We have a new tradition in our little house.
 
On Monday evenings, Jack, 8, and Viv, 6, and I sit on the couch and watch regular people try to make their dreams come true on “American Ninja Warrior.” It’s a show I’ve watched here and there over the years, but never regularly.
 
I’ve been trying to think of something we could do together, just easy and fun. With Netflix and all the other ways to watch television now, there’s not the same fanfare I remember as a kid, with the family sitting down when a show is on. We don’t have cable, and our options are limited. The kids scroll through Amazon Prime or Netflix to find shows they like, and we watch movies together on the weekends.
 
As they get older, the things we can do together is changing. We can watch a family friendly show during prime time, and they can stay up late enough to see the end. It’s fun to watch our life evolve and to create new memories that are ours alone. It would be easy to just wait and watch the show when it’s available on the app a week later (no cable in this house, sadly), but we’ve made it a point to hurry through dinner and showers on Mondays so we can be parked on the couch together right at 7 p.m.
 
I love how excited they are for it – they still think it’s cool to sit with mom and hang out. I know that won’t last. I can’t believe it’s lasted this long – frankly they’re both cooler than I’ll ever be already.
 
The first night, they were rapt. It’s a fairly simple concept of a show, but Viv loved all the stories about the competitors and was so hopeful with each one. “Mom, he had cancer. He was so sick. I hope he makes it,” she said.
 
Jack was quieter about the storylines but would yell every time someone cleared an obstacle.
 
Maybe this is what it’s like if you love to follow professional sports. I have friends whose entire families are obsessed with hockey or football, their kids wearing jerseys. I know Jack and Viv probably see a fair amount of baseball when they’re with their dad. I don’t follow anything, really – a hometown pride for all teams Cleveland, but I only know how they’re doing if someone tells me. I know that means I miss out on some collective groaning, or celebrating.
 
We sat there together, and I watched the kids watch the show – sometimes experiencing something through someone else is the best way.
 
“Mom, that girl is so strong. She’s way stronger than you,” Viv said.
 
“That guy delivers sandwiches and just did that! I’m getting all my sandwiches from him,” Jack yelled.
 
“Whoa, that guy has abs,” Viv said. “And I don’t even know what that means.”
 
I laugh, and they laugh, and we talk about how hard the obstacles are. Jack has a hundred engineering questions I can’t answer and is always trying to figure out if you can game it somehow, so you can continue on, even if you touch the water. Viv is just hopeful and wants every girl to win. I can get behind that.
 
On a recent Monday, we watched the show, and I got them into bed after, and then I stood in my family room, debating between throwing in another load of laundry, endless laundry, or going to the kitchen to catch up on work. But I kept stopping to stare out the sliding doors – it was a clear, cool summer evening. I wanted to be out there, and not in the usual way for me – writing on the deck with a glass of wine.
 
I texted the teenage babysitter across the street, and she said she’d be over in 5 minutes, enough time for me to change into running clothes. I’ve always been an early morning runner, but I’ve adjusted and do a fair amount in the evenings now, when that’s the only time that works. It’s harder for me to get up before dawn and face the treadmill. And I know soon enough the kids will be old enough for me to leave them at home alone for an hour while I run, but we’re not there yet.
 
Laura showed up, and I stepped outside into the evening. Heading out at 8:30 seemed late, but it also relieved some guilt – the kids were asleep, so I wasn’t missing precious time with them. The work I had to do could wait until I got back, and the evening was too beautiful to not be a part of.
 
I ran about 6 miles in a big square with my house as the center, on mostly main roads because I didn’t feel like thinking about the route, just wanted something easy and mindless. I ran without headphones and just my thoughts. Earlier in the week, I ran 8 miles at Sertoma, looping in and out of the trees with two Bob Dylan albums on shuffle, thinking about lyrics as stories and songwriting as art and his recent Nobel prize.
 
