Emi Blakely

Despite the beautiful views and trails we have around campus and the larger Brunswick area, what has consumed my mind during most of my solo runs recently is a photograph. It features my dad, my mom, my brother and me, running along the trails in a race at the Wakulla Springs Mile. It ran on the cover of a 2014 issue of “The Fleet Foot,” the newsletter of the Gulf Winds Track Club, under the headline “The Family That Runs Together.”

A lot has changed since that picture was taken. We can all run more than a mile in a race. My brother is at least a foot taller and so much faster than me. My parents have chilled out on the ultramarathons. My brother and I just use the cover for our respective Strava profile pictures, but whenever I look at it, I think about how random it is that running became such a big part of our family. It is so integrated in the core of our family unit that I consider it our language.

Courtesy of Leah Kiros

For my dad, running did not start as a sport, but rather as a necessity. When my dad was growing up in Ethiopia, he ran six kilometers to school every day to make it by the bell. After school, running the distance back became a competition. One of my dad’s friends had a bicycle, and the rest of them would race him back toward the center of town. The friend took the paved road while my dad and his friends took a shortcut through narrow roads, hills, rocks and heat.

Most distance runners right now would kill for this type of base training, and some currently pay a lot of money to train in the highlands. Fortunately for them, my dad only dabbled in running throughout university and grad school and never took it seriously. Decades later, my dad has run a sub-five-minute mile at 48 and a sub-two hour and 50 minute marathon at 50.

My mom found running differently. She started running with her sisters as a way to stay healthy and spend time together in Philadelphia. After she became a mom and moved to Tallahassee, Fla., she found her way back to it. Tallahassee offered a great running community and is often referred to as Trailahassee because it offers over 700 miles of trails. So for her, running became an escape from the noise of everyday life. It was a place to be quiet, pray, reflect and reconnect with herself, her friends and, eventually, her kids.

Somewhere between that photo and now, running stopped being something I did simply because my parents did it. The same way you inherit a language before you know you’re speaking it, it became my own.

When adjusting to Bowdoin, one night freshman year at a party, a random girl invited me to tag along with her friends on a run to Wild Oats along the bike path. From there I discovered my friend was running the Maine Half Marathon in Portland. I had signed up during the summer as a way to force myself to stay with it. From then on we did our long runs, got meals and traveled all over together.

That run, and the conversations that came out of it, gave me some of my closest friendships here (hi, Julia, Anabel, Maya and Cole!). There’s something about running with someone that makes it surprisingly easy to become friends. You start with a conversation about the route, and a mile later you somehow know where they’re from, what classes they’re taking and what they’re doing this weekend.

Now running is something that builds a sense of family wherever I’ve settled down. I still send my dad my splits. I still talk to my mom about my favorite routes. My brother still roasts me in my Strava comments. But these days, I have friends from all over who accompany me on my runs.

What I’ve learned 12 years since that newsletter cover is that the family that runs together doesn’t always have to run together to be connected.

Leah Kiros is a member of the Class of 2028.