Prospect Park, she'd asked: "What'southward a 5K?"
"Information technology's just a loop of the park," he said.
How should she prepare, Connie wanted to know. "Just run on the treadmill," he said. She figured, How hard could it exist?
But at present she's following the people, a big, swarming crowd of people. And when they become to a hill, the people keep going and Connie stops. I can't practice it, she thinks.
Running exterior, let alone amongst hundreds of other runners on a frigid Saturday morning, is new to Connie. For years, she had to hide her workouts from her married man and family. The loma earlier her is steep, but not well-nigh every bit steep as the one she has already climbed merely to reach the starting line.
Connie Allen preparation on a local rails, July 2020.
Sundays were school days when Connie was growing upwardly. Only a few hours most Sundays, except for the start Sunday in Nov each year, when the New York Urban center Marathon ran upwards Bedford Artery, straight through the heart of Due south Williamsburg. That was a full twenty-four hours.
She would see only the marathon's backwash: an artery strewn with paper cups, empty gel packets, and police barricades, the mysterious remnants of one of the largest route races in the world. Marathoners were crazy people, she was told. They were going to intermission their legs, or faint, or die the moment they crossed the end line. But most important, they were not part of the customs.
Connie Allen, née Schlesinger, was raised Satmar, an ultra-Orthodox sect of Hasidic Judaism that originated in Hungary in the early 20th century but really took root in mail service–World War II New York. After the Holocaust, thousands of Orthodox Jews fled Europe and established tightly knit communities throughout Brooklyn, including in South Williamsburg. Connie'southward female parent, Devorah, was born in Israel; her father, Lipa, in Brooklyn. His parents, Holocaust survivors from Hungary, had their first child on the gunkhole from Europe to New York. They were also cousins.
For that first wave of Jewish émigrés, postal service-war Brooklyn represented a new beginning, merely information technology was hardly a happy 1. "Even in this country of safety and abundance, the hurting of the Holocaust wasn't very far from the surface," writes Warren Kozak in his book The Rabbi of 84th Street. "One could hear it in discussions and encounter information technology on the faces of those who survived." They seemed to be "stuck in a dark void," a state of constant mourning. "Even the warm glow [of Shabbos candles] could not fill the horrible vacuum."
Connie (left) at historic period 10 with one of her sisters.
South Williamsburg measures less than one square mile, but it's grown into i of the largest Hasidic enclaves in the world: Some estimates suggest that it's home to as many as 73,000 Hasidim of diverse sects. Most are Satmar, who decline modern life and maintain the customs and dress of their Hungarian ancestors. Insular and culturally bourgeois, the Satmar believe that through strict piety and by refusing to assimilate, they can guard against some other attempt at annihilation.
This insularity is reinforced past geography, with sharp lines separating South Williamsburg from its neighbors: Williamsburg proper to the north, where boutiques, confined, and luxury condominiums line the East River waterfront; and Bedford-Stuyvesant to the south, a historically Blackness neighborhood divers by 19th-century brownstones, Baptist churches, and vacant lots turned into customs gardens.
Connie knew nothing of either globe as a child, nor of any other worlds across Southward Williamsburg, where she was born in 1988. She knew only what she caught glimpses of; her imagination did the rest. From her third-floor apartment on Lee Avenue and Heyward Street, she would sit at the window staring out—"particularly on the weekends," she says, "because there'd exist less Jewish people out on the street."
Whenever she saw a non-Hasidic person walk by, her eyes would be glued on them. "I'd merely try to understand what life was out in that location, considering the life I was living was so miserable and and so depressing."
It's spring 2002, and Connie is 13. She'due south small, with big brown optics. Her silken hair falls straight against her back in a unmarried tight braid. Her traditional black housedress extends almost to her ankles and covers her arms and neck; underneath she wears thick beige tights. Simply her face up and hands are exposed. Every article of her vesture has been handed down from her older cousins and sisters. She feels invisible.
Connie'due south Satmar school is closed to girls for three weeks over spring interruption so they can help their mothers with Passover cleaning. They empty the cupboards, scour every surface that nutrient has touched, and scrub the walls to rid their homes of whatever trace of bread products. In Connie's dwelling, they even clean the ceilings. The ritual commemorates the exodus of enslaved Israelites from Egypt, when, according to the Bible, they were liberated by Moses then abruptly that their bread had no time to rise and they were left with only unleavened bread for their journey across the desert. Today the weeklong holiday is observed without leavened grain products, a tradition that honors their exile and hardship.
