Running Man

I've had this inexplicable urge to run lately. To just sprint somewhere. Not jog, but RUN. I don't know where it came from. I was standing in my bathroom the other night and I'd just finished brushing my teeth, when for some reason, this strong desire to start running overcame me. It was late, about 11 p.m., too late to go outside and test my feeling, so I started jogging in place, right there in my bathroom. If you'd seen me, you would've thought I was crazy, doing the high step by myself in my bathroom at that hour, but there I was, going with the moment, running to stand still. After a few minutes, I stopped and just stood there, feeling my heart race and smiling stupidly at myself.

I thought the urge would pass, that I'd had a temporary bout of insanity, borne of boredom or too much solitude, but it didn't go away. At the gym a couple of days later, I found myself on a treadmill with Cinderella, Ratt and AC/DC blaring in my ears, and BAM! I took what was normally a half-assed, can't-wait-until-it's-over ritual of misery and pain and kicked it up a notch. I hit the incline three times on that sucker, cranked the speed up to 6.5, and ran faster than I'd ever gone on a treadmill before. I was Carl Lewis. I was Ben Johnson on steroids. I was flying. My feet barely touched the rubber mat, which swirled around and around under me, in sync with each step.

For two miles, I felt no pain. And when it was over, 25 minutes later, I was panting like an overexerted pug and every inch of me was drenched with sweat. My gray t-shirt looked like a Rorschach painting. I was exhausted, but it was the good kind of tired, the kind that's wired with endorphins and electrifies your skin. This wasn't the feeling I was used to. In recent years, after a good run, I've felt nauseous and in no hurry to do it again. All that wind-sucking and ab-wrenching, who needs it? Truth is, I've gotten soft in my old age. Too used to instant gratification, relaxing and sleeping in. When it comes time to work out, it's far easier to just lift weights and do other things. Running's hard. It hurts. It's a war, not just against the treadmill or the road, but against yourself. Your own mind. How long can I go? Can I beat my prior time? I don't feel good today, I want to stop now. Please, let's stop. Don't be such a pussy, keep going you whiner, it'll be over soon!

Running wasn't always this way. This hard. As a child I ran all the time. We all did. We ran upstairs, we ran downstairs. We ran in our yards, playing Kick the Can, or Ghost in the Graveyard, or whiffle ball. We ran from our mothers wielding bare hands, wooden spoons, or belts (!) We ran down the street until we learned how to ride bikes, then we ran a little less. Running was freedom. The wind in our face, the rustle of sound in our ears, our shaking vision as our feet pounded the earth below us. We ran until we hit something or fell down. And then we laughed about it, got up, and ran some more.

Back in high school, I ran cross-country and track. I trained almost every day of the year and typically ran a minimum of three miles a day. Rain or shine, winter or spring, I'd hit the pavement or track, alone or with my teammates and we'd RUN. We didn't have iPods or shuffles or Zunes to keep us company back then. To make the time pass, we'd talk to each other along the way, push each other to finish what we started. Other times we'd take along our Sony Walkmans, those oversized hunks of plastic that played cassette tapes or FM radio, and we'd listen to them on headphones, the old fashioned kind with the foam ear pieces. Back then, running was second nature to me. If I didn't do it, I felt weird, like my body was congealing on me, growing fatter as I did my homework or watched the Dukes of Hazzard. I was in the best shape of my life.

My senior year, I was named co-captain of my spring track team. There were three of us. We had a big team, so the coaches chose one captain for the long distance runners (me), one for the sprinters, and one for the field athletes. I was quite honored, to say the least. It was the first time in my life that I'd been captain of anything. I was granted the honor based on a great winter track season I'd had, where I'd won a race, attended all the practices, and was awarded the "Unsung Hero" trophy at our team dinner, a marble and silver beauty that's currently buried in a wooden box somewhere in my closet, along with a third place plaque from a karate tournament when I was ten and various and sundry other achievement certificates, plaques, and pins.

