Interview with Ellen London

Ellen London is a force to be reckoned with. She’s a senior editor for Boston’s GBH News and she holds a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. She’s also a decorated athlete who’s been running marathons for the last 10+ years. And she’s a mom to two young girls. Somehow, she juggles it all while working hard to cover the news amid a climate where the news doesn’t quit. Ellen and I went to undergraduate school together in Maine, but our paths didn’t cross much at school. I was lucky enough to reconnect with her this spring, and to learn from her as a working mom and someone who cares deeply about what she does. This is our conversation.

Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’ve achieved some incredible things, both personally and professionally. You’re a mom to two young kids and an award-winning senior editor for Boston public radio. You’ve also run 15+ marathons. Can you talk a bit about how you think about balancing it all?

It is a lot being a mom and having a full-time career, and then also having a lot of personal hobbies and ambitions, including outdoor pursuits and athletics. I don’t strive for perfect balance—I’m not sure that exists as a mom. I think the biggest thing for me is defining what that balance looks like for myself and for my family, and then striving to achieve that. I think that a lot of the time, people think about needing to have everything be in perfect parity. So if I’m spending 50 hours a week working, then I need to spend 50 hours a week with my children. For me, it’s a constantly evolving conversation with myself about how I define success and what balance looks like for me, specifically, and then going for that. 

I have a really demanding job, especially in this news cycle that won’t quit. I work a lot. For me, it’s trying to keep that in check, knowing that even while I’m very passionate about my career, my kids, my family, my marriage, and my relationship with myself are far and away the priority for me. I try to keep all of those things at the fore and invite my career in to complement those things. But I’m not kidding myself that I’m in balance. You’re always a mom—you’re always on the clock, even when you’re technically not. 

I’m a planner and it’s honestly been such a blessing to have to learn, kind of through having kids, to let some of that go. And to give myself permission to evolve and change. And to change my priorities, and to change up the plan. … It’s through having kids, really, that I’ve learned that lesson.

Following up on this, can you describe what a typical day looks like for you?

When I can, I try to have a little bit of time to myself in the morning. Of course, that always depends on what time my alarm clocks (my kids) wake up. Even if it’s going into the kitchen and making my coffee alone and having a few minutes to myself when the house is quiet. I try even on really busy days—and this is one blessing of working from home most of the time—to have some regular check-ins with [my daughters], too. I try to leave my home office and go downstairs at lunch time, for example, so that I can have a little extra time with them during the day—I think that’s been really helpful. 

I’m a morning person and I used to love my morning run, first thing. That has been one thing that I haven’t been able to replicate since having kids. I do really miss being able to wake up and eat half a bagel and just go—even while it’s dark out. I used to love that. Now, mornings are so chaotic that even if I do get up a little before the kids, I never know exactly when they’re going to wake up. … If I can, I try to get a workout in during the day. So at lunch, I might get out for a quick run, or if I have a break in meetings, I’ll do a half-hour barre class. I find that helps me in two ways: Not only do I get my exercise in at a time when I still have energy, but I also find that when I go back to my laptop I feel a little more refreshed and a little less Zoomed out.

Does your passion for running fuel your professional ambition and vice versa? I guess another way of saying this is, where do you go to find positive momentum?

I think there are a few connections. One is that I work in public media. I’m an editor, so I see a lot of different kinds of stories and work, which is really exciting and it’s something new every day. But it’s also very intense. The news doesn’t stop, ever. Especially for the world that we live in right now—it’s a lot. It can be intense, sometimes it’s really sad. It can be hard to be in it all day, even when I do try to put up those boundaries and walk away from it. You know, we all still talk about it. Because of that, running and exercise provides a space for me to get fresh air and be physically and emotionally away from [the news cycle] a bit. What’s interesting is that when I go out for a run, I think I kind of shut off that part of my brain. But sometimes I come back from a run and—even without knowing it—I find that I’ve kind of worked through a problem or a work-related conundrum. I’ll come back with a fresh idea, or I’ll feel reinvigorated to think about something in a different way, [as if I was] processing [my work] in my subconscious while I was out there. I feel like running helps me come up with ideas and fresh perspectives just from having that distance from my work.

You prioritize spending time outside with your family. Can you talk about how you’re trying to foster a love of the outdoors with your kids? 

Right from the get-go, we’ve definitely had the benefit (and detriment) of the fact that our families are scattered all over the country. My family is in Maine, Ben’s is in Minneapolis and upstate New York, my brother’s out in Colorado—so our families are pretty geographically scattered. That can be hard, but the nice thing about that is that we have plenty of really cool places to visit and enjoy the outdoors. Right from the get go, when Rory was six weeks old, we took her out to Colorado because my brother was getting married and she was the teeny-tiny flower girl, which was very sweet. So first off, just taking a six-week-old on a plane halfway across the country to altitude, people were like, “Is that even safe?” And, of course, we checked in with our pediatrician and it was fine. But that was our approach: We’re just going to try it. We took her hiking, we showed her all around Steamboat, Colorado—we really enjoyed ourselves because she was right there with us, and we had a great time. Now, that’s not to say we haven’t had other trips and outings that have been total disasters, where even we asked, “What were we thinking?” But I think it’s just having that attitude of, you gotta try it once, twice, maybe three times. You know, just being willing to get your kids out there in order to enjoy the things you like to do together. 

