We took a family vacation to Arizona to visit my husband’s family. My daughter got to spend quality time with her extended family and I got to sleep in until 7 a.m. or later every day.

On the way there I finished Deep Work by Cal Newport. It wasn’t a great book and I don’t really recommend it, but it gave me the idea to shut off all social media while I was on the trip. I deleted Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, everything off my phone. For the first time in at least 10 years, I spent a week and a half away from the Internet.

I enjoyed my family. I watched movies. I read three books. I spent time in the desert.

More than five years ago, when I started this blog, it was a much much different time in my life. I was newly married, in my mid-20s, and staring down the nose at adulthood.

This post is goodbye. As the years have gone on, things have changed. While fitness will always be a presence and a habit in my life, it’s not the time in my life to write about it any more. There are a lot of great bloggers out there who can write about what it means to keep being fit, be a mom, and have a career; I encourage you to go read those women. The honest truth is that when I became a mother, my time became so much more precious. I can blog or I can run, but I can’t do both.

In the time since my last post, I’ve moved on from my day job at the Bangor Daily News, but I do still live in the Bangor area (while I work for a company based in New York City). I appreciate everything that writing on the Bangor Daily News platform has done for me and if you’re thinking about writing a blog about something that matters to Mainers, I’d wholeheartedly recommend writing for them.

Thank you all for sticking with me from the couch to the marathon to the delivery room and back again. If you want to keep in touch, you can still follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for the love, thanks for the support, but most of all, thanks for the company on the journey.

The person who started this blog was a young professional, recently out of college, ready to make a change with her life. The person sitting down writing this post today has changed many times since then.

Blog readers, it’s time I come clean to you about a few things. Motherhood is hard. Being a working parent is hard. It’s hard to keep updating this blog because I don’t feel like the person I “became” in 2011. I had a great story about losing 50 pounds when I took up running, but if you look at me today, that isn’t the truth any more. It was hard to lose the weight after I had a baby, and when I stopped breastfeeding full-time, I gained even more back.

This blog post isn’t an apology for not being the picture of health. Screw that. I’m still proud of some things. Since Lissie was born, I’ve been able to find time to exercise almost every day.

When I started running, I wanted some assurance that the big difficult thing I was about to undertake was definitely going give me results. I think that’s what a lot of people who found my blog think, too. “Before and after picture from the Couch to 5K” is the number one search query that gets people here.

If I didn’t think I was going to get them, I probably wouldn’t have started running. I completely missed the point. The reason why I still run most mornings even though I haven’t lost a pound in two years.

Running  calms me down.

Running wakes me up.

Running lets me shut my brain off.

Running makes me feel alive.

Running is a great excuse to be alone.

Running is a great excuse to be with friends.

Running marathons, I learned I was capable of a persistence and goal setting in a way I never thought was possible. I could do anything. Becoming a mother, I learned I’m fallible. The only way I can do anything is if I say no to most other things.

Eating when you’re stressed out is so easy. I understand now why so many mothers end up here. It’s a great way to make yourself feel better without taking any time and not taking that much money. Except I don’t feel better after it’s over. The cumulative feeling is pretty gross.

If there is one thing I learned after staring down these numbers on the scale the first time, it’s that it’s what you do every day that moves you to the person you want to be.

I’m not well like I wish I was now. And I don’t know the path out of this.  But I don’t regret any part of the journey, and I’m willing to start it over again.

It’s a lot of driving.

My commute for the last 7 years has been under 6 minutes. I prided myself in this fact. I hate driving. I love human-powered transportation: walking, running, cycling. I love that I can keep my body and the earth healthy at the same time. But now that I take Felicity to daycare, my morning commute turned from 6 minutes to 40 minutes. It’s 20 minutes past my office each way to take her to daycare.

It does take a lot of time to drive there, but it isn’t that far, because it’s through city traffic. About 5.5 miles. So I scoured the routes and worked up my courage to see if I could start taking her by bicycle each morning.

Lissie on her bike seat in June, on a 8 mile ride down outer Ohio Street in Bangor.

