Running

Why I Run, or, Liquor?!? I Barely Even Know Her!

/ tmcfar1 / Leave a comment

I used to be one of those annoying overachievers.

As a high school student, I was a four-sport letterman, a top honors student, and my graduating class’s valedictorian. One of the sports I lettered in was track, and my best distance was 3000 meters. And yes, youth was wasted on me, just like it is on all the other kids out there. Thirty-something seemed impossibly old to me at the time, to say nothing of forty.

The intervening years were not kind.

My biggest problem: an appetite for excess, primarily with alcohol. To wit:

OK, maybe not quite as bad as that but you get the idea.

The long and the short of it was that I found myself in my late thirties, depressed, overweight, in terrible shape, and drinking on almost a daily basis. The problematic thing about alcohol is that it’s awesome, at least for me. Alcohol can:

– Give that Milli Vanilli video a strange glow of profundity
– Render disco listenable
– Make COPS at 2am not only watchable but seem like an Ibsen play
– Make me laugh hysterically at cat memes for two hours straight

And so on.

So what does this have to do with the reasons I run? Well it’s what you probably think, but maybe not to the degree you think.

Because see, I still love booze. And I have no intention of giving it up. What I realized, however, is I need to give up spending my evenings with it every day. I would like to spout platitudes about how running changed my life, how it made me give up the bottle and fixed my depression, and I lived happily ever after, amen.

Nope.

I still battle depression, though I’m no longer overweight or out of shape. I still drink, though not to the degree I used to. What running does for me is it acts as a kind of buffer. When I run, I’m less depressed, and I’m less inclined to chug a bottle of wine and watch retro 80s videos alone in my basement until the wee hours. It gives me goals to work toward, and I know that my excesses will hamper those goals. Maybe there’s an element of endorphin related satisfaction there too, I don’t know.

So, that’s why I run. To save me from myself. A prosaic reason? Yeah, probably. But new agey stuff aside, it makes me feel better. And as long as it does I intend to keep doing it.

Me and the Great Lakes Marathon Series, or, Does This Garmin Make Me Look Quixotic?

/ tmcfar1 / Leave a comment

I don’t remember what finally made me decide I wanted to run a marathon.

Oh, there were probably many factors involved, most of which would count as the usual suspects I’m sure; being able to call myself a marathoner at parties and sound like a badass, big honkin bling, the fact that a track rival from high school was now a Marathon Maniacs member and was running the things like it was some sort of uncontrollable bodily function, the opportunity to agonize one’s body in exotic places, and all that. I vacillated over whether to even try for some time, but as I slowly got back in shape from years of self-inflicted lethargic purgatory it seemed to me that to make the attempt at least was now falling into the outer provinces of the realm of possibility.

So began the internet searches for training plans and wading through the titanic amount of information and opinions available out there. I was never under any misapprehension that it would be as simple as putting one foot in front of the other, but just getting some sort of cohesive plan figured out proved to be daunting. However, eventually I got to the point where I felt like I could at least move forward.

I do remember when I decided it would be cool to run the Great Lakes Marathon Series.

I found out about the series through the Rite Aid Cleveland Marathon website when I was scouting it for possible entry. For the uninitiated, the GLMS is a series of 25 marathons taking place along the shores of the Great Lakes. The series’ webpage claims it is for “runners who are interested in experiencing a variety of marathons along the Great Lakes, while at the same time making a positive impact on the ecosystem of the Great Lakes Basin.”

Super. Me, I just happened to note that 15 of the 25 marathons were within 4 hours drive of my house, which appealed to both my sense of activeness and laziness simultaneously. I considered this a win-win.

Here’s the thing, though. I still haven’t run a single marathon yet. I’ve always had a tendency to get so far ahead of myself I’d need a piggyback from Usain Bolt to catch up. My plans tend to smack of grandiosity, and though sometimes they come to fruition, they definitely often end up with me forgetting I ever made them and wandering off to eat a sandwich. I have no idea which will happen here. But dammit, I’m gonna give it the old college try. I do have some reasons to stick with it which will probably become clear. And I’m gonna blog about it because I enjoy writing, it’ll give me a creative outlet which I probably need, and, well, because I’m self-indulgent. And being self-indulgent is what the internet is for, right?