I'll be honest: I hated running for the first 25 years of my life. Running was something to be endured, something that—at its very best—only “built character,” induced vomiting, and seemed to be the price of admission for a starting slot on sports teams. From middle school through high school—over ten separate school and club sports seasons—I never once completed a run of two miles or more without (a) stopping; (b) throwing up; and (c) walking until I felt human again.
In high school our conditioning runs were of the out-and-back variety; they typically wove through the neighborhood for a mile or so, then headed up the Blue Ridge Parkway to whichever mile marker most closely corresponded to our coaches’ then-current Sadism Index ™. With the help of America’s Running Routes, I now learn that our six-mile variant climbed almost 1000 feet before the turnaround. But when I say “our,” I really mean “their.” For all I know, there were circus acrobats, a brass band, and an all-you-can-eat buffet waiting at the turnarounds; I never once saw any of them. Even the four-mile run—just a single 400-foot, one-mile climb up the Parkway—was beyond my capabilities. It became something of a joke: my friends told me they’d pick me up on their way back down, provided I was finished being sick.
Let’s fast-forward a bit. We’ll skim through college, where I got my exercise primarily by playing basketball and lifting weights. We’ll sneak a peak at law school, where I discovered that even the Stairmaster™ and the rowing machine were better than putting one foot in front of the other.
When I arrived at the law firm in September of 199_, pretty much the first thing I noticed was C____. I’d met her the previous summer, but she had been involved in a serious relationship at the time, and I quickly realized that I needed to stay as far away from her as possible. After sharing an elevator on the first day of work, I decided it was time to do a little research. By 6:00 P.M. that same day, I’d figured out that there was no one else in the picture. The coast was clear for me to screw this one up like so many before!
We began hanging out together in large groups (and by “hanging out together,” I mean occupying opposite sides of the same 500 square feet or so of space at the usual firm haunts). A couple of weeks after I started work, C invited me to a celebratory birthday lunch for her legal assistant J___. We went to the best Chicken Fried Steak Place (yes, it is a proper noun) in downtown Houston, which seemed a bit odd, given how fit and food-conscious I knew J to be.
When I asked him about the choice, he told me that he’d lost sixty pounds, and that this was the first time in over a year he’d felt he could indulge in an old favorite without falling back into old habits. When I asked him how he’d done it, J told me it had just been diet and exercise, and that he really owed his success to taking up running.
This of course led me into my well-rehearsed diatribe on running and how They Couldn’t Make Me Do It Ever Again. Imagine George H.W. Bush and broccoli, but with ten times more vehemence. Now you’re getting close to just how emphatically I insisted that I would never run again unless someone was chasing me with a knife.
Later that same Friday night, a bunch of us went out to a bar. C was there, as was J. Around 9:30 or so, C announced to the world that she was leaving. I recall making a rather pathetic attempt to get her to stay, but she said she couldn’t, because she was training for the Houston Marathon and had to run three three-mile loops around Memorial Park the next morning.
Maybe it was the combination of alcohol and love. Maybe I had a deathwish. Whatever the explanation, the next words that popped out of my mouth were, “Cool. I’d love to go with you.” At this point, my life turned into a stereotypical laugh-tracked sitcom. J was standing just a few feet away, and he immediately piped up with, “But Paul, you told me you were never going to MNMMMPH” as I stomped on his toe to shut him up. Sometime in the next three seconds or so, partial sanity returned, and I told C “I don’t think I could do anywhere close to nine miles, but I could probably make one loop with you.” C told me to meet her at 8:00 at the park.
The careful reader will recall that my distance running had historically followed a particular pattern: stop, throw up, walk. Unfortunately, that fateful first Saturday run was no exception. I made it a mile-and-a-half at C’s 8:15 pace, then renewed my old traditions.
I tried to make C leave me and finish her run. I also tried to disappear, to kill myself by sheer force of will alone, and to be the first homo sapiens ever whose visible embarrassment went right past “red” into infrared. But I couldn’t manage any of it; and she and I walked the most humbling mile-and-a-half of my life back to the cars.
This could not stand.
But that’s a story for another time.
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