Our son, Ronan Michael Flood, was born May 8, 2022 at 2:31 am — the absolute best Mother’s Day gift that we could ever have asked for. This punctual guy made his arrival on his due date, but did so on his terms, flying into the world with a whirlwind precipitous labour, caught by his amazing dad on the floor of the Airbnb in Whitehorse! There are so many details of his birth that we don’t want to forget, so I’m writing them all here both for posterity and because, when I was pregnant (and still now), I couldn’t get enough of other people’s birth stories.

Over the past few weeks, a number of friends have reached out to ask me “how to start running.” My first reaction is always to doubt my ability to answer this question. I’m not a certified coach, I’m not the fastest runner around, and, in the grand scheme of things, I haven’t been doing this running thing for that long. I just really love this sport and have found a whole new wonderful world in the community that is running.

A few weeks ago, Slate published an article with the pointed title, ‘Don’t run a marathon. You have better things to do.’ While this is a pretty classic case of Internet click-bait, and I would really rather not give Daniel Engber the satisfaction of increased web traffic and comments on his provocation, I have to admit: I opened the link. As a runner who, just last month, signed up for her first marathon, I couldn’t help myself… The click-bait worked.