Her daycare is out in the mall area, which is car city. I was reluctant to try without many, many practice rides in low-traffic areas because:

• it would be early in the morning when I would be inconvenient to call my husband if we had an issue, because my he is working then, and
• there is a lot of car traffic at that time in the morning.

Frankly, here’s the thing. I love riding my bike. I LOVE it. It might be my favorite sport, except running does have some advantages on cycling when it comes to flexibility with weather and location. You can go way faster and way farther on a bike. But it feels way more dangerous than running. You’re closer to moving cars. You don’t have as much reaction time to get out of the way if cars don’t see you.

I’ve known more people who have had cycling accidents with drivers who weren’t paying attention than I care to count. And even though it is really important to me to teach my kids that its important to avoid using cars and enjoy the outdoors, I don’t want to risk my 13-month-old’s life on a principle.

But on Monday morning, I had the courage.

OK, so here’s where the harrowing personal story comes in

We were on our way, route planned out, everything packed, ready to go. And going past one of the first intersections by my house, the one where I-395 exit on South Main Street is, we had an incident.

There is no avoiding this intersection by my house. I must, at some point, cross I-395 to get into Bangor. Also, in this part of Brewer, the sidewalk is ONLY on the interchange side of the road, so pedestrians must cross these four ramps. You can kinda see what I mean from this Google Streetview shot from 2011, above.

I was going into this intersection, where the mobile crime lab is in this picture, when a black sedan passed me and then immediately turned right, cutting me off. I hit my brakes, hard, which caused me to lose my balance and the bike to tip over into the street.

With Felicity on the back,

It was terrifying and thankfully, a man who was driving behind me stopped and made sure we were OK. I think I was more shaken up than Felicity was.

I took this photo later, when we got to daycare.

FORTUNATELY we were OK. She was fine. I was just a little scratched up. FORTUNATELY, even though the fall wrecked both of my tires ($50), they did not go flat until I had taken her the five miles to daycare and was within walking distance of my office. FORTUNATELY in all my years of cycling, this is the worst that has ever happened to me.

I know that I should have paused before crossing that intersection, even though I had a green light, even though I shouldn’t have to, because I know that car drivers aren’t looking for cyclists. Even though I shouldn’t have to have stopped, I know.

But I want to share my story. Because I’m annoyed. Because I shouldn’t have to be bullied into driving a car every day. Because driving is a privilege, and with it comes the rules and responsibilities, and if anyone is out there that drives a car, please know that it is your responsibility to SHARE THE ROAD.

Because this little face. She loves riding bikes.

It’s going to cost $50 to fix my tires, but when I get my bike back on Friday, I probably will ride with her to daycare again. Probably.

I stopped weaned the night feedings on her birthday. For the most part, after that, she stored waking up at 3 a.m. for a few weeks, but when she was started walking around the middle of August, the night waking started again. So here we are, at 13.5 months:

6 a.m.  Get up for the day and nurse.

6:30 a.m. On a good day, go for a run. Realistically, this happens two days a week. If I get fyi sleep in the extra 40 minutes, I usually take it.

7:20 a.m. World’s fastest shower, clothes and make-up.

7:40 a.m. Leave for day care. She has breakfast at day care when she arrives around 8:10 a.m.

8:30 a.m. Arrive at work.

Lissie takes one nap at day care from 11:30 to 1:30 ish. And I don’t pump any more! I went from 3x per day at 10 months to 2x, then down to 1x per day at 11 months. I phased it out and burned through the rest of her frozen milk by two weeks after her birthday.

I do not miss pumping at work.

4 p.m. Her father picks her up from day care.

5 p.m. I’m home from work! We nurse, then do a fun activity outside together while Dad makes dinner.

6:30 p.m. Dinner. She is getting most of her nutrition from solid now.

7 p.m. Bath, books, nurse, bed. She’s usually out by 7:45. This hasn’t changed much since the last time.

Things that I have learned since the last time

• It was a hard decision to night wean but I did it for as long as I could stand it, and when I did, I know it was the right time because she adapted within a few days.
• That said, I’m still nursing at night since she’s had a cold the last few days.
• The babyhood, it was over so quickly.