Not this night. I thought about the kids. I thought about how fun it was to sit with them on the couch and create our own community around a TV show. I thought about the Afton 25K, which I’m scheduled to run for the third year in a row this weekend, yet another of my woefully undertrained and long ago signed up for events. It will be fine, it always is. I climbed the short hill up the bridge on 57th Street and thought about all the noon runs with the running club, and their tradition of walking over the bridge at Cherry Rock. I missed some of those folks and the chance to get in more miles over my lunch break, an opportunity that helped me build my weeks in ways I didn’t appreciate at the time.
 
And then a random Ani DiFranco song came into my head, and I ran through the lyrics as I came to the light at Cliff Avenue. I loved her in college – and even though she’s a bit dated and dates me when I say that, I won’t apologize for it. I loved her. Every once in a while, when the kids are gone and I’m cleaning the house, I’ll turn her up full bore and just sing my college heart out, remembering watching her open for Bob Dylan one year in Cleveland, or play a parking lot in Columbus another.
 
Is it great writing? I don’t know. Sometimes I can’t think critically about something I love too much – my view is romantic, not classic, and I can’t separate my emotions and memories of those years from it. I could pull up old reviews of her work, but it wouldn’t change how I feel about it. If anything, I would just feel like an idiot if she was much hated.
 
“I think it’s absurd that you think I’m the derelict daughter,” she sings in “Willing to Fight.” That sounds about right for this year.
 
Instead, I just took it for what it was, an entire song I could remember in my head, word for word, step for step, and as I got to the end of it, I realized why maybe it had been rolling around in my brain anyway: “You’ve got your whole life to do something, and that’s not that long.”
 
It’s not. My whole life is half over, probably more when you consider crappy genes, and what have I done. Sometimes you think that while you survey the wreckage and wring your hands, “What have I done?” Everyone has that. I joked to a friend the other day that I need my lonely cup of coffee every morning to review my regrets and face the day. It was a joke, a play on the lyrics to “Coffee and cigarettes,” but there’s some truth to taking stock every day.
 
But on that Monday evening, as I came around 49th Street and watched a woman work in her garden and felt the sun setting behind me and passed the apartments where my kids spend half their time with their dad, by the library Jack is old enough to ride his bike to, the playground where Viv finally figured out that she actually can ride her bike, and I’ll be right next to her, and she won’t crash, my what have I done turned to “Look what I’ve done.”
 
I’ve raised this small family, keep raising it. I’ve run these miles and keep running them. I’ve stared at these cups of coffee or glasses of wine or out the window in my kitchen, one foot tucked into my knee in the flamingo pose I remember my mom standing in, and surveyed my life.
 
It’s a good one.
 
Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged

​The first time I showed up for a group run, I had no idea what to expect.
 
My friend Owen had encouraged me to join him and a group of friends who ran a 5-mile loop every weekday from the downtown YMCA. It was about 13 years ago, and I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to keep up. It was Owen Hotvet and Sam Trebilcock from the city – two tall, thin men who lope along and look the same running in the 6s as they do in the 9s.
 
What that means is sometimes you didn’t know what you were getting into, as they chatted next to you and cracked jokes with Jon Arneson and Jeff Alvey.
 
Sometimes we picked up Regan Smith or Dick Holmes or Rob Oswald would pop up along the course, a route that hadn’t varied in a decade. We met just after noon, made our way down Dakota to 25th Street and headed east to Phillips, down to 26th and let it carry us to the bike path.
 
We came around the curve and dipped into Rotary Park, picking up speed before the bridge over the river at Cherry Rock Park, where we always walked. It was the running club custom – probably still is, but you’ll have to ask Jon Ellis or Sam if that’s still happening. They’re about all that’s left of the group, which has changed over the years as people get injured or get bored or don’t have a long lunch break to spend gathering miles.
 
They’re a great group of people, and if you see them around – at Spoke-n-Sport for Owen or probably still the Y for Arneson, doing some kind of fair-priced handyman jobs for someone who needs it for Rob --  you should say hi.
 
These are the people who showed me how to run in a group. How to tuck in when it’s windy, how to be close enough to nearly kick someone’s heels, how to be a friend and walk when it’s hot – something they did for me over and over. How to help each other come back from an injury – Alvey and I spent many hours running in a pool to rehab various broken bones.
 
But that first time I showed up, I was so nervous I got there about 15 minutes early. I would learn quickly it’s the kind of group that comes in at the last minute and starts running immediately.
 
