Born to run > All-terrain strollers give parents freedom to exercise outdoors with their children

Tired of longingly watching joggers pass you by? Finding it hard to fit a guilt-free exercise routine around your family and job? Well, supermoms and powerdads, cancel the babysitter and get out your running shoes. The Baby Jogger is the answer to your fitness dreams.

Part tricycle, part stroller, the Baby Jogger allows parents to spend time with their children and exercise at the same time. For some, that has changed the entire experience of parenting.

“The key for me is to have some freedom and independence to be outdoors and the Baby Jogger gives me that,” says Catherine Johnson, who lives in Orono and works part-time as an oncology social worker.

Since the birth of her daughter Kelsey last fall, Johnson has used the Baby Jogger regularly for runs and walks with her child. Like many Baby-Jogger owners, Johnson doesn’t own a traditional stroller. The Baby Jogger, which is collapsable, weighs 21 pounds, and can hold up to 50 pounds, serves as a handy and durable pram. Plus the handle is higher than on most strollers, so the pusher stays in an upright position, and although some complain that the jarring of the shoulders can be uncomfortable during a long run, others hail the Baby Jogger for offering the additional upper-body workout.

And if the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of child care couldn’t stop a devoted exerciser, neither could a Maine winter. For Johnson, it meant taking Kelsey and the Baby Jogger to the University of Maine fieldhouse.

For Boston Marathon runner Giles Norton and his daughter Georgina, it meant wearing a few extra layers of winter togs.

While training in Orono, Norton bundled the infant in two baby sleeping bags and placed her on a lambs-wool blanket in the sling seat of the Baby Jogger. Then father and child took a 10-mile outing despite the ice, wind, and snow of sub-freezing temperatures. Every 15 minutes, Norton stopped and checked Georgina by peeking through a tiny air hole in the wrappings.

“The best thing about it,” says Norton, who finished second for Maine in the Boston race, “is that a kid’s cry is much quieter outdoors, and not only do the cries not drive you crazy, the kid just goes to sleep.”

Flashing a broad smile and raising his eyebrows, Norton adds: “It’s good for brownie points, too.” He demonstrated by calling out sweetly: “I’m taking the baby for a run, dear.” And then, the rascally smile again.

“The convenience works both ways,” says Christine Fisher, Georgina’s mother. “It relieves me from Georgina, and Giles likes the company. A lot of people take the dog. Giles takes Georgina.”

The touring tyke was also in tote — this time with her mother — for the Turkey Trot road race last November.

Scott Samuelson, husband of gold-medalist runner Joan Benoit, uses the Baby Jogger to roller blade with his 4-year-old daughter Abagail and 2-year-old son Anders. “They treat it as a Disney World ride,” says Samuelson, who runs a small manufacturing business in Brunswick.

Young Abagail might not be so quick to agree. Once, while being taxied by her father, she ended up in a drainage ditch. The child landed safely, but scowled at her father and snorted, “Daddy, don’t do that again.”

“The trick,” explains her father, who admits the girl should have been wearing the attached seatbelt, “is to go out at nap time, and they’ll fall asleep.”

Local sporting-goods stores are slow to stock large supplies of Baby Joggers, made by Racing Strollers, Inc., in Yakima, Wash. But Albert Minutolo, who has been selling the all-terrain stroller for three years at the Bar Harbor Bicycle Shop, keeps a stock of several styles (ranging in price from $285 to $390) and also offers accessories, such as canopies and baskets.

Minutolo knows more than just the facts about the machine. He and his wife, Audrey, have 2-year-old twin daughters, and swear by the Twinner, a two-child version of the Baby Jogger. It’s easy to push, rides smoothly, and lasts longer than the more conventional umbrella stroller, they say.

Though Audrey is not a runner, she takes the girls on walks for several hours each morning. The sturdy build of the cart, which has 16-inch bicycle wheels and can hold up to 75 pounds, makes it easier for her to go on rocky roadways, such as the carriage trails in Acadia National Park. She refers to the perambulator with such endearments as “my little car,” “a real blessing,” and “the girls’ home away from home.”

But the proof is in the pushing: “It has given me a whole life I wouldn’t have with kids,” says Audrey.