WASHINGTON – In 2007, Dimity McDowell was pregnant with her second child and needed a goal. She’d been sucked into postpartum depression with her first child and “didn’t want to go there again.”

So she asked her friend, Sarah Bowen Shea, to train with her for the Nike Women’s Marathon. The duo completed the race, wrote about their experience in “Runner’s World” magazine and decided to start a blog for mothers who run.

“We realized there was this huge, great community that hadn’t really been solidified yet,” McDowell says.

In the past five years, McDowell and Shea have done more than solidify a community of mother runners; they’ve established a brand — Another Mother Runner — published two books and fueled a movement of passionate women runners who come together to exercise and find comic relief in balancing parenthood with life.

“We really wanted to gather these women who run