Hildee Weiss used to look out her window at people running and think not me. Not because she didn't want to. Because she was convinced she couldn't. She worried about how she would look in the clothes. She worried about tripping and falling. She pictured Phoebe from Friends running through Central Park and thought that would be her — except without the joy.

She was a wife, a mother of five, an active volunteer, a freelance writer. She was doing everything for everyone else and had been for years. She didn't have a hobby. She didn't have a sport. She had a hand injury and a father-in-law who sat her down and told her she needed to do something for herself.

That conversation led to a phone call to a local JCC, which led to a trainer named Jeff, which led to twelve years of running and a book called Embracing My Inner Athlete that she never planned to write.

🎧 Tune in here:

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or other podcast platforms.

The trainer who believed in her first

Jeff asked Hildee what she wanted to do if she could do anything. She said running. She had no idea why she said it — it seemed impossible — but she said it. He took it seriously. He worked around her hand injury. He had her walk on the treadmill and sneak in a minute of jogging here and there. And then one day he told her to get on the treadmill and run a mile.

She did it. She doesn't remember the pace or the time, but she remembers the feeling at the end. That exhilaration. That I did this. She signed up for a 5K the following month — he told her at the last minute that he wasn't going to run it with her — and she stood at the starting line and followed people along the way and crossed the finish line and understood for the first time what everyone had been talking about.

She did another 5K the month after. And then a 10K. And then she broke her fifth metatarsal tripping on a step coming out of a bathroom mid-run, was told she couldn't walk or run for months, panicked that she would never do it again, and came back and ran the fastest 10K she has ever run to this day.

That's when she started to understand something. Nothing really isn't possible. Those were her words and they land harder than she probably intended.

The shift that changed everything

For a long time Hildee thought of running as something she had to do. She obsessed over the data. She was hard on herself about pace and time and distance. She was using running as a measuring stick rather than a gift.

Then she had a hysterectomy. She recovered. She came back to running and something was off — she kept stopping short, telling herself she was too tired, saying it was too hard. Jeff noticed. He told her she needed to find the joy again.

He invited her on a group run and told her it would be three to three and a half miles. It wound up being closer to five, which he admitted later was a test. She ran the whole thing. They were at the back of the pack and they talked and she enjoyed it and she realized that nothing about that run was about pace or time or data. It was just running.

After that she made a decision. She could look at her watch occasionally but she wasn't going to obsess over it. She was going to run outside as much as possible. She was going to notice the blue sky and the greenery and say hello to people on the way. One morning recently she did exactly that and finished her run to find it was the fastest she had run in years. She hadn't been trying. She had just been running.

I have to versus I get to

The reframe that sits at the center of this whole conversation is a simple one. Hildee stopped saying she had to run and started saying she got to run. It sounds small and it is not small at all.

Running is her time. When her watch lights up with a call, she doesn't answer it. When she's out there, she shuts everything else out. She spent decades prioritizing everyone around her — five kids, a husband, aging parents, community commitments — and what she found when she finally made space for herself is that it made her better at all of it. Healthier. Happier. More patient. More present.

She doesn't frame that as selfish anymore. She frames it as selfless.

The book she almost didn't write

Hildee had been writing a blog for a few years when a friend told her she had a story worth publishing. She wasn't sure. Her original blog was called You Want Me to Do What — which it turns out is also the name of a book by the only man to complete all three elite US military special ops qualification schools, so her publisher suggested a different title. It didn't take her long. Embracing My Inner Athlete. That's what she had been doing for twelve years.

She wrote the first draft between September and January. Sent proposals to publishers and agents and got a lot of very kind rejections. One agent told her she had so much potential but was already representing Kira D'Amato. Hildee reached out to Kira. Kira was lovely. In July she signed with Library Tales Publishing and they have been cheerleaders ever since.

The twelfth chapter was added months after she thought she was done. It covers the hysterectomy, the difficult return to running, and the shift from I have to to I get to. She added it because she wanted people to know it hasn't been smooth sailing. It never is. That's kind of the whole point.

What success actually looks like

Hildee has a definition of success that has nothing to do with pace or medals or personal bests. It's the moment at her first Spartan race when she was muddied and exhausted and trying to get up an incline wall and Jeff was above her saying keep going keep going and she was ready to give up and he said give me your hand and something came over her and she pushed herself to the top and came down the other side and kept going.

That's it. That's what success looks like. Not the result. The moment when you find out you had it in you.

She wants to be running in her eighties. She saw a woman at a race once, either in the eighty-to-eighty-nine age group or in the nineties, going up to collect her medal, and she said I want to be her when I grow up. Not for the medal. Just for still being out there.

She has a night run in Jerusalem coming up next month with some of her kids. She has the Jerusalem Marathon 10K on the calendar for next March. She is not stopping anytime soon.

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Hildee Weiss on For The Long Run wherever you get your podcasts.

Stay Connected

Subscribe to the For the Long Run newsletter and follow the show on Instagram.

Jon is a runner, cyclist, and podcast host from Boston, MA, who now lives in Boulder, CO. For The Long Run is aimed at exploring the why behind what keeps runners running long, strong, and motivated.

Follow Jon on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.