 Just this last winter we went up to the North Shore of Minnesota on Lake Superior, north of Duluth. It’s so beautiful, it makes my Mainer heart sing, because you’re on a rocky coastline that feels like an ocean, even though it’s a lake. It’s really lovely. It’s also the coldest place on Earth. It is so cold. So we were up there this year and it was pretty consistently five or 10 [degrees Fahrenheit] below. But, you know, we bundled the girls up—I put Harriet in the front pack, and we took them for a cross-country ski. Everyone had a ton of clothes, we had hand warmers. And we were like, “OK, it’s really cold. Let’s just bundle up and try it”—and it was great. Harriet pretty much slept through the ski, Rory had a blast, and it was just being willing to take the extra time to get everyone safely bundled and to try it. So many of our favorite memories as a family have been from times when we just went for it. I think you just have to try to stay away from being too intimidated and just do your research, ask around from your friend group, and then give it a go.

Can you talk about what your experience has been like running through two pregnancies? (I’ve had a lot of ups and downs with my own postpartum return to running, and I feel like this is something our culture needs to talk about more!)

My relationship with running has changed several times. Even more so just over the last few years. I was a collegiate athlete, I played tennis at Colby, and so I didn’t really come to distance running until later in life … later on in college. As I started getting really into it, I started getting really involved and I was coaching and I started to see some improvements, and then I became more competitive and so it kind of satisfied more of a competitive place in my life, which I think, candidly, at some points was unhealthy. It definitely sometimes got to a point where I was too regimented or too intense about it to the point that I don’t think it was great for my body or my mental health. 

Through having kids, I think my relationship with running has changed in a lot of wonderful ways. My relationship with running really started changing when we started trying to have our first baby. We tried for years with no success—lots of different fertility treatments. We finally moved onto IVF, and we did two rounds of IVF and that gave us Rory, who is our eldest, and she’s now two-and-a-half. And during that time, I spent a lot of time evaluating a lot of things about my lifestyle. My penchant for over-working, over-exercising, under-eating—all of those things. I think going through that experience really forced me to have this reckoning with myself about what my priorities were, and whether or not my lifestyle supported them. While we were going through IVF, I actually stopped running for a little while and was just doing a lot of walking and yoga and trying to be very gentle on myself and my body. (I will say, full disclosure: I have a lot of friends who have also gone through IVF and have done varying levels of exercise throughout, so this is not at all a medical claim.) For me, I just found that with this desire to be kinder and gentler to myself, in general, it was helpful to take a step back from running for a little bit and focus on going through the treatments and hopefully starting a family. Once we did conceive, for the first, you know, sixteen weeks or so, I was still on a lot of medication. Frankly, I was just really freaked out that something was going to go wrong. During those early days of my first pregnancy, I didn’t run. I was doing a lot of walking and yoga and barre classes. But it wasn’t until I was moved from our fertility specialist back to our OB and all the ultrasounds were looking good and I was becoming more and more confident in the pregnancy, that I started running again. And, it was such a source of joy to be able to rediscover it after so many months away. It was like a homecoming. It was funny to come back to it in a whole new, different body. Sometimes I would go out and run and feel fantastic. And other days, just walking up the stairs I would get so out of breath and I’d think, “I don’t think today’s a running day.” But it really did shift the relationship to a place where I was just much more in tune with my body and my breath. 

Since then, running really has served a different purpose in my life. Now, it’s much more about having time to myself, although I run with our jogging stroller a lot, so I’m not necessarily alone, but it’s still a nice mental escape for me. 

In between our girls, I trained for the Boston Marathon, which had been postponed because it was [scheduled to be held] right at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. And, so, the trajectory there was, like, have one baby, start training again … a month before the race it was postponed, and then something like two months later I was pregnant again with our second. … Then, after our second daughter was born, I started training for the Boston Marathon [held in October 2021]. And it was such an interesting full-circle moment for me to come back to the semi-competitive side of running, but in a way that was so much healthier and grounded. And feeling like I was bringing a new strength to the table. I went into the race in October with goals in mind, but goals that were much more calibrated for where I’m at now. And I think that, to me, that really just brought everything home—that I can still be involved in this sport, and I can still be competitive in this sport, but in a way that meets me where I am and where my body is in this moment. I came away from that race and was a good 25 minutes or a half an hour or so off my PR, but I named it a new PR, it was my PR-PK, my PR, post kids, which I was even more proud of. …

I saw a pelvic floor specialist after Harriet was born. And that specialist was not one that was on my radar after Rory was born, but now I don’t shut up about it. I tell every woman I’ve ever met. It doesn’t matter if you’re training for a marathon or getting back into your life. I found [my PT] to be such a valuable resource. I was kind of like, “Why did nobody tell me about this the first time?”She was so helpful to start getting my body back to a place that felt more like me, and through my work with her, I felt better supported in all aspects of my life; running was just kind of a bonus.