For those three weeks, Connie's typically silent apartment is total of mayhem, and she sees an opportunity. She may not be able to modify her wearing apparel or her hair, merely she can change her body.
As her mother and sisters make clean and scour and scrub, Connie slips down the narrow hall to her bedroom. She closes the door and lays towels on the creaky wood floor to muffle the sound. She begins: outset jumping jacks, and so high knees, and so running in place equally hard every bit she tin can, nearly passing out from the endeavor. She repeats the wheel for twenty minutes, and over again the side by side twenty-four hours. And the twenty-four hour period after that, until information technology'due south time to go back to school.
"I wasn't overweight, merely I wanted to lose weight. Non considering I wanted to lose weight, just considering I wanted people to notice that I'd lost weight. And not even that I'd lost weight, necessarily, but notice me," she says now.
Looking dorsum, she realizes how unhealthy that idea procedure was for an adolescent girl. But 13-year-old Connie, who wasn't even allowed to wear her hair down or practice anything else to feel skilful about how she looked, but wanted to be seen. Past her classmates, her teachers. Anyone. She wanted to exist someone other than the girl in thick braids and dark clothes who even other Hasidic children thought was weird.
Lipa and Devorah had eight children, six girls and two boys. Connie was their fifth child, and their fourth daughter. The family was astringent even past Satmar standards, which exacerbated her feeling of alienation among her peers. Lipa believed that food was for nourishment alone, not pleasure. He had never tasted chocolate or ice cream. Devorah spent most days reading her prayer book. She rarely showed amore.
On Fridays at sundown, Devorah would light Shabbos candles and Connie and her sisters would queue up in the living room "like an assembly line." One by one, Devorah would osculation them on the forehead; in return, they would kiss her paw. It was a tradition that had been passed down over generations. Connie says she didn't feel any item affinity for Judaism or God. But she cherished those moments of closeness with her mother. She wanted more.
Lipa spent his days studying the Torah. Their income was limited to what Devorah earned babysitting for other families in the building. The family relied on food stamps to buy squished produce and stale bread at the market. The only meat they had was from chickens that Lipa usually slaughtered and cleaned himself, both to ensure that it was washed according to kosher standards and because the butcher cut him a deal for doing the labor himself. Lipa got priority at meals; the kids were left with bare craven wings and little bits of potato or rice. Green beans if they were lucky.
Connie looked frontward to holidays, because on holidays, she and her sisters got to help Devorah make rugelach, a traditional Jewish pastry filled with chocolate or cinnamon. It was the but fourth dimension they were immune to have carbohydrate. The family spoke but Yiddish and dressed in night colors. The girls wore their pilus in one or two braids; the boys in traditional payos, or "side curls." Connie and her sisters were forbidden from talking to other girls who styled their hair with ponytails or bangs, or who wore colorful wear. Her brothers were forbidden from talking to girls at all.
Connie, heart, at age xiv with her siblings on their way to visit her older sis who had recently had a baby. She says it was the first time she had always ridden the subway despite being built-in and raised in NYC.
"He was extremely religious," Connie says of her father. He believed men were holy; they existed to serve God. Women existed to have children and to serve their husbands. The sexes were to be kept separate. When Connie and her sisters turned 12, their begetter stopped looking at them or speaking to them directly. Whenever he chastised them, information technology was always through Devorah. Connie got chastised a lot. She was rebellious. She liked to listen to the radio; sometimes she brushed her teeth on Shabbos. Neither was allowed.
"I know a lot of people who grew up better than I did," says Connie now. "They had more liberty of speaking their mind, and more love. I e'er feel like things would have been unlike if I'd had that honey." By 16, she decided she was done. Or rather, the conclusion was made for her. The sequence is a little murky; information technology comes in flashes at present, her retentiveness a kaleidoscope refracting the slivers of a life that, upward to then, had simply seemed of a piece. Connie sometimes has trouble putting them back together. She pauses oftentimes. Getting it correct is of import.
Of this she is certain: The summer afterward 11th grade, in 2005, Connie was told non to return to school. She had made a friend at Satmar sleepaway camp who'd acquired a reputation for hanging around with boys. The school disapproved. Connie was fine with this. She'd never felt similar she fit in.
She got a task helping the teachers at another schoolhouse, where she befriended the janitor. He was the first not-Jewish person Connie had ever known. And though goose egg ever happened between them, Connie considered him her boyfriend. What else to call a man she talked to in individual?
