Auld Lang Syne (weeks 49, 50, 51, 52)

Hi, remember me?

Hi! I’m back! I hope your holidays were everything you needed them to be - time with family, or without, calm and restful, or merry and bright. We split time between Georgia with my family, and then headed to Bonaire for some sunshine with Dylan’s.

Mine was full of (almost all) of my favorite people on the planet (and some humans they’ve created!), sunny days and bubbles. The Bug took her first tentative steps at a Christmas party on December 7, so it felt like our entire holiday was spent watching her progression from wobbling uncertainty to shriek-sprinting up and down my parents’ house by the end of 2024.

We are well into 2025 - it will come as no surprise that I’m someone who loves a New Year’s Resolution. The idea of a measurable challenge?? Goals to fix everything about my life, which you can reward with little treats if you so desire? Sign me up! My husband, on the other hand, rolls his eyes when I tell him the 10-15 resolutions I have every year and how they’re going to make me an entirely new person.

Dylan and I are very different people - we fundamentally agree on the things that matter for our lives, our parenting, and our belief systems, but in terms of personality we’re opposites. I like to think we bring each other balance and that it often works seamlessly for us to be so unalike, but sometimes our differences are brought to the surface in jarring ways.

On Wednesday December 18, my entire family was gathered around the dinner table. Somehow the topic of Dylan’s college football career was brought up, and he was regaling us with stories about his time as a “WR Reject” (as a group chat with some of his best friends is still called). We were all in stitches as he remembered his coach calling him out for failing a run test his senior year, and how a different year he screwed himself over by running the fastest 40 of his life and subsequently getting put in too fast of a group. This triggered a memory of my best friends’ group chat, where on October 13 my friend Mary texted us this:

As I told the story, Dylan interjected his disbelief that it took 10 responses over 2 hours for someone to finally ask what the mile time was. Will, the husband of Mary, had run it in 6:08! He is someone who runs, and has run most of his life, but still, impressive in your 30s as someone who isn’t like, training for something.

So I posed the question to the dinner table - how fast could you go out and run a mile right now? And my husband, who hates running and has not run more than down the hallway after our 14 month old since 2021, declares immediately that he could run a sub 7:00 mile.

I was flabbergasted and immediately responded that he absolutely could not do that, which my mom agreed with. After some debate, with my dad and brothers supporting him, he changed his answer to definitely under 7:30 and probably under 7:00. I still said impossible.

Some context here - we are all hoping and praying that the Bug inherited her dad’s athletic ability. Despite both of my parents being fit and sporty people (my dad was an All-American boxer in college), they proceeded to pass down heart and competitiveness but not hand-eye coordination nor endurance to their three children. I was captain of our cross country team, a group of 114 young women (who won a state championship thankyouverymuch) because as every single girl on the team lapped me I cheered them on by name as I struggled to breathe, literally finishing last in all but 2 races over the course of my 3 year career. When I am working out 4-5 times per week, I can hold my own, but if I take even a week off of fitness my body immediately forgets it ever was able to do a crunch. So for my husband to have the audacity to announce he could do this was literally unbelievable to me.

(In the moment, I might’ve forgotten that he played 3-4 sports his entire life, including being captain of the track team in high school and playing football in college, and easily picks up new sports within one session of playing them even now. He can go a month without working out, go to the gym one time, and immediately be toned and fit again. Do I sound bitter?)

He took the challenge to heart, and agreed to head to the local high school early the next morning to prove himself. So at 6:15 am the next day, all 7 adults and a baby piled into two cars to watch my husband run.

However, the first high school we went to had no track. We drove 20 more minutes away to another high school, which shockingly had it’s football field and track locked because they actually didn’t want a random 32 year old man using their facilities while school was still in session. Seemingly defeated, we drove back to my parents’ house - but on the drive, we located a public track that was 45 minutes away. Dylan agreed to try again the next morning.

So, at 6:15 am the NEXT day, all 7 adults and a baby piled into two cars to drive 45 minutes away to watch my husband run.

It was fucking cold, and none of us had dressed correctly, but it was a gorgeous morning.

My brother Levi was the official timer, and agreed to call out Dyl’s splits while the rest of us cheered. As he took off, my mom immediately went “he’s going so slowly, there’s no way he makes this.” Dylan is 6’5”, long and lean, and his legs really weren’t moving that much so it sort of did look like maybe he wasn’t going to do this. My dad turned to her in disbelief as Levi said his first 200 time was 52 seconds, realizing that his body just looked like it was moving slowly, but in reality his long long legs were actually covering so much ground.

We all screamed our heads off as he went around the track, his third lap looking ready to kill him, but when he crossed the line to start his final 400 meters we knew he could do it. My dad ran alongside him for the final 100 cheering while Dylan finished his mile to raucous applause before immediately laughing while vomiting and collapsing on the ground.

He ran it in 6:46.

Turns out, sometimes you don’t need to be an entirely new person. Sometimes you can do impossible things.

The Bug learned how to walk, and successfully pet my brother’s cat twice. Dylan ran a sub 7:00 mile just by sheer force of will. One of my best friends got miraculous, impossibly miraculous news. I actively held a baby in my arms at a 90 degree angle for 8 hours on a plane from Bonaire to Amsterdam. We survived a full calendar year of being parents.

So, we’re back in Amsterdam. Winter is beginning in earnest. I hope you feel ok not taking on any resolutions, if you don’t want to. For this new year, as cold and dark days lie ahead, I’m hoping you go into it knowing that you already can do an impossible thing.