Your Lives Remembered project was a beautiful, impactful piece of journalism honoring the lives of Massachusetts people lost amid the pandemic.

Even though it’s intense, I love what I do so much and it’s something I’m so passionate about. Lives Remembered was a project that we worked on with the Berkeley School of Music and we were looking for a way to humanize the pandemic. After covering the pandemic here in Massachusetts and elsewhere for [more than] a year, we were looking for a way to humanize the story. I think we all were becoming a bit numb to the grim statistics and the incredible amount of loss. We wanted to try to figure out a way to connect with our audiences and to honor some of those who we had lost locally. We partnered up with the Berkeley College of Music and some students there who had been working on original compositions based on their own pandemic experiences. The thing that was particularly powerful about partnering with these students is that they themselves had experienced so much loss, too. These were kids who expected a college experience that was so different from the one they were having. We heard from some students who were feeling so isolated, or maybe they had moved to Boston from other parts of the country or the world, and now found themselves stuck in their dorm room or apartment as the city was in total lockdown—and so they were processing a lot of that kind of loss of innocence in real time and it really showed through their music. So we brought together the original compositions from the students and then some of the remembrances that we had put together with families who had lost loved ones throughout the pandemic. The end result was this multimedia project that brought together photo slideshows of some of the people we had lost with the original [music] compositions and profiles of different people and interviews with their families. I’m glad that you brought up this project. It’s one that I’m really proud of and it did something that was new, where it gave those who worked on it and those who engaged with the story a nice way to pause and reflect. And, you know, the stories are all amazing and then to have the music element to sit and process in your own way, I think, was really powerful.

What are your running goals in 2022? 

The biggest thing for me right now is prioritizing moving every day. After the marathon and going back to work full-time following maternity leave, I really jumped in [to work] feet first and picked up a lot of work really quickly (which is great and exciting!). But there was a stretch of a few months where I really was just working and parenting and there wasn’t a lot of time for exercise or social activity … I just really dove in. So one thing I’ve been trying to prioritize now is just moving every day. Some days that’s getting out for a 20-minute walk between meetings, doing a quick barre class, or going for a run before bed. It’s not always—in fact it’s rarely—the one-hour or ninety-minute run that I wish I could do. But I’m OK with that. I think, “If I moved today, it was a good day.” Because that takes so much daily commitment, I think that’s my biggest goal—to keep moving once a day every day, until I get to a place where there is a little more time or something shifts and I am able to take on something more formal. It’s a simple goal, but it’s a hard one!

Do you have a favorite running memory at this stage? What made it so sweet?

I have a few—one that’s more recent is running the Boston Marathon [last] fall. It was amazing. I was six months postpartum. (I will say, too, that I’ve been doing this a long time and I worked very closely with my medical team to prepare.) But it was really amazing. I did most of my training on maternity leave and so many of my non-runner friends were like, “Why would you do that?” And I was like, “Are you kidding me? It got me outside every day, it was a great time with the girls, it gave my day structure.”

Marathons are always hard. Coming back to my first race after two kids was very challenging—very humbling. But two things were really cool. One, I was still breastfeeding Harriet at the time and I remember getting off the bus with my handheld breast pump and pumping my milk as I was walking to the start, and another mom came over and gave me a huge hug and said, “You’re amazing! Have a great day!” It was such a nice way to connect. I remember feeling very powerful in that moment, like, “I’m going to make the milk, and then I’m going to run the race, and it’s going to be awesome!” That was really special. 

Two, it was a hard race. For the first time in my life, I had to stop and walk a few times. At the end, I was in pretty rough shape—I was still running but I was really tired and just ready for it to be over. I went to take the right turn onto Hereford Street and I saw my best friend and her husband and their three little kids up against the barricades. She has always been a source of major support for me. And if that wasn’t enough, I saw that she was pointing to the other side of the street, and there was my mom with my babies, right up against the barricades, too! Apparently, it was totally coincidental that they ended up across the street from each other. But it felt like an Ellen London cheer zone in that one very small section. Rory was up against the barricades with a cowbell in her hand—she still talks about it. It was just a really special moment for me … You know, I took [the race] on for myself, to do something that made me feel like me. It was really amazing that 26 miles later, I got to see my purpose right there in the flesh at the finish.