I am obsessed with movies.  All movies.  Comedies.  Classics.  Action.  Drama.  Musicals.  You name it.

My brother and I actually have a secret language.  We speak movie lines.  We do this so often that sometimes people who know us well will hear us talking and say, “What movie is that from?”  And one of us will respond, “It’s not.  I just said it.”  I can also speak this language with the rest of my immediate family, my cousins, other extended family members, and the occasional non-Jacobs clan foreigner.

Disclaimer: I will only say this once, and only once, if anyone attempts to make fun of me for what I am about to say, you are taking your life into your own hands…I will plead temporary insanity. But here’s my confession.  I have a secret addiction to sappy, cheesy girl movies.  Otherwise known as, chick flicks.  I don’t like to admit this because I’m concerned that the negative connotations associated with enjoying such movies, may tarnish my reputation as a badass.  But I’m about to quote a movie of this genre, so I figured I would just out myself already and be done with it.  So, there ya have it, I like sappy movies. The Notebook, Love Actually, The Holiday, Letters to Juliet, When Harry Met Sally, all of them.  If there’s an insanely hot, buff, young stud as the leading man, all the better.  Preferably the likes of Jude Law, Vince Vaughn or Ryan Gosling.  And Ladies, who’s with me in thinking that Taye Diggs really needs to do a nice romantic lead? One word…Yummy.  And yes, I cry during the bombing scene of Pearl Harbor and when the old people are laying in their bed while the water rises in Titanic.

So, anyway, the other night I was watching Eat, Pray, Love.  No one does cheesy girl movies better than Julia Roberts.  Am I right?  Well, in this scene of this particular flick, she was thinking about leaving an unhappy marriage.  She said, or rather, she was thinking… “The only thing more impossible than staying, was leaving.  I didn’t want to hurt anybody.  I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door and not stop running until I reached Greenland”.

I know that feeling.  There’s running.  And there’s running away from something.  I used one to do the other.  I ran my first marathon in 2001, and then I had three kids from February of 2003 to July of 2007.  I ran a half marathon in between each of my pregnancies to make sure I got my body back down to size and to feel good about myself.  Ethan was 4 1/2 months old when I turned 30 and I was determined to be wearing my skinny jeans for my birthday.  I did. I ran the Chicago Half the week before.  I’m still not even sure how I trained for that with an infant.  But it was after my youngest was born that my running took on a life of its own.  I was a busy mom of 3, not yet school age, kiddos.  It was my sanity to get to the gym every day, pass off my little ones and jump on a treadmill.  I ran my second marathon just after my 3^rd baby’s first birthday and I didn’t slow down.  It became an obsession.  I worked in a run where ever I could.  But the ones I looked the most forward to where those long Saturday morning training runs.  The longer, the better.  I was like Forrest Gump, I just kept going.  I wanted to run and not stop until I reached Greenland.  At the time all of that was happening, I didn’t realize what was going on.  It’s taken some deep introspection (and a lot of therapy) to figure out what I was doing.   I wasn’t just running; I was running away.  Running was my attempt to get away from my life, a life I had lost control of.  Running was my escape.  My escape from a marriage that I didn’t know how to change, or I was too scared to change, because I had spent so much of my life running from the things that I didn’t know how to confront.

Leaving my marriage is without a doubt the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, but I had to confront it.  There was no running from it.  I couldn’t just slip out the back door.  I had to stand strong and face it.  And now that I’ve learned how to face things, when I do run, I don’t feel like I’m running from something, I’m running TO something.  I’m running to accomplish a goal, running to get healthy, running to feel strong, running to embrace freedom.  Later in that scene of Eat, Pray, Love Julia says, “Ruin is a gift.  Ruin is the road to transformation.” My failed marriage left me feeling like my life was in ruin, but I guess now I run to continue my transformation.  I run to grow and to prove that transformation to myself.  Because I don’t need to prove anything to anybody else.

However, just to set the record straight (and to reclaim my rightful badass status), I can quote Tommy Boy in it’s entirety, I really wanted to name my youngest son Maximus after Russell Crowe’s Gladiator, my favorite Bond movie is Dr. No, and who doesn’t love Indiana Jones? Any questions?

RRG and “Little” brother after the Surf City half-marathon 2011. I’m pretty sure we were quoting movie lines during that race.