Devorah had reached her limit. She demanded that Connie talk to her uncle, "who supposedly knew about stuff." Connie agreed on 1 condition: that her female parent find her a match by the time she turned 17. It'due south not uncommon for young ultra-Orthodox Jews to go married as a way to escape their parents' homes, says Yael Reisman, the director of field and movement building at Footsteps, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that provides aid to ultra-Orthodox Jews who want to transition out of the community. Just getting married too further cements them in the community. "Once you lot're married, information technology becomes much harder to get out," she says. "And one time you have children, information technology's even harder."
It was July and her birthday was in October. Connie figured she could make it that long. "I merely wanted to exit," she says.
Connie went to see her uncle three times. They met in a dimly lit room in his firm. There was an erstwhile-fashioned dinette against ane wall, a couch against some other. He sabbatum at the head of a long, wooden table, stroking his long, night bristles. She sat at the side, her eyes cast downwards, her easily folded in her lap. He assumed she'd been sent to him because she was meaning. "He talked about sex the whole fourth dimension," she says. "I didn't even know what sex was. That was the showtime time I ever learned about it."
Connie's parents fulfilled their end of the deal, too, and found her an eligible boy, some other Satmar one twelvemonth older than Connie. "My family thought I was already pregnant, and they didn't want a scandal on their hands," she says. The couple had a brief, 15-minute coming together and were married 12 weeks later.
Connie at 17, on her wedding mean solar day.
Once she was married, Connie cutting off her hair and began wearing a wig; only a woman's husband should run across her natural hair, according to ultra-Orthodox custom. The couple moved into a small flat just a few blocks from where they'd both been raised and began to build a life. In the Orthodox community, that meant starting a family unit.
Every month after her wedding, Connie walked upward Bedford Avenue, turned right onto Penn Street, and entered an unmarked brick building. Connie hated going to the mikvah, a ritual bath that dates to at least the 1st century B.C. and adheres strictly to rabbinical law. Simply she had no choice. Married Orthodox women are expected to get to the mikvah at the end of their monthly cycles to ensure that they are "pure."
Within the building, she would descend a narrow set of stairs to a clammy basement. An older woman would greet her there and lead her into ane of several private rooms, where Connie undressed, showered, clipped her nails, and combed what remained of her thick, black hair. When she was finished, she would ring a bell and the older woman would come in to inspect her from head to toe. Was she clean enough? Did she have any loose pilus? Were her nails fairly trimmed?
Then she'd get to a larger room with a small-scale pool. They'd exist the only ii people in the room. Connie would submerge herself entirely six times as the older woman sabbatum on the side and watched. Subsequently each submersion the older woman would offering a uncomplicated, two-syllable affidavit: "Kosher."
Connie and her hubby had picayune in common, only they did share a rebellious streak. She thought that might be enough. Unlike almost young Satmar men, her husband didn't shun the secular earth and spend his days studying the Torah. He had a job. He smoked. He had a auto. He was one of the "cool" guys. And he introduced Connie to movies. These became an escape, however brief. But they also made her sad. Her heart sank during what she refers to as "the love parts"—any scene that depicted a deep, affectionate relationship betwixt the characters. "I didn't have that," she says.
Connie got meaning the get-go time she and her hubby had sex. Within weeks, she fell so sick she could barely get out of bed. She was already thin—110 pounds—and dropped to 90. She never saw a physician. Instead, her married man called a rabbi.
The rabbi came to their apartment and the two of them sat down at the dining room table. "You take to take care of your husband, you lot accept to support your family," he told her, his vocalization gentle simply firm. "You can't but lie in bed all 24-hour interval." Connie seethed. She realized that her husband thought she'd been faking. He'd summoned the rabbi to call her barefaced. A week later on she had a miscarriage.
Subsequently nearly two more years of trying to get pregnant (and dreaded visits to the mikvah), Connie gave nascence to a son in August 2008. She was 19. She joined the local YMCA, on Bedford and Monroe Street, about a mile south of S Williamsburg, where she began walking on the treadmill in an effort to lose some pregnancy weight. Her husband joined too, but information technology wasn't his matter. He preferred to stay home.
Connie went to the Y a few times a week, after she put her son to bed. She wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, blackness leggings, and a long skirt, and covered her hair with a large kerchief. On her anxiety she wore the beefy white Nikes she'd lace upwards five years later for that Valentine'southward Day 5K. Gradually, she learned to option up the pace for brief intervals, jogging for up to 2, maybe three minutes at a time.