Things that I see changing

• She can walk! She’s made huge jumps in the last two months towards independence. It’s thrilling and also a little scary, like, I am a parent of another human being with a will and personality.
• My willingness to entertain the possibility of going through all this again with another kid.
• This series. I don’t see her month to month changes as being that dramatic any more, so this will be the last one. Thank you guys for all the and feedback.

But here’s one I don’t want to miss: FIVE YEARS since I started running.

This picture was taken on the day that I started running the Couch to 5K program.

I started running five years ago, on Aug. 25, 2010. I was 25 years old, had just moved into the first house I had bought that summer, and had been married for just about a year.

And I was ready for a change.

This was my second year working for Sun Media Group in Lewiston, and I knew that our company fitness program, “Step into Fall” was about to start. I participated the year before, but things were hectic then, as we had just come out of a huge product launch that summer, and then I was planning my wedding in the fall.

(By the way, in preparation for my wedding, I did try to diet and lose weight. And I did — I lost about 20 pounds in the 7 months between the proposal and the event by skipping meals and walking 60 to 90 minutes every day. No surprise, I gained almost all of it back by the time I started the Couch to 5K a year later.)

So here is how Step into Fall worked:

• Everyone on the company’s health insurance program can participate — that includes family members of employees.

• You self-organize into teams, and the team with the highest average point per member wins.

• The basic premise is you earn points by recording when you exercise each week. High intensity activities (like running) earn three times the points that low intensity activities (like walking) earn.

• You earn bonus points as an individual for things like:
  • Competing in an athletic event (like a 5K)
  • Attending a company lunch and learn

• You earn bonus points as a team for things like:
  • Exercising together
  • Having team members from different departments
  • Having team members who work different shifts (e.g. day and night)
  • Having a manager on your team
  • Having a family member on your team

All you really got for winning was bragging rights. But being the competitive person I am, bragging rights meant a lot to me, and I saw that this might actually be an athletic competition I could have a chance at winning.

So I started the couch to 5K that fall knowing that sticking with the program would “count” for something. And I found out that I absolutely LOVED running.

And I turned into the kind of crazy person who would go to a conference and get up at 5 a.m. to finish a 8 mile run instead of going out drinking the night before. Don’t you see the love, here?

For the record, I never ever did end up winning that contest, any year. Competition for the employees most dedicated to fitness is fierce over there in Lewiston.

I wrote a bit about that program in May of last year when I spoke to a group of HR directors who run programs like this in their workplace. You can go back to that post, “You don’t have to be perfect to be a role model,” to read all the reasons why I think programs like these work. (As an aside, I think that post pretty much sums up my philosophy to this blog.)

Basically, it comes to this: Every time I tried to change my lifestyle alone, I failed. The time it worked? I had my friends and co-workers to support me in my journey.

Do you need encouragement in your weight loss journey? Subscribe to new posts from this blog when I write them (on a pretty occasional basis ):

The park had a meeting with the public last night at its headquarters to talk about the issue of when a permit is really needed. I spoke with John Kelley, the public information officer for the park, and he told me about 80 people showed up — members of the running clubs as well as representatives from Mount Desert Island high school athletics.

Kelly confirmed with me that these are the park’s guidelines for when you need a special use permit:

• a group of 20 or more people on a paved road or carriage roads
• a group of 5 or more people using on a single-track trail
• a group of 10 or more people using the Schoodic section of the park.

These are the same guidelines the park has had, Kelly said. And those guidelines aren’t specific to running — the idea is that any time a large organized group might displace other visitors of the park, the rangers want to know about it, so they can try to “work around that impact” of having a large group use a facility in the park all at once.

“The key to the special-use permit is that it is a process,” Kelly said. “It’s a case by case review of the activities of all varieties — activities that we want to happen in the park, at least to the extent that they don’t impact other visitors.”

And to clarify earlier questions about the permitting process, the $50 fee is refunded if a special-use permit is not required — or not granted, Kelly said.

