When I look at the photo, my eyes have a hard time knowing where to focus — on the two young, fit women in gym shorts and matching tank tops wearing proud expressions? The newly placed medals around their necks? The post-race treat of a giant, powdered sugar-laden funnel cake on the plate between them?

For 20 years, that image of me and my twin sister Lynne Streeter Childress, just past the marathon finish line for the Baltimore Running Festival, has been something of a touchstone. I have used it as a visual ruler for how fast I’m supposed to run, how my body’s supposed to look.

That, of course, is complete and utter foolishness.

“When you’re in your 40s or 50s, you wanna lose weight and you look at pictures of yourself, but you realize you’re chasing the youth,” Lynne said Sunday, the day after we marked the 20th anniversary of those 26.2 miles by walking the 10k (or 6.2-mile route) at the same event.

Sure, it was roughly a quarter of the distance at a much slower pace. But we’re just as proud of it — and in some ways, prouder. We are 54 now, not 34. We are moms. There is padding where there wasn’t before, and we have a whole regimen of pain relief, digestive aids and stretching that the faster, thinner ladies in those photos used to ignore.

“But we did that,” my sister said. Darn tooting.

Neither Lynne nor I were ever particularly fast, and even at our fittest, we did not have what was thought of at the time as typical lithe, lean runners’ bodies. “We were never going to win anything,” Lynne said, at least not in rankings. What we did accomplish was pushing ourselves to an adrenaline-fueled high, propelled by our own lungs and strong legs. And we looked good.

Lynne had already run the Marine Corps Marathon in 1998, but I had not yet completed my first full when we signed up to run the Baltimore Marathon together in 2005. The training was hard and we actually tried to downgrade to the half-marathon but found it was full, so we groaned and went back to training for the whole shebang.

What you don’t see in those happy carb-eating faces at the finish line are the previous grueling six hours. “Remember we were running 10-minute miles at the beginning and these ladies told us, ‘I think you need to slow down,’ and we were like, ‘Whatever?’” Lynne reminded me. We were completely gassed after three miles and had to walk.

Saturday’s race felt better not only because it was shorter and slower, but because it was intentional. Being older and wiser does that to you. I trained to run it but was slowed by injuries and a second bout of COVID in June that affected my lungs. But once Lynne was in, I knew I could do it. And my brave sister, who had minor surgery just a week before the race, sucked it up and went for it. “I just wanted to finish.”

And finish we did — even faster than the last time we walked a 10K in 2019 in Annapolis.

We were inspired by other slow and steady runners and walkers, as well as this gorgeous, supportive, loud city of ours, from the chipper sign-waving “No Kings” protestors, to the families banging cowbells in their pajamas, or the lady who was waiting for her bus who yelled, “You got this!” Even the families stuck in traffic along Druid Park Drive cheered us on.

We were struck emotionally as we walked, moving past familiar places like our late father’s old office, the McDonald’s on North Avenue, or the Baltimore City Public Schools headquarters where I interned in high school. Mostly, we were moved by the people. “There’s something so kind about Baltimore,” Lynne said. “I grew up there, so I don’t see it the way a lot of people see it.”

And some things remain gloriously the same. In 2005, a group of Remington residents within a few miles of the finish line helped motivate us to the end, bumping “Eye Of The Tiger” from a boom box with one of them in an actual tiger costume. The 10K doesn’t go past them, but I asked around and they are still out there two decades later. Baltimore’s a trip.

Finishing this race was, in a way, self-care. It’s not just the physical changes with the extra weight, the creaks and menopause, Lynne’s arthritic knee and her “having had a human go through my body.” It’s the difference between being single, childless 34-year-olds at a time of cheap flights, disposable income and the ability to schedule around your own activities instead of youth soccer and sleepovers. We had to fight harder to carve the time to do this now.

Our 20th anniversary photos don’t show hot young women with a plate full of fried dough, but appreciative older chicks laughing with their cups of Gatorade and a runner’s buzz. We don’t have to do what we did in 2005. We did what we could do now, which is more than most people our age can.

“It’s a different body,” Lynne said, and we’re so proud of them. “In that picture Saturday, we look so happy. We looked happy in the first one, too. It all seems like an accomplishment.”