My event was the 2800 meter race, a/k/a The Two-Mile. The 2800 was 10 times around a 400 meter track, the longest running event of them all. Because it was so long, it was also the last race of the day, and for both reasons, few people liked to run it. It wasn't easy staying sharp for hours while you waited for your race. When everyone else was done and ready to party, we were just pulling off our sweats and getting ready for our race. And because it was so long, the Two-Mile was not only boring as hell, it beat you down psychologically. It was not for the faint-hearted.

First, there was the starting line, where I'd stand, heart racing, waiting for the gun to go off, knowing that I had a long, hard two miles ahead of me. Then BANG! we'd be off, and instead of a dead sprint, like you'd see in the shorter races, we'd break into a fast jog, so as not to burn ourselves out too quickly. It was slow enough to give one hope, but fast enough to exhaust me by the halfway point, mile one, where the pace would really pick up. With any luck, I'd find myself in the middle of the pack, trying to figure out how much I had that day, trying to decide if I had enough cojones to burn a faster pace, or whether I needed to conserve until later. It wasn't an exact science. More than once I blew a tire trying to catch the leaders when I didn't have the stomach for it, and I'd end the race with bile tickling the back of my throat. I still have a picture my father took of me once after I'd just finished a race. My face is flushed, I'm sweaty as hell, my hair is sprouting around my face like palm tree fronds, and my hands are outstretched, pleading, as if to say "Please take this fucking picture now so I can fall over and pass out!" Other times I finished with far too much kick, and I'd be mad at myself for holding in too much instead of leaving it on the track. It was hard to get it exactly right.

Our running wasn't just limited to school sports. My friends and I entered local road races -- The Village Green Run, The Market Square Day Race, The Winner's Circle Race -- to stay sharp and be a part of the local running community. I remember one time, one of our "creative" cross country coaches had us run in the fucking water in Hampton Beach. "It's good resistance for your legs," he said. It didn't faze us then, but to think of it now, he must have been crazy. That water had to be 60 degrees, at best. Still, it was fun to be a part of a running community like that. We compared running shoes, commiserated over the best practice routes, and discussed the best gear to wear outside in the rain or during the winter time. We supported each other and got in great shape in the process. In fact, I'm proud to say that one time, when the wind was blowing just right, and I'd eaten my Wheaties that morning, I ran a 1600 meter, the equivalent of a mile, in just under 5 minutes: 4 minutes, 54 seconds, to be exact. It was my best time ever. I miss that camaraderie and the friendly competition that went with it.

Of course, like anything else in life, my brief running career was marred by a couple of unfortunate incidents, which I shall now recount. Before one cross-country race in Concord, NH (cross country is 3.1 miles through a marked course, usually over fields and through the woods), I was running extremely late for the team bus. In my rush to get dressed, I put my running shorts on inside out, so the elastic band on my shorts was holding high and tight on the outside, with all the extra nylon material flopping out from the inside. I looked like a European greaser stuffing a Speedo. I didn't notice though and I even ran the race that way. At the finish line, my teammate Dennis caught my faux pas right away and burst out laughing. He pointed to my crotch and said, loud enough for everyone to hear (including all the women on the team): "Did you run the RACE like that?? AHAHAHAHA!!!" What could I do? It was too late to change, so I sheepishly pulled my jogging pants over my increasingly uncomfortable Euro-shorts, clambered on the team bus, and found myself a dark corner in which to cringe.

Worse than this, however, was how I lost my track captainship, all for a woman and the prospect of sex. Sounds sordid, doesn't it?