Both when I talked to Acadia National Park Chief Ranger Stuart West last week and when I talked to Kelly today, I asked about what would happen if a large family wanted to go on a hike or run together, and the recommendation is that they should split into smaller groups as to not impact other visitors on the trail — or apply for a permit.

Another suggestion that came out of the meeting last night was to be able to issue a permit for a repeating activity, such as the high school cross country team taking training runs.

I’d seen a few posts on Facebook about concerns around this very issue — that the MDI team wouldn’t be able to run in the park any more.  For example, this post from Secretary of State (and former MDI runner) Matt Dunlap on his personal Facebook page:

Regarding those statements, Kelly said that the guidelines to run in the park haven’t changed, and the high school team isn’t being denied a permit. They just need to apply for a permit to run in the park.

(MDI cross country coach Desiree Sirois declined to talk to me for this blog post.)

Gary Allen, MDI Marathon race director and co-founder of Crow Atheltics running club – where this blog post all started — was at the meeting, and he shared his thoughts with me:

I appreciate the park both calling the meeting and working to clarify the rules.

I get a sense that a lot of this is still about them writing a summons that never ever should have been written in the first place and rather admitting that they may have made a mistake, they are instead overhauling the whole system.

To me, hikers and runners are all pedestrians, and telling groups on foot they can no longer visit a national park unless they comply to what feels like random quotas feels a lot like overkill. ANP should be a leader in encouraging people to get outdoors versus making them wonder if they are compliant. Statistics show our country has never been more unfit, and in my humble opinion, these kind of regulations appear to favor tour buses versus people power are pretty ridiculous.

(Allen is referring to the fine the runner faced after planning a group run at midnight on Aug. 13 up Cadillac Mountain. Chief Ranger West said that the park wanted to work with the court to drop the fine.)

Kelly said that he took pages and pages of comments and suggestions at the meeting last night, and the park is reviewing them.

Coincidentally I was on Cadillac this Monday enjoying the park with my family … from a car.

“We’ll look into considering some of the ideas that came out of the meeting,” Kelly said.

Acadia National Park Chief Ranger Stuart West issued a statement that he’ll ask the assistant U.S. attorney to “dismiss the charges based on the greater good.”

“Although, by the letter of the regulation, the ranger was not wrong in issuing a citation, I feel there is another way of handling the situation, so I will be making a recommendation to the Assistant U.S. Attorney to dismiss the charge based upon the greater good. That greater good is working with Andrew [the runner who was cited] and the rest of the running community to get everyone on the same page about when a special use permit is required,” West wrote in an email.

Furthermore, since this issue came to light, the park staff is working to simplify the system to make it easier for people to know when they need a special use permit, West said.

Park officials and runners met on Monday evening at the fountain in downtown Bar Harbor to talk about the situation and reach a common ground.

I spoke with Gary Allen, the race director for the MDI Marathon and co-founder of Crow Athletics running club. He’s how I found out about this controversy, and he was at the meeting Monday night.

“It was a productive discussion,” he said. “We were far more relieved than we were going into [the meeting] because [West] said that he would recommend that the case would be dismissed.”

Both sides agree there is still work to be done to get everyone on the same page about when a run rises to the level that a special use permit is required.

“To me, the park’s position is still a gray area,” Allen told me. “I’m glad they’ve moved to dismiss this, but I’m still not sure that the activity of the group of seven runners rises to the level of being illegal.”

“I learned quite a bit from the meeting last night,” West said in a statement via email. “It sounds like management of the special use regulations has evolved through the years, and although I know that they have improved dramatically over the last five years, we still have some work to do.”

“Both sides really want to cooperate with each other,” Andrew Kephart, the runner who was issued the citation Thursday, said to me today.

There will be an open meeting for the public at the park headquarters at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 26, to discuss the issue.

“The park has long been a supporter of the running community. They are some of our most considerate and supportive user groups. To have an incident blow up into a much larger misunderstanding is a shame, but social media has a tendency to do that,” West said.

