Run For It

I was drinking a Chimay Red and smoking a bright pink Dunhill cigarette on the patio of AZ88, my favorite bar in Scottsdale, when I decided to run my first race. It was a few months after my father had died. I was living in Pasadena, but I had been making frequent trips back to the Phoenix area to see my brother and “help” my mother.

I would end up running the race with my friend Mad Scientist Matt**. Mad Scientist Matt was very kind during the months immediately following my father’s death: I would come to town, deal with my mother as long as I could stand, and then I would want to go out for a beer. Mad Scientist Matt, who is now a PhD with his own successful brewery, would pick a new up and coming brewery/bar in the Phoenix area and meet me there to teach me about beer. I was both touched and thankful for the time he took to hang out with me during those months, as any pleasant experience during those days was a much needed reprieve from the sea of misery I was navigating through.

I don’t know how the subject of the Buffalo Half Marathon came up that night at AZ88. I had an uncle who ran the full-marathon track race on an annual basis, but he had never encouraged me to run it. I had been running on and off since high school, but never quickly. I considered going for a jog of any considerable length (more than one mile) an accomplishment, even if I jogged slowly.

When I had moved to Pasadena in 2002, I had started going for runs around the neighborhood to see all of the beautiful Craftsman houses in the area. Unlike most of the places in Arizona I had lived, our neighborhood Pasadena was built with miles of sidewalks to run down. I could head in almost any direction and kill an hour or two exploring neighborhoods I had never seen before.

Mad Scientist Matt was also running regularly at the time. Maybe this is how talking about the Buffalo Half Marathon over beers morphed into, “We should run in the Buffalo Half Marathon”. I think it was January or February when we had this discussion–it is always harder to remember what time of year it was during any particular memory taking place on a patio in Arizona because year round the weather predisposes one to sitting on a patio–and the race was always at the end of May. Although I was certainly not running any distance close to the 13.1 required to complete a half-marathon, I was doing at least a couple miles at a time whenever I hit the sidewalks in Pasadena. Finishing the half marathon seemed plausible.

In the wake of losing my father, I was struggling to set any goals for myself, which made setting this time sensitive goal seem like a good idea. It was just going to require literally putting one foot in front of the other, which is what I was concentrating on doing metaphorically every day.

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“There is a reason person who ran the first ever marathon DIED,” my mother used to say whenever someone brought up running long distances. Swimming, with weight training workouts on days not spent in the pool, was my parents’ prescription for physical fitness during my childhood. My father was always willing to vary his workouts more than my mother was, especially if it meant interesting me in being physically active. He would take me to play tennis on public courts, hiking in the desert, or invite me to run along the canals with him and our standard poodles Beau and Rex.

While not being competitive has certainly influenced my lack of commitment to sport, my inability to focus for a sustained period of time on something I do not find intellectually engaging has also contributed to the problem. When my parents used to force me to be on YMCA swim teams, it was not the physical exertion I remember bothering me, but the monotony of swimming back and forth in the same lane, lap after lap, hour after hour. I didn’t care if I beat the other kids. It seemed like it was solely an exercise in counting and breathing. While I am thankful each day I can both count and breathe, this gratitude wasn’t enough to keep me in the pool.

Running and lifting weights initially appealed to me because I could listen to my Walkman while I did them. As technology progressed, from portable tape player to portable CD player to portable MP3 player, the length of time I could listen to music without having to press repeat grew, which grew the length of time I could continue working out with reduced boredom.

Music is critical to me when I run. I have read countless articles about the meditative quality of running longer distances. While I think both exercise and meditation can be good for you, the thought of combining them makes me want to bypass both and take a nap. Also, most people are lucky if they can do one or the other: talking about your ability to do both simultaneously just reeks of overachievement.

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Looking back on it, my training plan for the Buffalo Half Marathon was the most disciplined approach I had taken to achieving anything in my life up until that point, with the exception of when I applied to English PhD programs. The next time I would make a life plan as coherent as training for the half marathon would be nearly nearly ten years later when I made the plan get to into an MBA program and earn my CPA license.

But for the rest of my life up until then, I was driven by emotion, ideas, or expectations. My parents expected I would go to college. I picked the University of Arizona because I fell in love with Tucson and my ranking in my senior class made it all but guaranteed I would be accepted. I was an English major and political science minor because I enjoyed learning about those things. I moved to Los Angeles because of the movie LA Story and because I was scared of staying in Arizona. I started working in coffee because I became enamored with baristas when I sat in coffee houses to study during my time at the U of A.

Part of my inability to plan then was because I could not see a future for myself. Not in the sense that I thought I was incapable of accomplishing things or that I had no where to go. As I watched friends and acquaintances march through their twenties with a list of goals (go to grad school, get a good job, get married, have/adopt kids), I looked into my future day after day and saw a blank space, an empty sheet of white paper. I was treading water, but didn’t know if I was swimming in a pond, a swimming pool, or an ocean. I couldn’t even bare to try and touch the bottom with one tentative toe.

My performance at the Buffalo Half Marathon was a success only in that I finished. Mad Scientist Matt, Little Matt**, and I watched Big Fish the night before the race. While I would still recommend the movie to anyone today, an emotional story about a son remembering his story-telling father in the aftermath of said father’s death was the mental equivalent of drinking a bottle of whiskey to get prepared to run the night before the race. I went to bed after crying through the movie, only to be woken up by my mother every hour to two when I was trying to sleep. She was drunk and mad about something/nothing: she was waking me up to berate me about whatever it was. She would rail and I would lay there listening until I could doze off. (She had been doing this to me for several years, so I was well practiced at sound sleeping in these conditions.) It would take her a while to realize I had fallen back asleep, which is when she would wake me up again so she could keep talking at me about it.

I remember dragging my ass to the starting line with Mad Scientist Matt the next morning, portable CD player in hand. Although I was trying to feign confidence, I suddenly wasn’t sure my months of training were going to amount to walking across the finish line, let alone jogging across it. But I did finish. When I returned home to Pasadena, I kept going for jogs, but immediately trashed my running training plan. For all the planning and hard work I had put into finishing the half marathon, I felt all the worse for wear and devoid of any desire to ever race again.

But just as the passage of time has helped me heal and grow past the trauma of my father’s passing, it has helped me heal and grow past the trauma of being a terrible half marathon runner. One of my colleagues at work frequently participates in biathalons and similar races in order to keep himself in shape. We have talked work out routines a number of times (mine these days is built around Daily Burn, which has helped transform my fitness level by helping me work out effectively despite the huge amount of travel I do for work). About a month ago, my colleague asked if I would consider running the Running with Shears 5K with him: it is strategically located between Columbus and his hometown of Chicago. It would be a fun excuse to bring our spouses out for a weekend away and support a good cause. The upside of having started my race career with a half marathon is a that 5K immediately seemed reasonable and achievable in comparison. I said yes.

Fifteen years later as I draw up a new race training plan, I realize how much easier accomplishing anything is since I found my way forward and transformed the rest of my life. I have a supportive and loving husband, an engaging career, the opportunity to write in my spare time, and I can sleep through the night without fear.

Running 3.1 miles? No problem.

**Note: I met several Matts in my late teens/early twenties and assigned them nicknames to make differentiating them in conversation easier.