During her pregnancy, Connie had been able to avoid the mikvah because she wasn't menstruating, and she managed to sustain her hiatus even after she gave birth. "It takes about half dozen weeks to get rid of all the postpartum blood and any," she says. But somewhen, she was expected to go back. "Information technology's a job that women do to provide sex for their husbands," she says.
1 twenty-four hour period, Connie realized that once a month, during the time she would normally allocate to the mikvah, she could disappear for upwardly to ii and a half hours without cartoon suspicion. This gave her an idea: "I figured, instead of going to Bedford and Penn Street, I'll just become to Bedford and Monroe Street and brand my ain mikvah."
She learned to use the weight machines, to do crunches on a Pilates brawl, and to climb the stair machine. Afterward she'd take a quick shower in the locker room, clip her nails, and go home, a directly shot up Bedford Avenue on the B44 omnibus. Her husband had no idea.
At dwelling house, Connie connected to rebel. She wore jeans and put on a skirt simply when she left the business firm. She grew her pilus out and wore it down, donning her wig simply in public. She listened to the radio. "It was but me in the house doing what I wanted, and if my husband didn't like it, we'd fight. Whatever. I didn't fifty-fifty intendance," she says. Also, he could be loose with the rules besides. He watched Television receiver and had a smartphone. He wore cufflinks and cologne. He'd skip the prayer at synagogue.
But now they had a son. They had to think well-nigh where he'd go to schoolhouse, what kind of dress he'd wear, whether he'd have side curls. They fought near information technology. "He wanted to go along living that double life," she says. For Connie, that was unacceptable. "I thought, you tin can watch TV but your child can't? That'southward not how I desire to raise my child. That's non honest, and non truthful."
She told her husband she wanted to leave the customs. He tried to dissuade her. Then he said they'd practice it together, they'd alter together. "Only he didn't take information technology in him," she says. "He just couldn't practise information technology."
Reisman says that for people who get out the community, the repercussions extend far beyond the one who chooses to get. Leaving "tarnishes the entire family unit," she says. "Your siblings might non exist selected for sure marriages, your begetter might be ostracized at shul (synagogue). People worry about what will happen in their wake. That's why some who may want to leave don't."
Connie with her son, at age 2, and her sisters, the last time they were all together before she left the community.
As oppressive as life in the community might appear to outsiders, specially for women and girls, Reisman says information technology tin also exist one of great warmth and beauty. "Everyone looks out for you," she says. "Almost every need is taken intendance of. If you leave that, not merely are you lot going out on your ain, but yous're losing your whole safe net."
For many in the ultra-Orthodox customs, this presents the biggest take a chance of all. "Considering of the mode you were brought upwardly, yous don't know how to function in the world," Reisman says. "You may not fifty-fifty speak English. The ultra-Orthodox are essentially immigrants in the place where they were born."
No one in Connie'due south life supported her decision. They told her of people who'd left and committed suicide, or who tried to render but were never truly accepted back into the fold. That there was nothing out there for her. That she'd lose her son.
"She had everything at stake," says Reisman. "She had everything to lose."
Only Connie could see no other way. She had to leave for her son'south sake. During their divorce, Connie's husband threatened to sue her for custody. She was unfazed. "I said, 'What are you going to do? You weren't in the room when he was born, you've never fed him, never changed his diaper.' And in the community, that was normal. But I wanted a partner."
Through Facebook, Connie met some other young single mother who was also leaving the community, and they got a two-sleeping room apartment in Midwood, a placidity, middle-class neighborhood in central Brooklyn, several miles from South Williamsburg. She commuted to the former neighborhood every day by omnibus to her task at a tech support company.
She was 21, with an 11th-course education and an xviii-month-old to feed and clothe. She had merely begun to acquire English four years earlier. She had niggling money and almost no fourth dimension for herself, permit alone for working out at the Y, one of the few things that brought her joy. She stopped going.
"Everything only fell apart," she says of that time in her life. "Just so much anarchy."
To alleviate stress, Connie and her roommate partied whenever their kids were with their dads. They drank. They went to clubs with other disillusioned Hasidim.
Connie, left, with her older sis who had merely gotten engaged.
1 day when things were especially rough, Connie called her mother. "How come nosotros were never brought upwards with the idea of college?" she asked. "Why couldn't we take farther education later on high school, then we can support our families?"