They told me the route, stayed within sight of me the first time I did it. I kept falling back, just self-conscious about my ability to stick with them, about being the only girl for the many years until Rana DeBoer joined us for a while.
At one point about halfway through the run, Owen turned to me.
 
“You know, if you’re always about 20 feet behind us, you’re running the same pace we are,” he said. “Come up here.”
 
It was his version of Sheryl Sandberg telling women the world over to lean in.
 
I did. And I ran with them for the next decade just like that – sometimes on their heels, sometimes behind them and every once in a while I would be one of the first to pull into Cherry Rock park, slowing to a jog near the water fountain while they came in behind me.
 
You knew if you wanted someone to go faster with you, they would. Sam or Alvey or Owen would watch you pick up your pace coming down 26th and know – as you hit the curve into Rotary, they would slowly push and push you.
 
It felt good. It felt so good – you could be out there and suddenly have a moment of competition, watching the person next to you just pick it up and pick it up and pick it up. The look out of the corner of your eye, the slide as they pulled away and you realized they were never working as hard as you. The satisfaction the few times you got ahead.
 
The pure sexiness of just hammering it out on the bike path.
 
It’s how I got faster, and it’s who helped me qualify for Boston. It’s also who ran with me after giving birth, or while pregnant, or after surgeries, or on a day so hot I went down on the side of the bike path and Patrick Lalley pulled a cramp out of my calf that went on to bother me for months.
 
This is the gift of the group run – I didn’t know if anyone who ran my pace would be there, a pace that changed with the seasons and with life. And they didn’t know, either. Alvey’s slowed down over the years, and they’ve added a 4-mile option. Arneson sticks to the treadmill now. Lalley’s on a bike, I don’t have a long lunch break and most of the rest of them just changed.
 
On a given weekday, it might be Ellis and Sam, two men who couldn’t physically look more different – one tall and thin and every step the former college road runner and one barrel-chested wearing gym shorts over tights.
 
Sometimes on a Friday, you’d show up and there would be folks who hadn’t been there for weeks or months. “All-Star Friday,” as Owen used to call it. Now many of us would be the all-stars, were we to stand outside the downtown Y at 12:15 and see if anyone wanted to run. I’d probably text a few first, see who was around.
 
I did that a few weeks ago and was able to meet Ellis for the loop.
 
“Do you want to turn on Frederick,” he asked.
 
“No, I don’t want to turn on Frederick,” I hissed at him. “The route goes down to the bike path. I’m doing the traditional route.”
 
He just laughed. The traditional route had changed since I’d last come along, but he did it for me, anyway.
 
The group will do that. They’ll carry you when you need them to, sweep you along with them on the hard days. Someone will be there to push you when you need it, watch you look at them, return the glance, and then just go, as hard as you can until the bridge.
 
And on other days, what they can give you is something simpler: The knowledge that someone will be waiting for you. Always. That they’ll go the old route with you if it feels good. That they don’t mind you haven’t been there for a while, or you might have to walk. You might do all of it, and they’re just happy you’re there.
 
**
 
With that in mind, the 605 Running Co. is introducing pace team leaders for group runs once a month. We’ll highlight who those leaders are to help break down any barriers you might have to joining a group run. Here are two of the leaders.
 
**
Name: Yoko Hartland 
 
Age: 46
 
Family: Husband, Todd; Two daughters, Erika and Andia; Two stepsons, John and Jake, and his wife Kaitlin.
 
Hometown: Hiroshima, Japan
 
Occupation: Coder at Avera Healthcare
 
First race: Deadwood Half-Marathon 
 
Most recent race: Yellowstone Half-Marathon
 
Favorite race: Boston Marathon 
 
Has a pacer ever helped you? Yes, most definitely. I ran with pacers almost every race, especially marathons. It really helps. From mile 20, I always run by myself and challenge myself to use all my energy. 
 
How do you hope you can help runners by being a pacer? I would like to encourage and share my energy with runners. And make great memories. 
 
What pace will you lead? 9:00/mile.
 
