Team Tuffy Tofu Rocks Arizona!

If everybody had an ocean across the U.S.A., then everybody’d be surfin’ like California... 

At any other time, two women running down the middle of the street, belting out The Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ U.S.A.” at the top of their lungs would be cause for concern. Sunday, it was pretty much par for the course since these women were into the last third of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona marathon and were loopy on a combination of adrenaline, aching legs and starved muscles. They also happened to be me and my mom.

My mom was a pretty fearsome athlete before she had me. She ran three marathons in less than two years, regularly placing in the shorter 10K and 5K races she ran. After mostly avoiding the water in her childhood, she took swim lessons in her 20s and 30s, determined to become a stronger swimmer – which she did, moving from marathons to triathlons, including one in Portuguese Man-of-War-infested waters in south Florida.

She kept up her running after I was born, and talked/walked/jogged me through one 5K a year starting when I was about 8 (I could have sworn I’d never want to do a longer race than that first 5K). She encouraged me as I started to run more seriously in college and, with my dad, (and some of my colleagues!) acted as cheerleader through my first marathon in 2008.

She turned 60 in August (don’t worry, I got her permission before typing that) and had been talking for a couple of months about doing another marathon to celebrate. It would be her fourth - and her first in almost 30 years - and I was running my third in October. I started to think that a mother-daughter fourth marathon might be pretty cool.

In September, my mom registered for the 2010 Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona marathon. When she called to tell me she was really going for it, I mentally cheered, registered before we had hung up, then called my dad the next day to tell him he had to keep the whole thing a secret for four months.

As she sweated and shivered and paced through her training miles at 6,600 feet in the Arizona mountains, I did the same in Virginia and Washington, grumbling about the unusual December cold snap and fibbing to my mom about how many miles I was running. I nagged her into making the drive down to Phoenix on Friday rather than Saturday, saying I’d feel better if I knew she had more time to acclimate to the warmer weather and wouldn’t be rushed. And on Friday night, when she arrived at the house of a friend who was in on the surprise and very generously offered to put us both up for the weekend, she cried when she realized I was there to run with her.

Sunday morning, we pulled on our matching “Team Tuffy Tofu” tanks and were ready to go. “Tuffy Tofu” is the nickname my dad gave my mom when they were dating and she was a vegetarian putting an insane number of miles on her feet every week. Then I was born, and was christened “Tuffer Than Tuffy Tofu” (which was completely unmerited, but funny). My dad had shirts made for us, and the joke came up repeatedly over the years, making it the perfect team name for a mother-daughter marathon.

And there we were, at mile 20-something, bobbing along to our own personal soundtrack of The Beach Boys and waving at the cars that passed going the other direction, cheering deliriously at every mile marker that got us closer to the finish line. We crossed it hand-in-hand, whooping at the top of our lungs. And as we walked off with our medals, I looked at all the people younger than my mom finishing behind us and looking in much worse shape than either of us.

My mom is 60, and she just ran a marathon. How awesome is that?