Her mother replied: "Why are you asking me questions? I never asked questions of my female parent. Why are yous questioning the style of life?"
Reisman says that for Satmar Jews, questioning the way of life is tantamount to forgetting the by, and forgetting the past is tantamount to extinction. "Everything the Satmar customs does is because of the Holocaust," she says. "They suffered incredible loss. Everything they exercise is under the lens of trauma and fear. And when they get pushback from the outside world, their tendency is to crawl in even further. At that place's a very us versus them mentality, and it all comes from the Holocaust."
For those who leave, this inherited trauma compounds the extraordinary challenges of adjusting to the secular earth. A lot of people don't brand it, or they fall into destructive habits as a way to cope. "I could have very easily become a drug addict," Connie says.
One morning subsequently a night of hard partying, Connie woke up and couldn't remember the previous 12 hours. She thinks she was roofied. "I thought, 'I'm washed.'"
It's the offset of 2013, and Connie has been on her own for 3 years. She hasn't seen her family since 2011, when she was asked to get out her sister's wedding for non wearing an appropriately small dress. She no longer has the friends she partied with when she left the community. She has only her son, and when he'south at his dad's, she has no 1. She feels lost.
To fill the fourth dimension, she returns to the simply affair that gave her solace in her old life.
There's a YMCA on Flatbush Avenue, in a predominantly Caribbean neighborhood not far from Midwood, and Connie spends up to v hours at a time there, working her style across the weight room and so running on the treadmill. She meets bodybuilders and yoga instructors who become her new friends. She falls in love with the "feeling of lifting heavy weights and feeling actually sore the side by side day."
Gradually, she meets other runners. 1 day, one of them invites her to race the Valentine's Twenty-four hours 5K. She doesn't hesitate.
Running in the Valentine's Day 5K in 2013, her first race experience.
But Connie has never run outside in the dead of wintertime before. She isn't prepared for the cold, or for the hills of Prospect Park. Equally she squeezes into the crowd behind the start line, she looks around at the other runners in their DriFit jackets, thermal tights, and fleece hats. A friend loans her his. She pulls it down over her ears and curls her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt.
But one loop of the park, she repeats to herself. I can do this.
At the gun, the crowd surges forward and Connie gets swept into the electric current. Then that first hill, and she stops. But non for long. Connie pauses, looks up at the incline, and starts to walk. When she reaches the meridian, she starts to run again. She approaches the cease line as the clock ticks past the 27-infinitesimal marker. She signs up for some other race the next weekend.
Past mid-March 2013, Connie has run a handful of 5Ks and iv-milers and wants to endeavour something longer. That April, she runs a 15K in Key Park, and finishes in 1:22, an average stride of 8:48 per mile. "I felt horrible, everything was pain, simply I loved it," she says. "When it was over, I idea, how do I railroad train for something like this in the hereafter?"
She joins a gild, Due north Brooklyn Runners, and begins training in hostage with another runner on the team named Hershy, who also grew upward Orthodox. With him, Connie starts to practise her regular runs at a 7:30 footstep and "crazy runway workouts."
"I didn't have a Garmin, I'd just follow him and he'd time me," she says. "Nosotros'd exercise hill repeats on the Williamsburg Span. And so we'd do a 20-minute cool-down. One day on the fashion dwelling, I passed Prospect Park, and I did some other loop."
Presently she buys a Garmin of her ain. So she buys new shoes. She starts running to and from work, 8 miles each fashion.
Connie doesn't know if she is a distance runner or a rails rat, a marathoner or a 5K specialist, a miler or a sprinter. She just knows that she loves to run and seems to be pretty good at it. She applies to the 2013 New York Metropolis Marathon, merely she doesn't get in through the lottery, so she registers for Philadelphia instead. And so she gets a spot in New York through Team for Kids and decides to do both.
That fall, only ix months after her first road race, Connie finishes two marathons simply two weeks apart. Her time in New York, 3:33:57, good enough to qualify for Boston.
It'south 2020 at present. Connie is 31. She carries herself similar an athlete, confident and stiff. When she speaks, she's direct; when she listens, she does and then with intention. Her eyes are the same large, dark-brown orbs she had at 13, but now they're believing and alert.
She lives in New Jersey with her new husband, their two-year-erstwhile girl, and her son. He'll be 12 in August. Her husband, Ken, is a runner too. Like she did with most of her new friends, she met him through NBR.