That’s the running group based out of Mount Desert Island, which puts on the MDI Marathon. (I’ve never actually run with them, but I ran that marathon, and when I moved up here, I thought I would … just sayin’.)

Then the back story came out: A member of the group, Andrew Kephart, posted in that group and a few other local running groups on Facebook about an open invitation to meet for a run at midnight Thursday to climb up and down Cadillac Mountain and see the meteor shower.

When Kephart and six other runners met up at the base of Cadillac at midnight, a ranger was waiting for them with a print-out of the Facebook post.

There’ve been a handful of posts in that group since then surprised that a group of runners would need a permit with the park to go on a training run casually organized on Facebook. I was, too, so I got in touch with Kephart and the National Park Service to get the details.

So last year Kephart had organized a similar event around the same time of year. He said he did the same thing — posted on Facebook (just a post, not an event) that he was going to run the 4.5 miles up and down Cadillac on a full moon, and friends were welcome to join.

“Last year I think we left at 9 and we didn’t see anything,” he said. “Also it was kind of cloudy. I figured this year the peak time was midnight.”

I talked to Stuart West, the chief ranger at Acadia National Park, and he explained the rules to me: There are three things that the park considers when granting a special use permit:

• Does the request degrade the resource in any way?
• Does it impact the visitor experience — that is to say the people who aren’t participating in the event?
• Are there safety considerations?

He said it was the third reason, the safety consideration, that led them to fine the runners before their training run on Thursday night.

“A lot of people were at Cadillac watching the shower [that night],” West said.

He said that applying for a special use permit would “absolutely not” have prevented the event from occurring. The park could have provided cars with emergency lights on the vehicles to alert drivers about the runners going up and down the mountain.

The number of people participating in an event doesn’t matter. You can be required to get a special use permit for as few as three people, such as for filming, he said.

There were two reasons why this event needed a permit, West said: First, because of the safety consideration at night during a special event, and, second, because the post implied they expected as many as 30 people.

He gave me an example that you could post on Facebook an open invitation to friends to meet up for a run around Eagle Lake at 5 p.m. Even if 30 people showed up, if the group broke into two smaller groups and ran in opposite directions, everyone would be in compliance.

“The park is not interested in just giving someone a citation. We’re interested in influencing from here on how everyone uses the park, so they know the rules of using the park,” West said. “People ask, why do you have special use permits? I think they have to realize how many different things are going on at the same time. We manage weddings and people scattering ashes, and that would be horrific if both things are going on at the same time.”

West said if you think you might want to host an event that would need a permit, because of the three criteria above, you can apply for a special use permit through the park’s website. If your event doesn’t need a permit, the rangers will let you know.

[Edited to add, since some people pointed this out on Facebook: The special use permit application states there is a non-refundable $50 processing fee, unless “the requested use is a First Amendment right.”]

And like Kephart wrote in the Facebook post above, he told me that the ranger still let the seven runners go out on the 9-mile run.

“Even at the base, running up, we saw the meteor showers. It was wonderful,” he said.

Rather than describing the deceased’s life with euphemisms and platitudes, skirting her cause of death, the obituary author cut right to the core of what killed his loved one.

So was Coleen Singer a victim of partisan politics? I think so. And I think that more people should talk openly about how access to health care has affected their lives.

Part of the reason I haven’t been able to write in this blog much, besides the usual demands of being a new mom, is because I’ve spent most of our weekends this summer driving down to visit my brother in the hospital in Lewiston.

My brother Melvin holding Felicity when she was a few weeks old.

My brother suffers from Crohn’s disease, a chronic illness where his immune system attacks his gut. Crohn’s attacks can be debilitating and extremely painful. He has to watch his diet and stress levels very carefully, as flare-ups lead to surgery and prolonged hospital visits.

He turned 26 in March and was kicked off my parents’ health insurance because he aged out. Prior to that, he had successfully lived on his own for two years, working part-time for a call center in Lewiston. He was not eligible for health insurance through his employer. Leading up to his birthday, he petitioned to stay on my parents’ health insurance and was denied.

Making less than $900 a month, he could not afford to pay for health insurance, so he went uninsured.

