Happy birthday, Slider Inn

Over the weekend, the Slider Inn, a bar that has generated more stories in my life than any other, turned five.

My first visit to Slider was September 1, 2011, mere weeks after it opened, and I know the date because I wrote about it in my daily journal (where I mislabeled it as "Sliders"):

Stayed late [after the Breakaway run] to help with the Runner of the Month profile. Then Sliders with a group. Also got some new shoes.

The following week (by which point I'd sorted out the name), I got my first taste of what could happen there if I let the night rule me instead of the other way around:

3.6 miles --> beautiful weather and a 9:24 pace. Then...what happened?! Got home at, like, 2:00. DRUNK. Slider Inn.

The saying at Breakaway was “the best nights happen there and the worst nights happen there,” and true to that, Slider saw me through some really good times and some really, really bad ones. Even more so than my best races, my favorite Breakaway memories primarily come from the Slider Inn, with the parties and the people and the feelings of acceptance and home that greeted me during some stressful and painful years.

Those years and those memories were the product of those who worked there and drank there and the life that I was living, and it will never be the same, and that's okay because it's good to evolve.

But sometimes I miss it. And I know it's not just me. My cameo at the 5-year anniversary party was brief, but one of the patrons I talked to lamented that "things had changed." And he was right. Five years may not seem like a lot, but in the life of a bar, and of a person, it can be.

Today, I'm glad I'm here, I'm glad I'm the person I am, I'm thankful for the experiences I've had that have shaped me.

And I'm thankful that not far away from me is a place where I have had WAY too much to drink, where I have made really questionable life decisions, where I have cried, where I have laughed, where I have enjoyed Jameson slushies and Tiki Tuesdays, and where I hope to the Lord Jesus that I have progressed past the worst of it, because everyone should have a safe place where they can act like a damn idiot, and then take what they need from there, and grow.

A look back: My first marathon

I wrote this for the Memphis Runners Track Club magazine nearly five years ago. I still like it. :)

I knew I was in trouble at Mile 9.

Masking discomfort during a difficult run is an acquired skill – a skill that got me through eight miles of smiling and waving at every familiar face on the sidelines. But at Mile 9, when a friend of mine yelled from the crowd, “Becky!  How’s it going?” the truth was out before I could stop myself:

“Awful!  This whole race I’ve felt awful!”

The first mile I figured it was nerves. By the third mile I had graduated to a legitimate concern about throwing up. By Mile 9, I was angry at every single person in my vicinity who looked like they were having fun. This wasn’t fun. This was awful.

Mile 10. Mile 11. Mile 12. And there was the turn-off for the half marathon. Taunting me…making a really good case for me to peel off and try this marathon thing another day…a day when I wasn’t on the verge of emptying the contents of my stomach all over Poplar Avenue…

******

Five years earlier, in January of 2007, my friend Megan announced that she had an idea and I was the only person she knew crazy enough to do it with her.

“We should run a marathon,” she said.

Megan had read that a person was at peak physical potential at the age of 25, and it was this that made her start thinking about running. The two of us were, at that time, mere days away from 25 and in the worst shape of our lives. We were sitting at the Flying Saucer, downing pints, and complaining about our jobs, mine requiring sitting at a desk forty hours a week and Megan’s involving roughly that much time in her car.

2007 St. Jude Memphis Half Marathon

Despite our clear need for physical activity, my answer to the marathon suggestion was a flat, unequivocal, are-you-kidding-me “no.” Though I’d run some in college, I’d never progressed past running a couple of miles on the track a few times a week. That, to me, seemed about as much running as a person needed to do.  

But by the time we’d downed a second pint, she’d talked me into a half marathon. (“You can do just half of one?” I’d asked.)

Eleven months later, we walked the St. Jude Memphis Half Marathon, having spent the previous year taking our training about as seriously as I had taken running in college. Our goal was to finish in under three hours. When I crossed the finish line, my watch read 3:05.  

Well, I made it, I thought.  But I’ll bet if I tried that again, I could do it better.

******

The next year, we decided we needed help, and became the only half marathon participants in local running store Breakaway Running’s new St. Jude training program. We were indebted to owner Barry Roberson, who ran with us at 6:00 a.m. most Saturday mornings. He was there the day we ran an hour without stopping for the first time (five doggedly-slow 12-minute miles). He stuck with us when we skipped all our weekday runs because we were “busy,” and when we missed a Saturday or two because we were “tired.” He kept on us, he encouraged us, and when we ran ten miles for the very first time, he was there to tell us what an accomplishment that was.

That year I crossed the finish line in 2:52. I repeated the process the following year, took it just a little more seriously, stopped skipping runs, and finished in 2:27.

******

In 2010, I lost my job. My first book flopped. My best friend died. It was a hard year. Running stopped being something I did half-heartedly and started being something I did to keep my focus and regain my balance. Again I trained with Breakaway. I also started going to evening group runs. I even showed up to Paul Sax’s track workouts at the University of Memphis on Tuesday nights.

That year, I finished in 2:14. And I felt good about it – good enough that, for the first time ever, it didn’t seem like an unattainable feat to run twice that far.

I broke the news to Megan, now living in Texas, over the phone: the impossible had happened. I actually wanted to run a marathon.

