The Starting Line Was Never the Start
Veronica Tucker
Finish
I didn’t cry at the finish line. I thought I might. I imagined my knees would buckle from the weight of it all. Twenty-six point two miles. Three years of becoming someone new. But when I crossed under the Arc de Triomf, lungs burning, legs shaking, I felt only clarity. Not triumph. Not relief. Just a quiet knowing that I had arrived at a version of myself I once believed was out of reach.
The marathon was in Barcelona, a city I loved long before motherhood. I studied there once, younger and unshaped. Back then, I wandered the alleys with a borrowed language and a body I never questioned. Now I was here again, not as a student or a tourist, but as a woman who had chosen herself one morning, years ago, in an exam room filled with fluorescent light and unfamiliar fear.
Just past the finish, I slowed to a walk. The medal settled against my chest. My hands trembled from effort. My shoes were soaked with sweat and memory. I looked up at the sky, then down at the road, then toward the crowd. I knew no one here. My husband and kids were home. Still, I searched for a face that might understand what it meant to come this far.
Because the beginning wasn’t here. Not in Spain. Not today. It started in the stillness of a waiting room, when I first heard the words gestational diabetes and understood that something had to shift.
Diagnosis
It was not a dramatic moment. No sirens, no shouting, no cinematic pause. Just a clipboard, a number, and a frown. I was in the third trimester of my third pregnancy, tired in the way only mothers with young children understand, when the nurse came in and said the glucose test had come back high.
Gestational diabetes. I had heard the term. I understood the mechanics. But understanding is not the same as feeling. I felt guilt, mostly. And then fear. I was a physician, trained in emergencies and quick decisions, but this was not acute. This was slow and creeping. A whisper that something in me was out of balance.
The advice came in the form of printouts and meal plans. Choose whole grains. Cut back on sugar. Take walks. Check your blood sugar four times a day. None of it felt monumental, but that is how most transformations begin: with a choice so small it looks like nothing at all.
I started with oatmeal. Not the instant kind, but the thick-cut oats I used to say I didn’t have time for. I swapped soda for water. I walked the long way to the mailbox. I tracked numbers. Some days I failed. Some nights I stood in the kitchen, eating peanut butter off a spoon while the rest of the house slept.
Still, I kept going. Not because I wanted to be smaller, but because I wanted to stay. I wanted to be present. I wanted to be the kind of mother who could chase her toddler across a field without losing her breath halfway through. I wanted to stop disappearing into the background of my own life.
So I moved. A little more each day.
Momentum
At first it was about numbers. Blood sugar readings, portion sizes, minutes walked. I stayed within the lines, quietly afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. But after my son was born, something shifted. The fear didn’t vanish, but it changed shape. I wasn’t just managing a diagnosis anymore. I was building a life I could live inside.
I bought a Peloton on impulse. I told myself it was for convenience, something I could do in short bursts during nap time. I didn’t expect to like it. I didn’t expect the rhythm to matter, or the instructors’ voices to settle into my mind the way they did. But there was something grounding about the cadence, the sweat, the fact that no one needed me for those thirty minutes.
Then came the bike path. Then the dumbbells. Then the gym. A friend convinced me to try CrossFit, and I almost backed out the night before, convinced I wasn’t strong enough to belong there. But I showed up, breath tight in my chest, unsure of the difference between a snatch and a clean. I kept showing up. That was the miracle.
Progress didn’t announce itself. It slipped in quietly. I noticed it one day when I bent to pick up a dropped toy and stood without wincing. I noticed it when I carried all the groceries in from the car in one trip. I noticed it in the mirror, not because I was shrinking, but because I looked like someone who had returned to herself.
Running came later. Almost by accident. A coach suggested it. I dismissed the idea. Running was for other people, leaner people, people with time and long legs and smooth knees. But I tried it. A minute on, a minute off. Two minutes. Five. I did not fall apart. I kept going.
Not because it was easy, but because it was finally mine.
Return
The training plan was taped to the fridge, weeks mapped out in tidy squares. Run. Rest. Cross-train. Longer run. I followed it the way I used to follow medication schedules for my kids, adjusting for illness, for snow, for exhaustion. I ran through mornings so early the stars were still out. I ran after shifts at the emergency department when my body wanted only stillness. I ran around sports schedules, birthday parties, grocery lists, and every invisible weight that mothers carry.
There was no single run that convinced me I was ready. Readiness was never the point. What mattered was showing up. Over and over again. What mattered was becoming the kind of person who showed up for herself.
Barcelona was never about the scenery, though it was beautiful. It was about the finish line that marked a beginning I had already crossed a hundred times in silence. Each time I chose to move when it would have been easier to sit. Each time I filled a plate with intention instead of impulse. Each time I spoke to myself with a voice I would want my daughters to hear.
On race day, I ran with the cadence of memory. I passed crowds cheering in languages I half remembered. I watched the sun rise over the city and thought of the woman I had been three years earlier, sitting alone in that exam room, uncertain and afraid. I wanted to tell her it would be hard. And worth it.
I didn’t win anything. I didn’t need to. I crossed the finish line not as someone new, but as someone reclaimed. Not fixed. Not perfected. Just deeply, vividly alive.
And when I got home, Will ran into my arms, sticky and laughing, shouting “Mama did it!”
He was right. I did.
But the truth is, I had begun long before the first mile.
Veronica Tucker
Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, a married mom of three, and a lifelong New Englander. She enjoys running, travel, time with family, and finely crafted matcha lattes. Her writing explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, and being human. Her work has appeared in Medmic, redrosethorns, and Red Eft Review, with more forthcoming.