Does this sound like the opening line of a bad stand-up bit? Don’t worry, my resolution isn’t to try stand-up for the first time. I know I’m funny, but I suspect even my mother would be surprised to hear that I don’t really like speaking or performing in front of people. Unless it’s 11 pm in a dive bar that’s at least a safe 30+ miles from my home, and you hand me a microphone and tell me they have Elton John’s entire musical works available for karaoke.
Resolutions are funny because it’s a social practice in our culture to make them and then hilariously fail at them. The internet is full of a meme for every resolution occasion, most of them related to how we swore this was the year we were gonna eat better, get skinny or get fit, or quit our terrible jobs.
I don’t eat especially well and I’m not particularly skinny or fit (and I still love my jobs), so none of those have worked for me up to this point.
Last year, a friend who Shall Not be Named and I were enjoying a little time-honored millennial fun, which is to say that we were deep-dive stalking one of her boyfriend’s exes on the internet. This girl apparently had run, hiked, and biked a total of 1,000 miles in the year 2018. In true supportive friend fashion, I laughed and suggested that it wasn’t hard and I could probably do it. Then I did the math and realized I probably couldn’t, unless I counted every single bicycle ride to the grocery store or the bar, (which I’m not sure should qualify as exercise anyway, considering the crimes against my health that are regularly committed at both of those places). Instead, I decided it would be possible to track my running for an entire year, and that I was likely to be able to achieve 500 miles pretty easily in the next 365 days.
>Alexa, play the hit 1990’s tune by The Proclaimers<
It didn’t start out promising. In February I only managed 20.05 miles, not even one per day, largely because I had ended things with a guy I was seeing about halfway through the month, and while I managed to hold my shit together for the first part of the week (due to work), Wednesday through Saturday was pretty much a blur of drinking too much and staying up way, way too late to walk home in the snow, stumbling and singing Whitney Houston songs with my sweet neighbor (with whom spending time always makes my heart and my mind feel good, but not so much my head and my stomach the next morning).
I would make it all back in March and April when I started training with a couple of friends for a half marathon, to be run in May. I picked up the pace and ran 50+ miles in March, along with getting back together with the former guy, who started off the spring season by making a very good show of being more supportive of my interests and athletic pursuits. In April, my half-marathon partner and I ran every single one of our training-program prescribed 72+ miles, including ten that I found myself needing to run in Maine while visiting for a friend’s wedding. It was cold and a little icy, but my sister completed every step of it with me, despite not having run that many miles in at least a year.
May started off with the aforementioned 13.1.
As happens after training for a milestone, May fell off a bit. Due to no required training and the start of my seasonal landscaping job, I managed 30.5 for the rest of the month after the half marathon. What can I say, it’s hard to get up in the morning and run in the dark, just to go to work and carry a 10-15 pound weed eater around for most of the day. It was at about this point that I stopped thinking about the 500 miles and decided I would simply tally up all my miles, every week, for the rest of the year, and see how impressive the number might be. I even picked my pace up again in June, until the last week of the month, when I talked myself into finally joining a CrossFit gym.
Have you ever done CrossFit? Specifically, have you ever STARTED CrossFit from a non-diverse exercise regimen of pushing lawnmowers and moderately paced cardio? I was wrecked. Even the beginner classes had me in pain for days. At my second tutorial class, I was asked to do 4 burpees and 10 squats and my legs were sore for the week after. July and August: attended CrossFit nine times each month. Only ran 60-something miles between the two. My July weekends, on my wall calendar on which I had been keeping track, were glaring, blank holes. Who has the motivation to get up and go to CrossFit, or get up and go for a run, when the sun is out, your boyfriend is in bed with an (inevitable) hangover, and there is fishing to be done?
Due to many other circumstances (see past blog post) as well as all those “inevitable” hangovers, I found myself delightfully, happily single by Labor Day, after which I exercised for a 2019-record nine days in a row. Still sticking with the CrossFit, my runs were shorter and shorter because my legs still barely worked the day after overhead squats, burpees, wall balls and deadlifts. I averaged less than ten a week. I went on a great (and rather lengthy) happy hour first date mid-month that caused me to cancel my planned runs for two days after, and then immediately took an airplane to Chicago for a solo-trip I had booked basically the very moment I became single. I ran five beautiful miles there, three of them at my fastest speed of the year. The thought that I could maybe finish the year with 500+ began to creep back into my consciousness.
Except I started dating someone new. The “let’s just spend time together and see what happens” kind of relationship. The no-expectations, feels-good-to-be-happy dating that I fully believe is the main reason people abandon their exercise regimens and healthy eating plans. That sweet, fun, hilarious period of time in which there is nothing to do except find out all the delightful aspects of the other’s personality - and laugh. I laughed a lot in October, partially due to the fact that he is hilarious, and the other part due to all the bottles of red wine and giggly puffs of weed we were consuming. October: 26.75 miles, my lowest number since February. Running miles were down, happy feelings were up. I’m pretty sure that all the exercise wisdom in the world says that running makes you happy. But have those people ever tried hanging out with a funny guy with a cute dog and raft-guide arm muscles?
Beginning November with the realization that I had less then 100 miles left to reach the goal was an alarming thought. Yes, it was possible. Was it significantly more miles than I had been running since April? Also yes. I ran 17 miles in one week. I ran while I was on a long weekend in Arizona. I committed and the countdown started. I kept a running mental tally as well as my wall calendar updated, and I marched into December knowing I needed to run 16 miles a week to finish. It’s fine, I’m fine, this is fine.
And I was cranking right along, too, running just shy of the required numbers (always a procrastinator), when I went back and added up all my months to this point, only to discover I had done the math wrong (if you knew me as a high school student, this shouldn’t shock any of you) and had significantly less miles left than I had thought. And a good thing, too, since I started coughing, sneezing, and running a fever five days before Christmas with nearly seven miles left to run.
This morning, New Year’s Eve, I woke up, texted my Glenwood Rec Center treadmill running partner, Lizz, and we headed to the gym to finish our miles. She was working towards 100 miles for the year, and I had 2.45 remaining. When I pulled into the parking lot, it was dark. Totally dark. Dark like a gym that is closed, because it was. It was also 1 whole degree outside, so running on the frozen sidewalks was completely out of the question. Undeterred, we paid the daily drop-in fee at a gym down the road and finished our miles before the sun came up.
In my last blog post, I wrote about some things that went wrong this year. I want to say that undertaking this much running changed me, that it gave me clarity, or was the cause of some brilliant, earth-shattering revelation. But honestly, the year as 500 miles of running just proved that it wasn’t all bad. Despite life taking me on an emotional and complicated rollercoaster in 2019, I managed to keep running consistently. I got out of bed and prioritized my health (most of the time), and used the arbitrary goal of proving that I am almost as athletic as my friend’s boyfriend’s ex (or just about any other average person) to keep myself grounded. I put one foot in front of the other for 365 days. I kept a resolution.
Take that, internet meme culture.
This is awesome.. way to go!
ReplyDelete-john reuter
ReplyDelete