Over the past seven years, Connie has completed iv marathons, including ii New Yorks and i Boston, with a PR of 3:31. But her real wheels are on the track. Through NBR, she met James Chu, a certified motorbus who saw right away that she had the explosive speed to excel at the 200, 400, perchance even the 800. Chu began coaching Connie in late 2013 and they decided to work down from the mile, setting their sights on the fifth Avenue Mile the following September.
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Connie and her coach worked together all spring and summer, meeting regularly at the McCarren track in North Williamsburg for speed sessions and to develop Connie's form. She learned to drive her knees forward, to use her artillery, to run tall. It paid off. In September 2014, Connie finished 5th Artery in 5:53. The following yr she brought her time downwards to v:35, and in Feb of this year, she posted a 2:35 800.
She kept working on the longer distances likewise, clocking a half marathon PR of 1:32 in her leadup to Boston 2016. Like any runner, she's had her share of injuries and slumps. The 2016 Boston Marathon left her cooked, and she struggled all summer to train for fifth Avenue in September. She made it to the outset line but dropped out at the iii-quarter mark. She needed a break. She hung up her shoes and focused on her family. She had merely married Ken, and they were trying to get pregnant.
Connie with her son, Chaimy.
In July 2017, her mother called. Connie reluctantly picked up; it was the first time they'd spoken in six years. She saw it as a chance to ask some questions, to maybe sympathise her mother better, to find a path toward reconciliation.
"Why didn't you lot requite united states of america kids any honey?" Connie asked. "Why was at that place no affection in our business firm?"
Silence.
Finally her mother answered: "I just did what my parents did."
Two months later, but before Connie's daughter was born, her female parent called again. This time Connie didn't option up; the pain of the previous phone call was still fresh. Her mother left a voicemail instead.
"Chumy," she began, calling Connie by her Yiddish name. "It's Mommy. I didn't forget about you. My centre is open up for you."
Her mother was crying, and for a moment, Connie thought she might finally be gear up to accept her for who she is, to give her the dearest she had always craved, to exist the female parent she had always longed for her to be.
But she wasn't calling to offer any of that, or even considering Connie was almost to have a babe. She was calling because it was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. "God is waiting for you to render to him," her mother said, her already quiet voice muffled by tears. "He loves y'all. God is never going to go out a Jewish child. You lot can e'er render."
"That voicemail started out well," Connie says, "but it took a turn when she mentioned God. They will only take me if I return to God's ways." These days, Connie identifies as an atheist. "Holidays we all the same celebrate because of the history and the traditions, and they're fun. I believe in history. But I don't believe there is a God or a college power." Her mother hasn't called since.
Today, Connie is at once forgiving and resolute when she speaks of her parents, and even of her ex-husband. After all, they didn't make the rules. But she also tin't abide a life that, for her, was so unbearable, and so solitary. She wants her children to know something different.
After a nearly three-year hiatus, Connie resumed training in May 2019, focusing squarely on the track. This leap, she ran a series of 200s, solo and closed with a 30-second rep. A PR. She hopes to break 65 in the 400 this summer, and Chu thinks she can do it.
These are much shorter distances than the New York City Marathon that captured her imagination equally a child, to exist certain, but the journey to get there has taken a lifetime.
She thinks dorsum on those bulky white Nikes, that kickoff 5K in Prospect Park, and the friends who helped her train for her outset 26.2-mile trek through the five boroughs in 2013. She remembers the thrill of descending the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, the only place she'd ever chosen dwelling house, and crossing the finish line at Tavern on the Light-green. Merely nigh of all, she remembers running through Due south Williamsburg.
"But going through that ane mile, the feeling of redemption," she says of racing upward Bedford Avenue, the same stretch of road that took her to the mikvah, and afterward, home from the Y on the B44 bus. She'd been on that road countless times, but never like this. She didn't feel invisible this time. She didn't experience lost. She felt like a marathoner.
As she ran, the few Hasidic spectators who'd gathered on the sidewalks stared at her similar she was crazy, or was going to intermission her legs, or would dice the moment she crossed the finish line.
Connie only smiled back at them. She couldn't stop smiling.
David Alm is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and longtime competitive runner whose articles about running have appeared in GQ, Men's Journal, Running Times, Runner'due south Globe, Women's Running, and other outlets. He likewise writes about things that have nothing to do with running, and teaches journalism at Hunter Higher of the City Academy of New York.
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Allen Is Running A Marathon,
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