Best advice you've been given about running: No matter how tired you are or when you cramp during a race, if you see the photographers, make sure you smile. Also, when you run the hills, you have to tell yourself, "The hills are my friend."  You are going to be fine. 
 
Favorite movie: I like a lot of movies, except scary or bloody movies. My favorite classic movie is "Helen Keller." Always look for miracles, never give up.
 
Last place you traveled: Yellowstone, Wyo.
 
**
 
Name: Eva Gillham
 
Age: 34
 
Family: Husband, Andy; Sons, Lincoln, 3, and Beckett, 18 months; Dog, Sox
 
Hometown: Novato, Calif. (Thirty miles north of San Francisco.)
 
Occupation: Assistant director of research and analytics at ChanceLight Behavioral Health, Therapy, and Education; adjunct graduate professor at the University of the Rockies.
 
First race: Not sure on this one. My first road race was the 5K at the Novato Stampede when I was in 6th grade in 1996. I ran cross country and track in middle school.
 
Most recent race: Newton Hills Ultra, for one that I actually raced. I ran the Avera Race in May and the Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation 5K last week pushing my boys.
 
Favorite race: Around here I like the Newton Hills Trail run. Back home I really like the Dipsea. The staggered start times make it interesting and it's a tough trail race. 
 
Has a pacer ever helped you? I haven't done many races with pacers. I have kept pacers in sight during marathons to help me know how I was running. That helped me stay consistent -- and actually negative split -- during the Sioux Falls Marathon last fall when I raced without training. 
 
How do you hope you can help runners by being a pacer? I think being a pacer will help people hit their target workout paces on at least a few runs. That's much easier (or at least more enjoyable) to do when you run with someone. Having someone else worry about staying on pace will let the runners get more in-tune with their bodies and how the pace feels. So ideally they will learn to run at that pace by feel, sans watch. I also think it will help more people come to group runs. It's much less intimidating to show up when you don't know anyone if you can be sure that you will have someone to run with you at your pace and you won't be left behind or get lost. 
 
What pace will you lead? Not sure on this one. I signed up to do anything from 7:30-9 minute pace (or faster). From my understanding there are multiple pacers for each group, so I think the pace I lead for each run will depend on who else is there. 
 
Best advice you've been given about running: 1) You'll never regret a run. 2) Let your feet do the talking. 
 
Last place you traveled: St. Louis, Mo.
 
The one food you have to have after a long run: My stomach doesn't handle food well after a long or fast paced run, so I'd say water or Gatorade if I'm feeling really dead, hot or tired. Watermelon is also amazing after a run on a hot day. Much later, ice cream is my favorite treat. 

I moved in with my dad when I was 11 years old.
 
It was the year my parents got divorced, and I had been living in Rhode Island with my mom and my three older sisters. She sat me down in the kitchen and told me their marriage was over, and the only other thing I remember from that day was saying, “I want to go live with dad.”
 
In my memory, the next pin is dropped when he drove up to our 100-year-old Colonial house with the leaded glass doors and dark oak floors and the claw-footed bathtub upstairs. He was in a pickup borrowed from a friend, and he helped me put my boxes in the back. My dog Nicky clambered into the front seat with me, rode next to me from the east coast to Ohio, where I was from and where my dad, John, still lived.
 
We drove through the night because my dad had always kept odd hours, working for General Motors and sometimes bartending on the side. We stopped at a truck stop in Snowshoe, Pa., and my dad woke me up to see if I wanted a hot chocolate. I can’t remember if I did or not, but I remember looking at him and asking, “Dad, is everything going to be OK?”
 
And he looked at me like he does, straight in the eye, confident, open and he said, “Of course, honey, everything’s going to be fine.”
 
I went back to sleep, believing him and in him in the way only kids can.
 
When he tells the story, he talks about how he had no idea what he was doing. He had a furnished bachelor pad in an apartment complex that didn’t allow children, a second-shift job and no babysitter for me. I wasn’t enrolled in school. Somewhere between West Warwick, R.I., and Elyria, Ohio, the wives of his friends found us somewhere to live, someone to take care of me after school and helped my dad get me signed up.
 