******

Most runners I know have never taken four years to talk themselves into running any one race. Then again, most runners I know have a more noble reason for starting to run than “I was sitting at a bar and let someone else talk me into it.”  

For me, a runner of no discernible natural talent and slow to the point of embarrassment, committing to a full marathon was not something taken lightly. When July rolled around, it was with genuine pride that, as the sole remaining original member of the Breakaway training group, I finally moved up and stood amongst the full marathoners. I trained through heat, through illness, through rain, through hangovers (well, okay, just one…that was a lesson learned quickly). I had my requisite injury freak-out after pounding a bone out of alignment in my foot during an eighteen-mile run…but I bounced back quickly.  

I ran twenty miles like a champ. Twenty-two miles like I could have kept going… My training went so smoothly that my confidence going into the marathon was at an all-time high. As someone who not that long ago considered a 35-minute 5K undoable, I could barely believe my progress.  

The night before the race, I wrote in my journal just three words:  “I’ve got this.”  

******

Except maybe I didn’t.

How annoying that after five years of building up to it and five months of sacrificing my Friday nights for early morning Saturday runs, arguably my worst running day of the entire year landed on the day of the 2011 St. Jude Memphis Marathon.

And there was the turn-off for the half, staring me in the face. It was decision time.

Feeling defeated

I did a mental check; my legs were all right, so whatever was plaguing me wasn’t related to my physical ability to move my body forward for 26.2 miles. And I thought that maybe once I got past the mental hurdle of the turn-off for the half (which I knew like the back of my hand after four years), I might feel better.   

So I kept going.

And I felt better.

But not better enough to stop me from doing something I hadn’t done during a single training run: taking a walk break.

There’s an adage that the way you run reflects the way you live your life. In my case, that means relentless, consistent persistence (some might say orneriness), for I can think of no other way to describe my extraordinarily slow but strangely steady climb from sedentary beer drinker to marathoner. That being the case, it felt like a devastating setback – a huge step backward – to have to walk at Mile 14. It had never even crossed my mind that I would be walking at that point. 

It took me three miles just to shake off the shock of it.

Though I finally felt better (what was wrong with me to begin with, God only knows), walking that early meant saying goodbye to my goal of finishing in solidly under five hours. Seventeen miles into even a good run, it’s hard to think clearly, but now I had to completely reassess my strategy for getting through the next nine miles.

Make that eight miles. Seven miles. I was still going. Six miles. Five miles. At Mile 22 there was beer, and I knew I was down and out when I realized I didn’t want any. But I was still going. Not only that, I was marveling at all of the people around me who were going through this with me.  

There was something primal about sharing the pain and the pride and the pure mental (not to mention physical) exertion of willing yourself forward when there was absolutely no logical reason why you should.

Finish line in sight

Mile 23 was another mental hurdle because it marked the furthest I’d ever gone on foot. I had previously found it intimidating (and occasionally irritating) to hear other people’s marathon horror stories, but as I kept putting miles behind me, I kept running into people I knew, and kept telling them my own marathon horror story.  

“I’ve been sick this whole time!”

“I’ve never felt so awful!”

“I’m going to have to walk the rest of this!”

And then I’d find it in me to run a little more. Walk/run. Walk/run.

Mile 24. Mile 25. And there was Autozone Park… With point-three miles to go, I caught the eye of the guy next to me, someone I’d never seen before and will likely never see again.  But someone who, in that moment, probably understood what I felt like better than any other person on Earth.     

“Come on, let’s do this,” he said. “Together.” And we started running…

******

In conclusion, I’ve decided that the Me from Five Years Ago should be given her due credit for her hesitancy to take on a marathon. The experience was, to be completely honest, pretty brutal.

But it’s possible for something to be terrible in a wonderful way. Trite though it may sound, the girl who was sitting at the Flying Saucer all those years ago didn’t have a clue what she was capable of, and I’m glad that I gave myself the opportunity to prove to her that I could do this. Regardless of ability level (or prep time), it is an enormous test of self-discipline to make it to the finish line of a marathon.  

For me, getting there took a little longer than it takes most people. About half a decade, actually, give or take.  

And when I arrived, I looked at my watch.

5:06.

Well, I made it, I thought. But I’ll bet if I tried that again, I could do it better…

The other half of Thursdays

Another thing that happened last Thursday was that I went to the Slider Inn after the run. The weekly tradition of going there is all but gone at this point. Even when we do make it, much like the run itself, it's an experience that has changed quite a bit over time. (As have my drinking habits.)

As we sat there on Thursday, we reminisced about "what it used to be like" and talked about the people who used to work there and the regulars who probably still show up but we aren't there often enough anymore to run into them (maybe a good thing on that last point). The height of the Breakaway/Slider alliance was such a fun time to be part of the group...

That era started almost exactly a year after the events I wrote about in the previous entry:

I used to say there was nothing special about the Slider Inn except it was the place all of us wound up hanging out after the run on Thursday nights, but that wasn’t quite right. There was something special about the Slider Inn. Things happened there that didn’t happen – couldn’t have happened – outside of it. It had a mystical hold on us. I heard people say, with my own ears (sometimes coming from my own mouth), “I can’t go back to the Slider Inn for a while,” in the same shuddering tone that someone might say, “I’m not walking by any cemeteries at night for a while.”

Watching the Olympic trials at Slider, 2012

But oh, what magical possibility lay in front of the person who said the opposite. Who said, with enthusiasm, “I’m going to the Slider Inn!” (also words known to leave my mouth). It wasn’t every night there that the floodgates opened, but it happened often enough. You could walk in the door having no idea who would be there or what to expect, and walk away hours later having experienced things that put episodes of The Twilight Zone to shame. It was a bar…but a bar with the power to make those who stepped inside of it come away as different people. One block south and one block east of the Breakaway on Union. Cozy. New. Still working on building up that patina of character that older bars inevitably acquire. Sometimes it was just a handful of us on a Thursday. Sometimes we would bring in our own band and have parties big enough that the parking lot would be roped off and tables set up for us.

The manager used to joke they expanded the deck for Breakaway, and it’s possible there was some truth in that; we certainly made use of it. Some of my favorite memories from those years come from long summer nights on the patio, sipping PBRs for hours while still in my running clothes.

It opened in the summer of 2011, and I was there for the first time six weeks after. With the owner of Breakaway, of course. He was our ringleader on Slider nights. I remember thinking that for all his hype, though, I didn’t see much that was special about the place. And I remember realizing later that I was wrong.

The Slider Inn was where we drank, and it always seemed odd to me that the people I knew who weren’t athletic thought that that, in turn, seemed odd. Like there was some kind of disconnect between running a lot and drinking a lot.

But no, the two went hand in hand, and that was obvious, because you get a bunch of high-intensity people together and no matter what it is that they happen to be doing, they’re going to be doing a hell of a lot of it.

Thursdays

When I was at the run last Thursday, a newcomer commented to me that everyone in the group was so fast. Later, she asked how long I'd been coming to that run, and it was with mild incredulity that I heard myself respond, "Almost six years."

"But most people haven't been coming that long," I assured her, thinking back to her earlier statement about the fast people. I looked around the room and saw very few fast people. Most of them are gone now, so it's not really a fast run anymore, though I didn't want to tell her that; even after six years, I haven't forgotten how big of a step it was for me to show up to my first Thursday night.

For a couple of years prior, I'd been running with Breakaway on Saturday mornings, with their full and half marathon training group for St. Jude. I had some tough years in there socially, and for a long time, those Saturday runs were my primary means of interacting with people outside of the older women I worked with. When I lost my job and no longer had even those women, Saturday mornings were sometimes the only times I saw other people all week outside of strangers at the grocery store. Strange as it sounds in hindsight, I had a very real and true fear that I was legit turning into a recluse.

That's why I started going to Thursday nights in August of 2010. This is what it was like back then:

Unlike the Saturday morning crowd, where any interaction I had was brief and with runners of my own pace/level of fitness, Thursday night was a mixed bag – a place where men and women with magazine-worthy bodies stood half-dressed next to people who looked slightly more mortal, all equally part of the group and all glowing with the success of a hot summer run. Everyone had worked hard; everyone was enjoying the alcoholic celebration of his or her success.

There was a lot of laughter, and the picture as a whole offered a glaring contrast to the dark world I was living in, where most of my free time was stuck behind a computer, looking for jobs or trying to promote my book via a blog that was testing my psychological limits.

The obvious outcome is that I soaked it in, loved it, and came back with fresh determination the next week.

A big crowd at the old store on Union

Except I didn’t. In reality, I was almost paralyzed by the feeling that I didn’t belong. I went home overwhelmed. A runner who talked to me that night had given me incomprehensible advice, still ringing in my ears. He’d told me I should start coming to the Tuesday night track workout at the University of Memphis to work on my speed. As if that was something I could just do. As if it were nothing to show up to yet another frightening group run full of people I didn’t know, except this time in an arena that broadcast my primary shortfall as a runner (speed), and which had no beer afterward to dull to the blow. There was no way. It had been hard enough to get through what I’d just done.

I came home, and I processed, and I wasn’t ready to try that again by the next Thursday.

But I was by the Thursday after that.

The crowd changed over time, because the crowd was always changing, but when I started, the majority of the people I was running with were hardcore. I wasn’t just at the back of the pack; I was substantially behind the next-slowest person. There was a mental aspect to Thursday nights, too, because everyone started out on the same path and that path looped back on itself; i.e., roughly two miles into the run, everyone saw everyone else and could gauge how fast they were going and how many people were ahead or behind them.

Though our speeds and abilities may have divided us during the run itself, back at the store we were all equals in the eyes of the beer. There was a keg every week, and a donation glass nearby that never had quite enough money in it to cover the cost. The regulars all had glasses that they brought in and left at the store, and though it felt like I had walked into a long-standing tradition, the popularity of the run was new, and coincided directly with alcohol being offered at the end of it.

It always seemed to me like the store was overflowing with people. I’d guess there were thirty or forty runners each week back then, and I was in awe of every last one of them. They all seemed to do not only running but life better than I did. There's a vitality that emanates from people who are committed to an athletic lifestyle, and they were radiant with it. Not only that, everyone appeared to be financially successful, professionally accomplished, and more emotionally level than I was.

Impressing them was beyond the scope of my imagination - me, with my atrophied social skills, cotton T-shirts, and slow, over-pronating gait. They all seemed so far ahead of me in so many ways I couldn’t fathom a scenario in which “impressing” was a plausible outcome.

But I did see them as people to observe and learn from, for they all seemed to be good at exactly the things that I wanted to be good at.

Playing hookie on a Thursday night

Shhh! Don't tell! I'm not at Breakaway tonight. I'm skipping because my social muscles are still tired from Tuesday's Mardi Gras pub run.

Earlier, I was sitting here, right where I am now, and I wrote a post about Valentine's Day. It was pretty damning, which was fine, but it was also out of character, which was not fine. I started to upset myself as I was writing it, because the things that I was writing were not me. There's no good that doesn't come with a little bad, so allow me to share a couple of downsides related to my job:

1. I'm around people all day, which means my introverted self does not have enough time between a Tuesday pub run and a Thursday regular run to fully recharge.
2. Most of those people that I'm around, all day and every day, have lived, and continue to live, much more "normal" lives than me. Far from being immune to social pressure (which is how I like to portray myself - don't buy into my bullshit because it's bullshit), I'm very susceptible to it. When I was younger, it wasn't so much that I succumbed to that pressure as I masked my insecurities through defensiveness and complaint (here is an excellent example of that). I assumed I had grown out of that aspect of my personality...but alas, no. All I needed was to insert myself into a new group of people to fruitlessly compare myself to.  

So instead of sharing the mess that came out of my fingertips tonight, I'm going to share something much nicer that I wrote about Valentine's Day a few years back, on a night when I didn't skip the Thursday run...

I wasn’t sure who all would show up when Valentine’s Day fell on a Thursday in 2013. There were several couples, and yes, several lonely hearts, but overall, it wasn’t all that different from any other Thursday night. And yet the occasion seemed to instill in us all an extra push to express our appreciation for being in each others’ lives.  

The first Valentine’s Day I was with Breakaway was 2011; it fell on a Monday and the Salty Dogs hosted a run/social. Initially, it was conceived as a simple group run followed by a meet-up at Bardog (no different from any other Monday). Then a scavenger hunt – done in teams – was thrown into the mix. And then somehow it turned into everyone showing up in their underwear.

I did not attend. (Running around in your underwear and then drinking afterward did not sound like Valentine's Day to me. It sounded like the month of August.)

A year later, in 2012, it was a Tuesday; I went to the track workout and it was a light crowd. I wound up at a bar around the corner with two guys, chugging pitchers of beer, and left feeling bereft in a way I never would have had I gone directly home.  

But 2013 was a night I needed, filling me with a calm appreciation that this truly was a secondary family for me. Sometimes we fought and sometimes we got sick of each other and sometimes we needed a break, but we also looked out for each other and were pleased to see each other and legitimately wished each other well in our respective metaphorical and literal journeys.  

The psychologists were right. It really is wonderful to feel part of a group. And that night, I did. I felt as if whatever else in my life was going on, there was at least consistency here, in this cluster of like-minded people. Sometimes it’s enough just to show up, just to do the same thing that other people are doing, and to be able to smile at the end of it because you belonged.

As I stood surveying the room, [a friend] walked in from his run, stopping to give me shit about politics, and as I did my duty in refuting him, I thought back to the days when I first started coming here, wondering if I could have ever envisioned that I would be here now. That I would have such affection for these people. That I would stand next to [this guy] and talk about politics on Valentine’s Day. He reached over and grabbed my arm as he made his way to leave.  

“Happy Valentine’s Day!” he said, and I smiled at the purity of it all. It was okay. Everything was okay.  On this day when no one was supposed to be alone, none of us were.

There was peace in that.

What if I just kept posting old Breakaway things?

When speaking marathon-speak, you have to act like it’s not weird at all to be talking about traveling on foot the kinds of distances most of the rest of the population only uses when describing how far away the next town over is.  This, above all else, is key.  It’s not weird.

Aside from that, marathon lingo is easy to pick up because most of the key phrases are comically self-descriptive.

Your long run is the run you typically do on the weekend to build up your mileage.  This is the bulk of your training and most likely your longest long run will be twenty miles, though Breakaway’s plan went up to twenty-two.  Used in a sentence: “Hey, man, how was your long run?” or “What’s your long run this weekend?”  

A drop-down week is a week in which your mileage is less than the week before.  Though your overall progress is upward, toward longer runs, your body needs time to recover, and thus the typical cycle is to increase your mileage for a few weeks and then drop down for a week, meaning both a shorter long run and a smaller overall weekly mileage tally.  Drop-down weeks result in paradoxical statements, such as, “Yeah, it’s a drop-down week so my long run’s only 14 miles.” 

An ice bath is what you take after your long run.  Because your legs are put through quite a bit of stress and pounding during a twenty-or-so-mile run, you will have likely done enough harm that you will be in pain for the next day or four.  To minimize muscle damage, it is advised to follow your longer long runs by (no, I’m not making this up) soaking your legs in a bathtub of cold water and ice for ten to twenty minutes.  This is infinitely more torturous than the run itself; you’ll be hard-pressed to find an ice-bather who can’t top his worst bad run story with an even more awful description of what it’s like to sit in an ice bath.  (Note:  Not all marathoners take ice baths.  Your author takes “cool water baths” because she read online they’re just as effective and really, she’s fine believing that even if it turns out that’s not entirely true.) 

A foam roller is a foam roller.  You roll your muscles over it to work out stiffness and kinks.  This hurts worse than an ice bath.

Splits are the times for your individual miles, or mile-increments, during your run.  Your aim is to have a “negative split,” meaning you get faster as you go.  For instance, if you ran twenty miles in two and a half hours and your first ten miles were in an hour and twenty minutes and your second ten miles were in an hour and ten minutes, then congratulations, both on your negative split and on being faster than I’ll ever be.

Gu is the brand name of a flavored, gel-like substance that you swallow mid-run to deliver nutrients to your body because you are not physically capable of storing enough energy to keep yourself going through all those miles and your body will start digesting itself if you don’t eat (or something like that).  The word “Gu” is used generically as a term for any gooey substance sold in one-serving packets, much the same way people use the word Kleenex to mean any facial tissue.  It comes in assorted flavors and you’re advised to “shoot” one Gu packet every forty-five minutes during exercise, although I would ask that you bear in mind that recommendation comes from the people who make Gu.  You can use your long runs to test your Gu needs (and flavor preferences), but be sure to complain a lot about having to eat it, even though it’s quite tasty.  (Oh, please, like you’re not hungry enough to eat damn near anything after 16 miles anyway.)

And lastly, the most important word in any marathoner’s vocabulary is gossip.  Because when you’re training for a marathon, if you’re running with other people, you will be in their presence for hours with nothing to do except put one foot in front of the other.  It’s best to come equipped to talk about other people’s secrets; if not, you’ll be spilling your own.  Some of the most revealing conversations I have ever had have come in the middle of grueling umpteen-mile runs, when physical duress had stripped away the mental defenses of both me and the people I was running with.  

A friendship forged through marathon training is unlike any other friendship, for, as they say, it is during long runs that shit gets real…

Hello, darkness, my old friend

Last night, I ran down the stairs without turning on the light and...missed the last step. The *pop* my ankle gave as it turned under was substantial enough I was concerned I'd broken myself. But no. Just a sprain. The swelling has dropped from grapefruit size to golf-ball size in the past 24 hours, but I'm still hobbling around at a slow-walk, cursing the dark and the stupid winter season it brings with it.

In an effort to shut myself up, here's something that I wrote a couple of years ago that's much more generous toward the darkness that comes with this time of year...

That winter, I started running at night, after the sun had gone down.

I liked it because it was easier to be alone that way, and running was an “alone time” activity for me. Yes, I lived alone, but in my apartment, there was my phone and the internet, not to mention the alluring distraction of television or iTunes, and people could get to me. On a run, I was liberated. And after years of feeling liberation in the early morning, I discovered something even more enticing awaiting me at night.

I couldn’t see as well in the dark (obviously) and that was what made it so nourishing. There was no temptation to read every street sign, or to look ahead to see how far I had until the next turn. When I couldn’t see everything that was ahead of me my runs were less cerebral.  I didn’t narrate to myself as I went or worry about offending someone walking a dog if I passed without offering a greeting. Personal interactions are different in the dark, at night. We know this from more intimate exchanges, but it’s true of fleeting encounters as well. In the daylight, there’s a pressure for vocalization that doesn’t always exist after the sun sets. If a runner passed me at night, I could feel that shared connection to humanity merely by silently recognizing the presence of another member of my species being in proximity to me. That same runner in the daylight needed a “hello” or “how are you?” and the forced smile that went with it; the connection was reduced to shared social etiquette.  

Liberation came easier when I wasn’t making eye contact with every driver who came barreling down the road I happened to be running on, too…but I stayed off busy roads anyway. Not just because even in reflective clothing and wearing a flashing arm band a night runner risks being hit by an oncoming car even more than a daytime runner.  

But because a busy road is a constant reminder that the darkness is only an illusion, and you’re not nearly as hidden as you hope you are.

From the Breakaway Book:

It never stopped. There was always another race. Always another run. Always another hash, another party, another new person introducing herself, another old friend who had disappeared without bothering to say goodbye, another wedding, another baby, another breakup dividing already-divided loyalties, another birthday, another political spat, another rumor, another slight, another invitation from someone I’d only met once, another beer, another shot, another pair of running shoes decimated, another phone number, another e-mail address, another piece of advice, another hug, another smile, another missed opportunity, another question about how training was going, another person with injuries to be sensitive toward, another deadline to sign up, another demand to know where were you, another, another, another.

Breathe.

The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

Three years ago, when I turned thirty, I made the conscious decision to “work on myself.”  It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t happy with my life (though I wasn’t), but that I wasn’t happy with the way I dealt with my life.  “Highly reactionary” is the phrase that comes to mind; a born storyteller, I could weave drama out of approximately anything.  But what makes for the best story doesn’t always make for the best life.

It was a year in which I tried being the kind of the person I’d previously mocked:  someone whose breakfast was squeezed out of a juicer, and who skipped parties to stay home and watch Wayne Dyer specials during PBS pledge week, and who wrote affirmations to herself and taped them to the bathroom mirror.

And I was someone who adamantly rebelled against the notion that the pleasures of running should be connected to the time on a wristwatch.  I ran my second – and most enjoyable – marathon that year, after a training season in which I greeted each 6:00 a.m. Saturday run with calm determination and a pointed thank you to the rising sun.

Change had come so swiftly and so effortlessly that when a friend I hadn’t seen in a while asked me how I’d been, with neither hesitation nor the slightest self-consciousness, I replied, “I’m very enlightened now.”

And I really thought that I was.  I thought that I was on my way to Buddhist-monk levels of inner peace, and that I would never again be rattled out of myself by the behavior of other people, and that through the magic of simply learning to stop and breathe, I had discovered, among other things, the key to perpetually satisfying running.  I had found the answer.

***

Except I hadn't.  (Or if I had, I let it slip away.)

***

I have a confession:  I don’t love running.  I like it an awful lot (well, most of the time), and we get along well enough, but deep down, neither of us is fooling the other.  Ours is a relationship of convenience.  I give my time and my energy, and in return I get an adequate level of fitness and, a couple of times a year, a runner’s high.  

Running and I are entering our ninth year together, and sometimes I look at what running gives other people and compare that to what it gives me, and I feel a little betrayed.  Like, after all this time, I should be getting more out of this deal.  I wouldn’t even ask for much. Maybe just a new 5k PR without having to kill myself over it or something.

But then I think about how I spent a year of my life believing I had unlocked the key to keeping my running fresh, and that I came to that conclusion not through diligent attention to my exercise regimen, but by listening to nothing but new age music for twelve months, and that’s when I have to be honest with myself.  Running gives me no more or no less than it should.

***

January is a bleak month - the weather is shitty, everyone's mood is shitty, the enthusiasm of the new year and all its promises starts to fade, and spring - that endlessly-hyped beacon of renewal - seems just far enough in the distance that it might never come. 

Today, as I write this, I am not sad, but I am saddled with the anxious feeling of being ready for the next chapter.  I feel it, all the while knowing it is the anxiousness, not the present moment, that is the problem.  

How to get through?  I will strive to run deliberately, and attempt to do so expecting nothing in return. I mean that literally, but I mean it even more metaphorically.  I am not racing the clock...

...I am racing myself.

Picture source.

Add my name to the list of Zen masters from the last post.

I have a notebook in my kitchen where I write down my to-do lists, and this morning, a sheet of paper fell out of the back of it.

Why I stuck it there, why I printed it out in the first place, no one even knows.  I can say, however, that one of my favorite parts of being me is how my past self is always planting little treats for my future self to find (usually with impeccable timing).

This is what was on the paper:

It's one of the cornerstones of psychology that we blame the person before we blame the circumstances.  We see someone acting unusually and automatically place the blame on him, never acknowledging how substantially influences outside of our control impact behavior.  Or how substantially influences we choose not to control impact our behavior.

Again, it sounds like such a selfish thing to take out of any interaction with another person - lessons about your own self.  But I began to think that maybe it was the exact opposite.  That that's what most people were missing, this idea that we are really all the same.  Instead of seeing yourself as a separate, fundamentally different entity, realizing that you are nothing more than a few coincidental situational differences from anyone you ever meet.

"We're a lot alike, you and me," he said to me once, and it was true.  But that was also true of any two human beings who have ever lived.  People drift through life, jumping from shallow relationship to shallow relationship, never changing and never seeing past their own immediate wants and needs. That, to me, is real selfishness - this failure to acknowledge that a part of you lives inside of every person in your life.  That's not to say that there aren't individuals to steer clear of; of course there are, same as their are tendencies inside yourself which shouldn't be encouraged.

But we're not so different you and me.

Photo source.

Once more, with feeling!

Though I was a month late joining the group, today I went to my first Breakaway Saturday morning training run for the 2014 St. Jude Half Marathon.

2013

The first year I ran with the group was the first year Breakaway did a Saturday morning program, back in 2008.  My friend Megan and I were the only half marathon participants.  Today, there must have been over a hundred people running the same four-mile loop that I did, and that many again running seven in training for the full.

This is the first year since 2010 that I have not been part of the full group.  In fact, this time last year, I was deep into training for Chicago - the Overton Park 5-mile Classic is next weekend, and I remember last year getting up and running ten miles on my own before finishing up with five miles at the race.  That was hard.

I'm glad I'm not doing that this year.

I found, though, as I was running this morning, that I was keeping to myself - not what one typically does during a group run.  I also found that as I passed people (or people passed me) and I picked up snippets of their conversations, it could have been any of the past seven years of Saturdays.  More people, different people, same stuff.  Same wondering about the next water stop and talking about mileage for next week.  Same boasting of new Garmins and discussions about goal paces.  It was the same view in front of me:  a sea of tech shirts, water bottles, and compression socks.  And it was the same route, same pavement, same one-foot-in-front-of-the-other...

It wasn't a bad run by any stretch, it's just that my heart wasn't quite in it.  

I need to find peace with why it is I'm training (again) this year.  Because even for "just" a half marathon, many, many miles lie ahead of me...

Boston.

I haven't had a good track workout in several weeks, but tonight, my body was working with me.

Frequently (I dare say usually) I walk off the track feeling moderately pathetic and somewhat dejected.  But I go back most every Tuesday because I'm chasing the days like today, when the longer I run, the faster I run, and the stronger I feel.  I finished well tonight.

I likely would have had a good workout no matter what (I was overdue), but tonight I had a couple of things working in my favor:  1) There was a new girl there who was trying to keep up with me for the last quarter and fuck that shit, and 2) a friend of mine gave me the flattering assertion that in the wake of what happened yesterday at the Boston Marathon, my voice was one that should be heard here in Memphis.  On the surface, these are two antithetical statements, the first being one of competitive individualism and the second being one of community support.  But that's running for you.  It's both things.  It's a loner's haven and it's an exercise in group cooperation.  It's every man (and woman) racing him(her)self and yet it's also every person on the course sharing the same experience and looking out for everyone else.

I have a hard time sometimes reading/listening to people's operatic odes to the act of running itself, not only because they're such clichés, but because, in a lot of ways, I don't feel that I belong to that club.  Running isn't who I am; it's something that I do.  It's not part of my self-definition; it's simply part of my life.  I don't call myself "a runner" any more than I call myself "an eater."  Or "a sleeper."  Or "a reader."  Running is just something that crops up in my routine on a regular basis.  Much like writing.  And showering.  And going to work.

And yet yesterday proved, to myself if no one else, that the mere fact that it's a part of my life means I'm a piece of something slightly separate.  Everyone abhors a tragedy.  Not everyone knows what it feels like to see the finish line of a marathon (and thus the true horror of having that euphoria desecrated).  Not everyone knows someone (much less multiple someones) who was running that race.

I'm going to take it on as a challenge to write something for our local running magazine to describe the feeling of familial concern that has enveloped us in Memphis in the past 36 hours or so.  Our community here was lucky.  None of us were hurt or killed, though many of us will be coming home with awful stories.  But we came together anyway.  We'll be coming together again on Thursday when Breakaway holds a fundraiser/2.62-mile run/Slider Inn party to honor the achievements of our local Boston finishers and memorialize the tragedy.

What we won't do is let any of this change anything.  We're all a bunch of idiots, you know, deep down.  No one in their right mind would do to their bodies what we do to ours, all for the sake of an elusive high that hits infrequently and erratically.  Or bragging rights that mean nothing to anyone but ourselves.

But there's something to be said for the sheer number of us that do it.  We feed off of each other.  We push ourselves to run brutal track workouts, like tonight.  We run for three, four, five, six hours at a time just to prove to ourselves we can do it.

I hope the girl I beat tonight comes back to the track.  I hope I do justice to our camaraderie when I write my article.  But most of all, I hope that yesterday doesn't discourage a single person from ever running a marathon.  People do terrible, terrible things for the stupidest of reasons.

But they also do wonderful things for the stupidest of reasons.  Running 26.2 miles is one of those things.  Hundreds of thousands of people have run Boston in the 117 years that marathon has been in existence.  One person turned it into a calamity this year.  To quote myself from above, fuck that shit.

My heartfelt sympathy goes out to each and every person affected by the bombings, and yet in the wake of not really knowing what to do about it, I'll be out there for more nights like tonight.  Just living my life.  Which includes running. 

This changes nothing.  And maybe that's my point.  This was a hideous, terrible thing.  But anyone looking to demoralize a group picked the wrong target in runners.  We don't know when to quit.  And when faced with a potential setback, the cold, hard truth is that it only makes us run harder...

These Are My Friends

They make me laugh. :)

And SCENE!

The low point came at Mile 12, when I felt bad in a way that I’ve never felt bad before, which scared the living daylights out of me.  But I took a walk break and the feeling passed – and along with it went all the feelings of anxiety and pressure that naturally crop up when it’s finally that one day you’ve spent the past six months of your life working up to.

There I was, twelve miles down and fourteen-plus yet to go; clearly not in a position to run a better time than last year (what with walking that early in the game); but with no limits, restrictions, or obligations either.  All I had to do, the only thing I had to get done the entire rest of the day, was get through those fourteen miles.  That’s it.  And I asked myself if I was going to do it, or if I was going to fucking do it.

Thus began the most fun fourteen miles I’ve ever run in my life.  

I wound up besting my previous time in spite of myself, and went the whole 26.2 without any real pain (unquestionably a first for me).  And I was smiling at the end.  So my second marathon this past Saturday was successful by every standard I had set for myself and then some.  I’m so happy that I did it – that I gave myself the opportunity to do it.

And now I’m likewise happy that it’s OVER.

It’s been my line all week that it’s a good test of my self-discipline to train for one marathon a year, and an equally good test of my sanity to be able to take a step back when it’s over.

A lot of energy went into training for this.  It’s time for me to rechannel some of that toward other things for a while.  No more forty-mile weeks for me…

…or at least not until this time next year… :)

Mile 7, courtesy of Breakaway Running.  This is the only shot of me from last Saturday to show up so far; I know there are many others out there, but I can't imagine any will capture the day better than this.

How to Stay Motivated to Run (or Exercise in General)

My friend Melissa posted an excellent question today on Facebook:  How do we (her Facebook friends) stay motivated to exercise?

I intended to write a few words of encouragement in response, but, this being me, it turned into six or seven paragraphs of highly-specified advice.  I wrote that much not because I have all the answers; far from it.  Instead, words came pouring out of me because motivation is a constant struggle for me.  In my weekly routine of running three to four days a week, I have never, in five and a half years, had a week where every single run was awesome.