Because he was uninsured, he stopped receiving Remicade, a very effective but also very expensive medication that kept his disease in remission.

A few weeks after his treatment ended, his energy levels decreased and he was no longer able to continue working. So he lost his job.

A few weeks after that — selling his TV and other personal possessions to pay for medication — he was admitted to the hospital with a serious flare-up in his intestines. He was in the hospital from the beginning of June to the end of July.

Ultimately he had to have an ileostomy, which is a procedure where his intestine was removed. The healthy end of it was inserted through the abdominal wall, and all bodily waste goes into a bag outside of his body.

That actually ended up being good news. Doctors were concerned that he might need to have so much of his intestine removed that he would never be able to absorb nutrients by eating again.

He’s out of the hospital, but there is still a long road to recovery. He needs time to rest and heal. And he also needs almost $500 worth of medication per month, minimum, just to stay alive.

I can’t say that this might never have happened if my brother had insurance. But stress is a contributing factor to his disease, and the Remicade he no longer could afford was an effective treatment in keeping his disease in remission.

My brother spent about 40 days in the hospital — many of those days in the intensive care unit — costs that Central Maine Medical Center and St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center will likely never fully recoup. Because he was uninsured and low income, he only got health care at the point when it became catastrophic, and he had to undergo a life-changing surgery.

On paper, my brother is an “able-bodied” young adult with no kids — thus, ineligible for Mainecare.

And his catastrophic care cost far more than continuing treatment would have cost.

We pay for health care for the less fortunate one way or another — if not through taxes, then through outrageously expensive hospital bills that are passed on to our insurance companies.

So that’s my family’s story, and that’s why Coleen’s obituary spoke to me. Do you have a story? Share it in the comments.

I have so many things I want to write about staying fit and parenting an almost toddler, but like anyone who’s been there knows, all your priorities shift after you have kids and blogging has fallen far behind for me.

My hands are literally full, all the time now.

So in lieu of the big things I want to say, here’s just the 50,000-foot view:

Less than 6

The number of nights in the last year where I have slept through 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. Two of those nights have been in the last week.

5

Longest number of consecutive days I have run in a row (May 26 to May 30 of this year).

372.2

Miles run since I gave birth.

43

How many seconds my average pace per mile has dropped comparing the year before I gave birth to the year after I gave birth.

13.1 miles

My longest run since giving birth, at the Race the Runways Half Marathon, which I might have had no business running. But I did OK anyway.

2.1

Average number of days per week I ran.

3.3

Average length of a run in miles in 2015.

2 (but sorta 3)

Number of competitions I’ve completed this year — Race the Runways and the Tri for the Y. (But I also walked in Erin’s Run.) I want to do the Labor Day five-miler next.

19

Longest break I’ve taken from running in days. That was a few weeks after Race the Runways, which left me with some hip flexor pain (which is why you shouldn’t run races you haven’t trained for).

100

The cost of the sweet sweet jogging stroller I picked up used on Craigslist when Lissie was 14 weeks old. It’s been loved, but I saved $300 but getting it used!

379

Duration in minutes of the slideshow of Lissie’s photos and videos taken by her father and myself in the first year for her birthday party.

4

The number of pounds I lost since the day I came home from the hospital.

0.5

The number of pounds I lost since my second week after giving birth.

2,000

The number of diapers I estimate we’ve bought this year.

The thing that was surprisingly easy:

Getting back into running. I had such an extensive base and I’m know what I’m doing. Even though my fitness is nowhere near what it was, I feel like my mechanics are good.

The other thing that was easy

Not caring about competing. I have too many things to care about now.

The thing that was surprisingly tough:

Not sleeping. Not sleeping. Not sleeping.  I found myself way too many times having to choose between a workout and a nap.

Also

Remember when I was like, anyone can find 30 minutes to be fit? Um, its really hard to find 30 minutes when you have a newborn. #sorrynotsorry

At least a million

The number of times I asked myself if I could really go through all this again.

0

The number of times I regretted it.

My favorite running partner.