Here's the backstory. I was a senior in high school and a few weeks from my graduation. Our track season was coming to an end; there was only one meet left. As a good and loyal co-captain, I'd attended every single practice and meet that year, including several that certain teammates of mine had blown off. My attendance record was spotless. The last meet of the year, however, posed a real problem for me. Due to some unfortunate scheduling months before, my high school had arranged for our senior prom to take place the Friday night before our final track meet. In order to make the bus the next morning, I would have had to get to my high school by 8:00 a.m. This was troubling, for several reasons. First, I was not then, and am not now, an early riser. Getting up early after a late night out has always been hard for me. Second, I didn't want to go to my senior prom with a track meet and an early rise the next morning hanging over my head. I didn't want to worry about running, competition, alarm clocks, or any of that horseshit. I'd studied my ass off for four years, run hard all year long, dedicated myself to school and sports, and by May 1986, I was over it. I felt like Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate: "It's MY time now!" Besides, what was one lousy track meet in the face of my senior prom, with all the awesome memories it portended?

Third, and most importantly, at the time I was still a virgin, and as one might imagine, like every red-blooded American male under the age of 18, I was eager to remove the Scarlet V from my chest at the earliest opportunity. So. Very. Eager. I was going to the prom with my girlfriend, a fellow member of my track team no less, and I'd convinced myself that on Saturday, the morning of the meet, I'd be lying somewhere comfortable, in bliss, with a very large smile plastered on my non-virgin face. Indeed, my friends and I had big plans for that night: first the prom of course, with the eating and the dancing, etc., followed by a limo with the all the lubricant wine coolers we could drink. The piece de resistance? The coital nail in my virgin coffin? A visit to The Tub Shop in Portsmouth, for some sweet late night lovin'. She'd have to be impressed by the Tub Shop. I did the math, weighed my options, and decided I wasn't going to half ass my senior prom for a track meet that didn't mean anything. We weren't making the play-offs or anything like that, regardless of how we performed at the meet, so what was the point?

Now, I wasn't just going to pretend I was sick and not show up like some of my teammates planned to do. To me, that would have been dishonorable. Instead, about a week before the prom, I went to one of my two coaches, the same guy who'd coached me for years in cross-country and track, explained my situation (I left out the part about wanting desperately to get laid), and told him that in light of everything, I didn't plan on making the last meet. What I expected him to say in response was something like "Listen, I obviously would prefer that you be there, but I understand that it's your senior prom and you only get one, so have a good time and don't worry about it. You made all the meets, so this one won't make a difference." What I got instead, to my utter shock, was: "You're a co-captain on this team and it doesn't matter if it's the last meet of the year. Your prom is the night before, there's no reason you can't make the meet the next day. We expect you to be there. You do what you have to do, and we'll do what we have to do."

That was it. I blew off the meet as promised, as did another co-captain. I went to my prom, got drunk, argued with my girlfriend, had a crappy, uneventful time at The Tub Shop, and never got laid. About a week after my prom, we were both informed by our coaches that we were being stripped of our captainships because we'd missed the last meet. I was surprised, because they hadn't threatened to do that when I went to them the week before. Had they done so, I probably would have dragged my ass to the team bus the next morning. Or maybe not, who knows? I'm sure they thought they were teaching us a "life lesson" about honor and responsibility, but these many years later, all I can say I learned was that they were a couple of self-righteous pricks who couldn't put things in perspective. They chose to emphasize one meaningless meet over all the other time we'd put in, even after we'd given them notice. Ironically, my slight was partially avenged a couple of years later when one of those same coaches was fired because he'd been fucking a (15 year-old) long distance runner on the girls' track team.

I guess coach did what he had to do, and the school superintendent did what he had to do.

In the end, was it a fair trade? I don't know. I didn't get the brass poonanny that night -- had to wait another four months for that -- but I made a choice for myself and stuck to it. I also thought that I acted honestly, but sometimes there are consequences regardless of how up front you are about your decisions and the reasons behind them. My only regret is that I didn't get laid on prom night.

So now... here I am at 40, jogging in my bathroom. Clearly, I've got the running bug again. Is it a passing fancy or is it something more? We shall see. I bought some new running shoes today, my first pair in 28 years, and I'm planning on making running a part of my life again. Not going to run any marathons or anything like that. I just want to run. I just want that feeling back.