Love and relationships
Good Housekeeping’s editor-in-chief, Gaby Huddart, was spurred on to run her first London Marathon when her daughter Lara Huddart-Ouabdesslam signed up to do it – and it’s a memory they will cherish for ever
Running the TCS London Marathon was, without question, one of the best experiences of my life. Nothing can beat the thrill of hearing thousands of people calling out your name, of knowing you are pushing yourself to the absolute limit of mental and physical endurance, of being slap bang in the middle of a truly iconic international event. But for me, the icing on the unbelievably delicious cake was the fact that my daughter Lara was running that race with me.
I’m in my 50s and not a natural sportswoman, so I knew I was doing something pretty special, but Lara had only just turned 19 and she’d never entered a running race before. My feelings of pride were quite overwhelming.
Lara ran ahead of me, bagging a seriously impressive time of 4:45, and when I jogged through the finish line around 20 minutes later (recording a time of 5:09) she was standing there waiting for me with open arms. It was a wonderfully euphoric mother-and-daughter moment and a memory we will both cherish for ever. There’s no doubt we are bonded by our shared experience of that rainy April day, but, in fact, the months of training and preparation also brought us closer in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.
MAKING A CONNECTION
Lara is the younger of our children (Juliet, her older sister, is 22) and her departure for university last September left me and her dad, Moussa, feeling quite emotionally bereft about our newly empty nest. Lara didn’t look back for a second. After the horrible social restrictions of lockdown, she was desperate to make the most of every minute away from home and keeping in touch with her mother was clearly low on her freshly independent list of priorities.
Lara was always the more minxy of my daughters, and through her teens we had an occasionally tempestuous relationship – we certainly knew how to wind each other up! I was worried that she’d see university as a chance to break free from the parental bonds and abandon me completely. I found the separation tough and would resort to sending pictures of dachshunds (a shared passion) to prompt an ‘Aw, cute’ response, which was enough to reassure me she was alive and well. Then, completely out of the blue last December, Lara posted a message on our family WhatsApp group saying she’d signed up for the London Marathon and asking us to sponsor her. I was shocked and impressed, but also green with envy. I’m a keen but casual runner (I completed a half marathon three years ago) and for the past 30 years I’ve been saying I would enter the
