Five months ago, I couldn't run around our cul-de-sac without feeling like my shins might crack. Pain pierced my ankles and knees after a block of hitting the pavement.

I refused to even describe my efforts as "running." I practiced a sort of continuous forward movement that seemed several degrees shy of a run. I prefaced any conversation about my training by announcing: I'm not a runner.

Under the influence of proselytizing "real" runners, however, I signed up for a half-marathon. I printed out a beginner's training schedule and committed to three times a week of continuous forward movement, plus at least one yoga session during the week.

And so began four and a half months of self-punishment.

The first few weeks, my workouts left me so sore I could barely walk the next day. I really wanted to quit, but I had told nearly everyone I knew that I was going to do this race, and I was too embarrassed to back out. People much older and larger than me lapped me around the neighborhood.

My children asked if I thought I might win the race I was planning to run: Not a chance, I told them. I was trying avoid finishing last.

It's hard to break out of decades of mental conditioning. My parents raised us to compete hard. If there was a measurable standard, we were expected to do far better than average. That easily measurable standard in running -- time -- forced me to confront that I was going to publicly compete in an activity in which I was certain to perform below the curve. That hurt much worse than my blistered feet.

Gradually, a strange thing happened. The distance I could cover with my continuous forward movement got longer. I began to learn what kind of aches and pains I could tolerate and keep moving through, and which meant I needed to slow down. I realized how much was out of my control every time I stepped outside the house to attempt a certain number of miles. Anything from the weather to road construction could impact how long it might take. I asked the experienced runners I knew for advice and shared my frustrations when it felt like I wasn't making any progress.

I didn't have the time to train like I would have wanted, but I did the best I could given my circumstances.

As my race rapidly approached, fitness blogger and mother of three Maria Kang blew up the Internets with a picture she posted of her very fit self in a sports bra and undies, surrounded by her three young children.

Judgment dripped from the "What's your excuse?" caption on her poster. There was an explicit message that anyone who doesn't work out (or look like her highly toned self) was just making excuses. Those of us living outside the fitness bubble know that is far from true: Not everyone has the support to be able to take time for themselves when they have the constant responsibility of caring and providing for young children.

Even though I had made exercise a part of my life since college, I took a complete hiatus for six years when I was pregnant, nursing and taking care of babies.

Those early years of having a newborn, nursing, expecting another child, and then taking care of both a newborn and a toddler left me barely enough time to shower, let alone hit the gym.

My husband worked long hours, and I didn't have my family in town to watch my children at a moment's notice.

Those weren't excuses, Kang. That was my reality.

It wasn't until they were both in preschool that I found my way back to the gym. It was difficult and painful to try to build up the stamina and strength I had lost.

And even after several years of consistently working out, the impending half-marathon filled me with nerves and apprehension.

The day of the race, I saw the thousands of people of all ages and abilities show up at the starting line. Who were these amazing, ordinary people about to push themselves so hard mile after mile?

And who were these thousands of amazing people volunteering along the route, handing out water and snacks, ringing cowbells, cheering and shouting encouragement? There were rows of strangers holding their hands out for high-fives and waving signs that made me smile: "You run better than the government." "Getting up early to make this sign wasn't easy, either." "When do we get to see the bulls?" "Strip tease by Channing Tatum ahead." (That was a lie, for the record.)

I had been wrong to worry about finishing last. As much as I admired and was in awe of those elite athletes finishing in front, I was inspired by those bringing up the rear. I have no idea what their journey was to get to that finish line.

But I knew where I had started, and I knew what it took for me to finish -- to run -- 13.1 miles.

Approaching the finish line, I spotted my favorite sign.

It read: "I'm proud of you, perfect stranger."

When my son was that magical age of 6, he only knew one way of baseball: the Cardinal Way. He had grown up in a cocoon of Redbird fandom. He had never met anyone at war with Cardinals Nation before.

So, it seemed strange to my then-first-grader when one of our closest friends came over to watch the playoffs and appeared to be actively rooting against our team.

We smiled at the innocence of his "How could this be?" reaction.

Our friend, Dave Shaw, said he was doing him a favor and imparting an important life lesson: There's a lot of different people in the world. You will encounter people who really don't like your team.

"I know everyone doesn't like the same teams," my son said recently. "They have their own teams they like, and we have our team we like. I don't think anybody hates the Cardinals. But I think there are some people who dislike the Cardinals. Because no one should hate a baseball team, even if they are rivals."

Oh, dear child.

It's one thing to open children's eyes to great rivalries born of great competitive spirits, but another to shatter their delusions with the hostility and contempt that is part of the conversation in some circles.

What role does hate play in modern-day sporting events?

Plenty of thoughtful parents have made the word "hate" verboten in their homes. Children can put the word "hate" to angry, upset feelings early enough, and parents spend much energy teaching them to self-regulate and cope with strong emotions. "Hate" is the new four-letter word. We don't want to raise a generation of haters.

When they're too young to understand the truly contemptible things in life, those things well-deserving of our hatred, it's best to shield them.

But where does the line get drawn when the hate is generalized and socially acceptable? After all, a great sports rivalry requires a great enemy.

It is possible to hate someone nicely?

"It's hate with a small 'h,'" Shaw said. "I have rooted against certain teams with every fiber of my being, but I don't think I could say it crossed into hate."

Plus, he said, in sports, "you are 'hating' an abstraction. It's not a real person or real thing."

Except when it is.

I recently tweeted a story about our team becoming "America's team," and a few people who disagreed responded with obscenities. And Deadspin, a sports and news site, incites a lot of Cardinals hatred, beginning with a post called "Why Your Cardinals Suck" earlier this month.

Those accustomed to "Midwest nice" have been taken aback by the rhetoric and intensity of hatred against our team. For help making sense of it, I turned to Tim Marchman, deputy editor of Deadspin. Marchman, despite his misguided sports loyalties, was part of my Michigan Fellowship class and watched the last Cardinals World Series win with us. Rest assured, he is not actually a blood-sucking vampire.

"I feel we are more articulating the building anti-Cardinals rage than fomenting it," he said. It's fun to laugh at Redbirds fans' earnest devotion, and mock the media narratives about "the best fans" and how the "Cardinals play the game the right way," he said.

"The nicer the team is and the better the fans are, the more it makes us want to shake our fists at them," he said. "The lack of anything offensive about the Cardinals is what is so offensive about them."

For the kids discovering this ugly side of sports, Marchman suggests parents embrace this moment: "Maybe it's a good thing this is happening to the Cardinals because it's an opportunity to teach kids there are socially acceptable ways for channeling antagonism. ... Just because you're really good at something, it doesn't mean everyone is going to pat you on the head and be happy about it."

I've seen the litany of responses from those wanting to defend the home team: from long-winded, rational explanations about why there is no legitimate grounds for this sort of hatred to telling ourselves to embrace the vitriol as part of the cost of dynastic pursuit.

Truth be told, that's not St. Louisans' style. We're not comfortable being the objects of derision for what we consider to be our area's bright shining jewel, which seems to bring out the best in everyone around here.

You can't enumerate all the reasons why our team represents The Good. It just makes the naysayers hate us even more.

The best response is the one we would want our children to emulate: Rise above, cheer for your team and ignore the haters.

Fittingly, Shaw, who helped challenge my son's childhood delusions, is a die-hard Red Sox fan.

Her plea for help popped up on my phone last week, and I immediately recognized that moment of darkness.

"Sending out bat signal to my support network," she texted. "Completely failing at work-life anything right now. Life is a complete disaster."

She's a working mother, reaching out to a couple of other working moms, in the easiest way we know how: a small group text, which quickly became small group therapy.

"Was totally just thinking the same thing today and wondering why no one else acts as overwhelmed as I feel most days," one of recipients responded.

The exchange came on the heels of a poignant essay written by Brigid Schulte, a reporter at the Washington Post, about looking through an old diary with her 12-year-old daughter. Her girl had written it a few years prior, and Schulte's heart started to hurt when she saw how many entries said, "My mom gets mad at me."

Parents can snap when they are exhausted, and it happens more frequently than we'd like. Schulte has written a book on the topic, "Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time," which will be published in the spring. She notes that even though mothers report higher levels of exhaustion and stress than fathers, we are all tired.

"Americans work among the longest hours of any industrialized country," she wrote in her essay. "American parents, however exhausted, spend among the most time with their children. We take fewer vacations. We sleep less. We have less time to pause. And the World Health Organization has found that we are the most anxious country in the world."

The piece touched a nerve with readers, several of whom shared similar stories of the toll that work and family stress can take on all areas of life.

"I wanted to curl up and die" when she read her daughter's old diary, Schulte told me later. She also realized "how easy it is to feel that you're falling apart at the seams much of the time."

But this may be her most important realization: "It doesn't have to be that way."

What are the cultural, social and economic conditions that have brought so many of us to the brink so often?

Part of finding a measure of harmony in the dysfunction between work and home requires changing expectations from within, such as prioritizing the things that make us healthy and happy and letting go of the emotional guilt and pressure that make us sick.

It's easier said than done to lower the bar on the personal standards that are so intertwined with how we define our self-worth: How much we achieve at work, how smoothly we run our homes, how clean we keep our spaces, how well we feed our families, how enriched and well cared-for our children are.

But our standards have gotten out of whack with the realities of our lives.

It's OK if your children drop a few extracurricular activities because of how harried the family feels. It's OK if you can't send thank-you cards and give a verbal or email acknowledgement instead. It's OK if your home is rarely as clean as the one you grew up in -- or even the one you had before children.

Part of growing up and maturing is finding ways of ditching unrealistic expectations and being kinder to oneself.

A therapist once told me that a majority of marriage troubles could be resolved if the couple simply hired a housekeeper. Outsourcing certain chores can save an overburdened marriage.

Other personal solutions include: making time for some kind of exercise regularly, regardless of the trade-offs for that time. Making an effort to see people who nourish our souls and seeking validation from friends when we feel lonely, lost or underappreciated. Reading books and watching TV and movies for pleasure. (And not feeling guilty for whatever we are not doing during that time.) Seeing a doctor when we feel too dark for too long.

But just as critical is improving the situation for families on a broader scale, which requires changing structures from the outside. This includes challenging cultural norms that expect everyone to work as if we don't have any caregiver responsibilities.

Katrina Alcorn, author of "Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink," describes our "massive cultural pathology" of being overworked and thinking our frenetic lives are acceptable because everyone else is living that way, too. And everyone else really is living that way. In fact, our country's policies rank among the worst in the industrialized world when it comes to parental leave, sick time and vacation. These aren't just gender issues, they are issues for any parent.

No amount of yoga or deep breathing is going to change those statistics.

When it comes to having healthier, happier families, we have to change our mindset and change the system.