Exercising incognito, pattering steadily along the sidewalk -- layered beneath sweat clothes and gloves and wearing headphones, dark glasses and a baseball cap pulled low to finish the disguise -- Debi Gilroy trained for a road race. She dressed like a bank robber because she felt like a fraud, like an actor pretending to be a runner, though the miles were real. Eight miles on a clear afternoon in December. She cut no corners, though nobody would care if she did.
More than six months after her first tentative little jog, done secretly so she could not be embarrassed, she was still astounded to be doing something physical. "I feel like somebody is going to say, 'Hey, what are you doing here?' " she confessed. Gilroy knows people for whom running is part of their identity. Not her -- the suggestion sent her eyes rolling. "I don't know how long it takes to change the mindset, that I'm not the fat, inactive person anymore."
At 48, Gilroy is far less of a person than two years ago, having lost 100 pounds since April 2004. Her weight is classified information. Not even her husband, Paul, knows what she weighed before gastric-bypass surgery and all those miles on the roads. What's clear is that her goal would have been inconceivable two years ago; to have even suggested it back then would have been a cruel joke. Debi Gilroy, who had never done an athletic thing in her life, was training for the Walt Disney World half-marathon, in Florida, a race of more than 13 miles.
Gilroy was not gifted with the gazelle gene. Her 13- or 14-minute-per-mile pace will never win a race. But only a handful of elite athletes in any race have a chance to win. For most runners, the competition is against their personal best time -- they compete to be better than they've ever been. Debi Gilroy didn't have a best time; she had never run that far. Her goal was to outpace the "sweeper" van, which takes the slowest runners off the course if they cannot maintain 16-minute-per-mile pace. She did not want to be swept.
Alternating running with power walking, Gilroy, a nurse, ground out her training miles. Her feet kept time with the show tunes in her headphones. She likes to think about music when she runs, and whatever show she's planning with her cabaret group.
She doesn't think about the arthritis and bursitis that crept between her bones and made her miserable before she lost weight. "Old-lady diseases," she called them scornfully, between breaths as she paced down Broad Street in Cranston, toward home in Warwick.
The source of her weight problem is hard for her to pinpoint. In high school, she thought every other girl was a twig and that she was overweight. In hindsight, she realizes she was normal-sized back then. She gained after her children were born: in 1974, '85, '86 and '94. For years she suffered in the yo-yo diet cycle: lose, lose, lose, fall off the wagon, gain, gain, gain. Each snap of the yo-yo left her heavier.
Her doctor finally suggested a gastric bypass. She was an ideal candidate, still young without serious health problems. The idea was scary, though. People can die from that surgery. She considered the risks of not having the procedure, too, and figured that path pointed to diabetes and heart disease.
For years, Gilroy had been helping age break her down, by carrying weight that threatened her health and made many physical tasks painful or impossible. "I was too big," she said, "to do a lot of things." Her operation was in April 2004 at Rhode Island Hospital. By early 2005, she had lost about 90 pounds.
She learned about the half-marathon from an online community of Disney fans, sort of a Mouseketeer club of adults hooked on Disney through family vacations. Her Internet friends urged her to sign up for the January 2006 race. "I said no, I'm not athletic. I don't do anything athletic." But the people who had run sounded so enthusiastic.
In early 2005, Gilroy decided to try running on a treadmill, in secret. If she couldn't do it, she didn't want anyone to know she had tried. "It was exhausting, but exciting because I could do it. It was the first time I tried anything like that."
She committed to run the half-marathon. One son said he'd believe it when he saw it. Her husband was concerned she'd hurt herself if she didn't prepare properly. As she trained, she outran those old-lady ailments. She licked insomnia with exercise. Acid reflux and headaches were less intense. She felt less stress and lost 10 more pounds. No longer helping old age, she fought to get back some youth.
To see her run, chin up, cheeks puffing, features hardened with determination, is to wonder: Who has the stronger will? The elite athletes built of nothing but legs and lungs who run for records? Or those who plod steadily against their own physical limits? For both types, the sport is an exercise of the mind, a contest of willpower over pain and fatigue.
Sometimes Gilroy didn't feel like making her three training runs a week. Too bad, she would tell herself. "I have to do it. There's been many days I've been out there when it has been raining or freezing or extremely hot and I've survived all of them." She has iced her runner's pains and aches and survived a lost toenail that disgusted her and ruined a pedicure.
The race was Jan. 7. At 6:01 a.m., Gilroy joined a human river of some 30,000 runners, flowing past fans, cheerleaders and bands. "I could not have dreamed," she would later say, "that it could have been so exciting."
About halfway through the race, she came upon her husband and son, near the Magic Kingdom. The hand-lettered sign held by Gilroy's 11-year-old son Chase bragged: "That's My Mom." Gilroy snapped a keepsake picture with a disposable camera, and sobbed for the next half-mile.
She finished in 3 hours, 13 minutes -- a 14:47 per mile pace. She was more than two hours behind the winner, but she whupped the sweeper van. The muscle aches passed in a day; her enthusiasm lingered. She enjoyed experimenting with the self-made drug called adrenaline.
She is registered for the Disneyland half-marathon in California in September. In the meantime she has e-mailed a treasured new photo to her friends. It's a picture of Gilroy before the race, next to a sign directing the runners to the "ATHLETE ENTRANCE." She is posing in the photo, pointing to the sign as a south Florida breeze lifts her hair. She is grinning and looks bemused. This sign is for me.
Your turn: Have you adopted an exercise regimen or diet to regain a healthy lifestyle?
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