It was a blue duplex where we had an outdoor staircase to the top floor, a kitchen and dining room and living room, one bedroom that was mine, carpet in the bathroom. He slept on the couch. Across the street was a cemetery and behind us was the parking lot for the American Legion.
 
One night I woke up to my dad standing in the kitchen, looking out the window with a stricken look on his face.
 
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
 
He just pointed outside, where blue balloons were rising into the air from the fog of the parking lot. There must have been some kind of celebration, but to him the scene was eerie and he told me about “It,” the Stephen King book he was reading and the fog and balloons and clowns. He notices things like that – one moment that can look like another one. One means nothing, the other, everything.
 
We each went back to bed.
 
My dad notices everything. I watch him when I see him, which is a few times a year, and he perches on a chair or sits on the couch and you can see him take in the room, assign the roles, watch the story unfold. He always knows how it’s going to end, and it can be maddening to listen to. Nobody wants someone else to be right all the time, and yet you love him for it, wonder what it is in him that makes him so able to just know.
 
Maybe it’s all the books – shelves and shelves of them in our house growing up, in my house with him. Later when he had Bell’s palsy, he would lean his face on his hand, hold one watering eye open with his other hand, a dishtowel next to him to keep wiping the tears out of it while he stared down at whatever he was reading. Book of the month club choices and secondhand store paperbacks and hardbacks everywhere. Shelves of nonfiction and history and world religions. Sets of encyclopedias.
 
“If you girls want to know something, I want you to be able to find out whenever you want,” he explained of this time before the Internet.
 
Finding out was his life. Still is. He’s 76 years old this fall, still lives outside of Cleveland with his second wife. They’ve been together for 17 years. He was married to my mom for 22. They’re all retired. He lays on his couch most days in his little TV room and falls asleep watching The History Channel, turned up to an unbearable volume from more than 40 years of working in an auto factory, a life of little orange ear plugs on the kitchen table next to a pair of Levis hung over the chair, a vice in the garage I loved to crank open and closed, open and closed on summer days.
 
He’s a man of grease and stories and bad choices and some that were OK, too.
 
“The best thing I ever did was have you come live with me,” my dad tells me. “You saved me.”
 
And maybe I did. And maybe he saved me, too. I needed him, and his unconditional love and how he ran errands with me in his old brown Chevette, littered with Pall Mall ashes and an AM radio and a tape deck that only worked if you jammed a matchbook into it with the tape. How then and now he looks at me and really sees me, knows what I’m going to say before I say it. It can be maddening – nowhere to hide, even when you want to. At the same time, when things have gone awry for me, he’s never turned away, even when the problems were ones I made myself.
 
It’s a gift, to be that way for someone. It’s the best gift you can give and he gave it to me. Still gives it, every time I call, and every time I don’t. Then, when I do, when his voice cracks as he asks me, “Jackie, even if you only have a few minutes, just call. I just want to talk. About anything.”
 
To be that wanted and that known, that loved anyway.
 
We had to be involved in activities growing up. My sisters Pam and Tracey ran cross-country. They were fine. My sister Kim ran track in high school and set state records in the 400 and the long jump in Ohio and Rhode Island, went to college on a scholarship. I ran track. I was fine – my best race involved me winning my heat, once.
 
My dad came to my track meets for the first two years when I ran, and he sat up in the bleachers with bags of trail mix he shared with the other kids on the team. He didn’t make friends with the other parents, and I didn’t really make friends with the team. One of the coaches had competed against my sister in high school. I’m sure I was a letdown after she saw my last name and then watched my times.
 
It didn’t matter. I ran because that’s what the Palfy girls did. My dad didn’t know anything about track or cross-country, didn’t play any sports in the Catholic high school he went to until he got kicked out. He was in a gang called the Bladesmen and that was as close as he got to organized anything, for a while.
 
But he wanted us to do it – something, anything, to keep us busy after school, to keep us active. He was obsessed with us all playing some kind of sport, and he didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t great at it. It didn’t matter.
 
“Jackie,” my dad would say as he drove me home from the meets. “You’re so far ahead coming out of the first curve, and then you really open up on the back stretch, and then those girls just catch you. You can’t let them catch you.”
 
