physical exercise? or mental?

“So you make two loops and then you twist?”

“No, I think you do the twist first, then the loops.”

“Here, let me try. Uh? Howd’s it work?”

This week my children and I busied our kitchen with homemade pretzel making. We were all craving chewy, salty doughiness and had never made pretzels from scratch. After punching down the inflated dough and pulling it from the bowl, we sectioned it in eighths and hand-rolled each piece into a rope.

Then came the fun part: figuring out how to make a pretzel shape. It’s deceptively difficult.

A loop, a couple of twists and a pinch. And once you think you’ve mastered it, you get to prove to yourself that you have to figure it out all over again with the next piece of dough. Each dough rope is like the very first time.

If we made pretzels day after day, we’d quickly become accustomed to the loop/twist/pinch and could do it in our sleep. But for now, we are still firmly in the learning stage.

My friend Molly says something similar about running.

She confesses that before she started her “running career” she assumed that running was all about the body – once the legs become accustomed to the motion of running and the heart gets used to beating so fast -- running is essentially a no-brainer. You run without giving it a second thought, just like brushing your teeth or taking a shower.

Hold up! This is where the needle scratches across the record.

Yes, to some extent, running does become easier the more you do it. Your legs scream a little less each day, and your breathing eventually returns to your command. You can predict at what landmark you will start to sweat. Even the hallucinations stop, for the most part (though at the tail end of a really long, hard run, bushes swaying in the breeze still look an awful lot like smiling children waving slowly and serenely, dressed in 1950s play clothes, like they do in a very bizarre cusp-of-waking dream.)

But what never becomes easier is the simple act of getting out the door, especially if you have four young children, a large extended family, a husband and a dog who need you every waking moment of the day, as Molly has. The mental strength needed to motivate Molly to run day after day far exceeds any physical challenge running started out as.

But somehow she does it. You can’t set your watch by her, but Molly drags herself out, sometimes in the company of one or more children in the jogging stroller or on bicycle, because she knows how good running feels. And, maybe in the long run, because she wants to instill in her kids a love of exercise. She is a positive role model.

And this is all the more difficult because Molly, as an overworked mom, has the wisdom to know how good it feels to lie on the couch with a book or some knitting.

We running moms admit it – it’s not always family needs we hurdle in order to get our shoes laced and our running bras correctly positioned. Just as often, it’s the exhaustion that sets in from caring for others day in and day out.

It’s just another life lesson we learn from running. Physical exercise transitions into mental exercise.

And because we are mothers, we are up for the challenge of both. Thank goodness.