My friend’s husband did, the other day, what to me sounds like the undoable. He got up at 4:30 in the morning, ate breakfast, and then ran 26 miles non-stop. The fact that there were hundreds of others alongside him running in the NYC Marathon doesn’t make it seem any more possible in my mind. I get winded running 26 feet.

As my friend told me proudly of her husband’s accomplishment, the two of us couldn’t help but be inspired by this personal triumph. A type 1 diabetic, he had trained and prepared for months, hoping to finish the run in less than four hours, and finally completing it- exhausted, depleted, and pushing himself through a serious sugar imbalance- in 3:52. He’d told her about things he’d witnessed in others near the finish line, like bleeding nipples, runners crying, speaking in tongues, and yelling at their own bodies for not being able to go on.

It slowly dawned on us. The experience that he had just crammed into the course of a 26-mile run wasn’t that far off from what she and I had gone through two years earlier when we each gave birth and then breast-fed our newborns for many months. The insanity, the non-sensical rambling, persevering through total depletion, chafed and bleeding nipples, and crying… LOTS of crying. It all just sounded alarmingly familiar. The marathon runners may have just touched on what we lived through over the course of many months.

Perhaps every man should be required, by law, to run the NYC Marathon one time for every child that his wife gives birth to. Maybe it would bring about a deeper empathy and understanding between all couples.

And when I think of something as "undoable" or "unattainable", perhaps I should cast my mind back to how I pushed a human being out of my body and then learned how to keep it alive, with no proper training and while completely sleep deprived. How I felt simultaneously ripped apart and all powerful in the week after I gave birth. Everything was vivid and vibrant around me. The fragility of my baby combined with the enormity of the situation was mind altering. When I think I can't do something, perhaps I can try to recall how I felt like a torn and tattered wonder woman back then, and recognize what that wonder woman has been able to accomplish.