“Dad,” I would say. “They’re faster than me, that’s why they catch me. I start too fast, then blow up. God.” Imagine the teenage frustration played out in the passenger seat.
 
But that was the gift: He believed it. Just run faster. Pick your feet up. That momentum on the backstretch? Keep it going through the curve. Pump your arms, and drag yourself, kicking and screaming, across that finish line.
 
Maybe you won’t be first. You probably won’t be. You usually aren’t.
 
But you’ll finish. That he knew. Knows.
 
Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged.
 

​School has barely been out for a week, and already Abbi Cain, 14, of Hartford, is thinking about going back in the fall.
 
She’ll be a freshman at West Central, and while starting high school is exciting enough for any young person, for a young runner, fall means cross-country. And for a newer distance runner, summer means a chance to build a better base, get faster and look toward what could be.
 
For Abbi, that means joining the High School Summer Training Program at 605 Running Co. For two hours a week for nine weeks, she’ll work with coach and store owner Grant Watley to build strength, endurance and flexibility.
 
This is the second year for the camp, which is open to track and cross-country runners from grades 8 to 12. Last year, about 14 students signed up, with an even mix of boys and girls. So far this year, registrations are trending up.
 
“It was a big success last year,” Watley said. “This year, we’ve expanded our camp offering so we can help cross-country runners all summer long as they prepare for their fall season.”
 
That’s just what Abbi is hoping for.
 
“We learned a lot of good stuff about running that I didn’t know before,” Abbi said. “They gave us a ton of stretches and gave us yoga to do before and after we run.”
 
Abbi liked the program so much she signed up for private coaching with Watley over the winter. “I thought it helped a lot for track season,” she said. The year before she tried a different program that focused on speed, but the plan with Watley worked on endurance.
 
Preparing athletes from one season to the next is part of why the training program combined with the private coaching option works so well.
 
“With cross country, your success is determined by what you do over the summer, so our goal is to help athletes have their best summer of training ever before they head back to their high school coaches in the fall,” Watley said.
 
Abbi’s mom, Becky, said the camp was a good way to keep her motivated.
 
“Running camp was hard, and it pushed her, and it introduced her to other people who like running as much as she did,” Becky said. “She came out and said, ‘mom these people like to run!’ She was kind of excited to meet other people who like to run.”
 
The coaching did more than introduce Abbi to a community – it showed Becky what her daughter was capable of. “I was watching her through the window one day, and she did like 45 push-ups,” Becky said. “I didn’t know she could even do one.”
 
Runners will measure improvement based on how fast they race and what level their training is at, Watley said. “As a high school athlete, you want to increase your overall training load every summer so that you can see the times in your fall races get faster,” he said.
 
Abbi and Becky both said the program and the coaching are a good option.
 
“The people there were really welcoming to everybody,” Abbi said. “No matter who you are or your experience.”
 
Becky agrees: “I just think Grant and his staff push her, and they make it fun. They’re really easy to get along with, and she felt comfortable there.”
 
That’s all part of Watley’s goal. He knows how busy high school students are – with school and practice and homework and other activities, not to mention the need to get enough sleep to help your training. While that’s a challenge working with high school athletes, the upside is they’re young, excited and love to learn.
 
“They are very open and receptive to what they need to do to get better,” Watley said. “What can they do better, and how could they have raced differently?”
 
But it’s more than that – building a community around running is what’s at the heart of Watley’s mission.
 
“I was at the first group run we ever did before the store ever opened up and of the 10 people there, seven were employees or owners of the store,” Watley said. Now, group runs attract dozens of runners and weekly yoga classes are packed. “I love hearing the stories of friendships that were formed through the race team, group runs, or just stopping by the store.”
 
 
About the program
What: High School Summer Training Program
When: Every Tuesday, June 20 through Aug. 15
Time: 8 a.m. to 10 a.m.
Cost: $229.99
Where: 605 Running Co., 124 S. Phillips Ave.
Website: Link to event here.
From Coach Grant Watley: “Every weekly session will have a group run, an aspect of supplemental training, and an educational component.  In addition, each athlete will get a training plan for the summer.”

​Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged.