When I met my wife (at our 5th-year college reunion, but that’s another tale), I had just run my first marathon (in DC, spring of 2002) and was training for Chicago the coming October. In terms of endurance and leanness, I was at a lifetime peak. That summer, when we’d run loops of Central Park, I barely registered the hills. It wasn’t flat, but it wasn’t Gun Hill in Ithaca or Wager Hill in Penn Yan or other hills I’d either chosen (or been instructed) to run repeats on as I trained for upcoming lacrosse or soccer seasons. Central Park, when you’re in shape, is scenic and rolling, not harsh climbs. Cat Hill breaks up the flatter monotony of the more crowded southern section; the west side adds welcome variety to your stride. Harlem is steeper, but you shrug it off; what just went down has to go up.

Fast forward a decade, and I’m pushing a double stroller around the loop like it’s a tackling sled stuck in mud (“Am I sure those tires are fully inflated?”) and feeling every degree of the grade. The Harlem hills rise like Lombard Street, and the once gentle humps on the West Side threatened to seize all forward progress.

My kids are not still, quiet, sleeping babies. They are active, craning their bodies, heads, and necks to track a dog as we pass, reaching over the middle barrier to tug or smack their sibling. Their shifting weight wrecks the stroller's momentum, pushing it back into me, then jutting it forward.

I’m the engine and the driver on this trek, but also a steward, mediator, negotiator (“we’ll go to the big slide if you can just stay seated until then.” “How long will it take?” “12 minutes,” I lie. There are three miles left; it’s closer to 30. “Run faster.” One says. “No, slow down, it’s too bumpy,” says the other.)

They’ll reach a hand high over their heads to request a water bottle or demand a snack. The favored snacks in the running stroller are the Entenmann’s chocolate chip bar (they have their own display case at the end of the aisle) and cups of Cheerios. I open wrappers with my teeth (typically at an inopportune time–on a hill or a turn, in a crowd) and hand them forward. They toss the trash back.

On one of the jogs, these slow torturous jogs in which I’m mentally attempting to invent a raised handle bar addition to the BOB stroller that would allow me to run (at 6’2”) with my hands in a higher, more comfortable position instead of carpel-tunnel inducing misery, the Google Street-view car passes us on the Drive high on the east side above the reservoir and before the 102 transverse where one could decide to cheat the loop and take a rather flat shortcut before the road dives and curves down past the Rink and the Harlem Meer only to sharply rise again as the route moves south down the west side.

When I push the double BOB, I can more easily excuse the taking of the shortcut. But whenever I do, it doesn’t seem to make the route significantly easier or shorter, just disappointing.

We see the Google car go by and figure that, at some point, we will be frozen in time on the internet forever. After weeks of refreshing the view, it loads, and we can see ourselves. Our faces are blurred. My form is awful. The struggle looks real. The older child is practically out of the stroller, trying to peer into our wake. The younger one is reaching over to touch him? Hit him? Pull him back in?

You can still pull up that moment on Google Maps, zoom into Street View on the East Dr, and see us from August 2012. I have logged hundreds of miles in Central Park in the years when my knees allowed it. Once in the NYC Marathon, dozens of times in other NY Roadrunner races, but mostly on runs, solitary runs, runs with my wife, and runs pushing a stroller.