So today I thought that, for what it's worth, I'd expand here on what I told her about how I keep myself going.  Maybe it'll help you (nothing I say here is exclusive to running; I just use that as my example since that's my main form of exercise) or maybe you don't care (which is fine; I'll write about something less self-help-y in the next entry).  But in any case, here's my two cents':

Becky's Guide to Staying Motivated to Run

1.  Variety.  It's really easy to get bored.  Today, I took the simple step of going straight when leaving my driveway instead of turning left or right and wow, had a fantastic run.

Is this fun yet, dammit?!

 2.  Variety (of another, er, variety).  Have big days where you do a lot and light days where you go into it knowing you're only going to do a little.  And think optimistically about the big days!  For me, that means a long run on a weekend morning (for you, maybe it's an hour at the gym instead of thirty minutes) and if I want to run 6 miles, I plan out a route for 6.5.  That way, if I'm having an awesome day, I can get a little extra in.  If I'm having an off day, I can stop at 6 and have a nice cool-down walk at the end (or even the middle, if I'm really hurting).  And either way, I've gotten (at least) my 6 miles in.

3.  Embrace multitasking. If you have a twenty-minute workout that you do, that's perfect, because that's exactly the length of a single episode of a sitcom on DVD.  Or hey, Maroon 5 has a new album on the way. I plan on depriving myself of listening to it too often except while on solo tempo runs; that way, I can distract myself from the pain I'm inflicting on my body while simultaneously giving Adam Levine the attention he so sorely deserves from me.

4.  Set goals that aren't self-defeating. Things like "I'm going to lose x pounds," or "I want my abs to look like whatever," are too easy to relinquish when you don't meet them right away. For me, I'm trying more and more to just stay focused on the goal of feeling good after I exercise.  Why?  Because it's too damned easy to beat yourself up for not living up to some arbitrary standard!  (Witness me crying for two days straight after my first marathon, depressed about my time and completely losing sight of the fact that I had just run a freaking marathon.)  Your body knows what you need and will let you know when you've done yourself right.  Hold on to that feeling and make that your goal.

5.  Take breaks and give yourself some slack. If you want to exercise three days a week, then do it...and relish the days off! As I once told Megan, "I love to run because it allows me to feel no guilt on the days when I don't have to and can come home from work and immediately start drinking beer."* It is totally legitimate to, while exercising, think about what you're going to be doing while not exercising.

(*I said this back when I had a full time job.  Please don't think I come home and start drinking at 12:30 every afternoon...although knowing me as you do, you are forgiven if that was your first thought.)  

6.  Anything is better than nothing. There are days when I'm so freaking tired, and go out and run one terrible mile when I meant to run four great ones...but that one mile is always better than zero miles. One sit-up is better than zero sit-ups. 

I smile in order that I might lie to myself.

7.  Brag about what you're doing.  Newsflash:  I kind of like talking about myself.  So when I'm in the middle of a particularly difficult run, I often try to convince myself of how enviable I will sound when I tell someone I just knocked out x number of miles.  And a lot of times for me, I don't even need to say it out loud.  I can propel myself forward on just the thought of the weekly mileage tally I write down in my journal at the end of every week.  But if you need to say it out loud, then say it!  Call someone, Facebook it, whatever.  I don't care who you are, I guarantee you there is someone in your life who will give you a thumbs up for working out.

8.  If possible, exercise (at least every once in a while) with other people.  Other people understand what you're putting yourself through and can be distractions and/or cheerleaders when needed.  They also often push you to work harder.  Pack mentality is primal and unavoidable - might as well make it work to your advantage.  

9.  Mess with your own head.  You have to find a way to convince yourself that whatever you're doing is enjoyable to you. At my lowest of low points, I think back to our ancestors on the plains of Africa, and I think, 'Becky, just be glad you're doing this for fun and not because you might die of starvation if you don't run down an antelope today.' 

Sometimes that helps...sometimes it doesn't...but ultimately, exercise for non-immediate-survival purposes is all a mind game anyway, and I guess for me, the key has been just running through all of the tricks every time until one sticks, and then starting all over again the next time...

It's hard to exercise.  It's borderline counterintuitive.  Your body has evolved to question why you are expending energy for (what it see as) no reason.  But your mind is stronger than your muscles.  I try to remember that when I'm having a bad day...and I also try not to kick myself too hard when my body wins out.  Because that does happen.  But what's much more important than a bad day is the day after, when you pull yourself together and go at it again.  

And when you're rewarded with a good day, you won't need any of this, because the feeling itself will be enough to remind you why you do this for yourself in the first place.

(Eh, and how good you look in jeans helps too.)

Uh oh. It's starting again.

All right, I need to figure out where I went wrong.  Because I was doing so well, right?

Cinco de Mayo was good.  Friday I donated to myself, and Saturday there was a party, which was more than good...

So why is it now that it's Tuesday and I feel like this?

It's like the more I find out, the less I want to know.  So many of these runners...about half, I'd say...they lie.  My God, I've never been lied to so much in my life...

And they cheat.  They harbor malicious feelings.  They're insecure, they're desperate, they're mean.  They're unrelentingly selfish, dangerously self-centered.

They're manipulative, they're unfaithful, they're obsessive, they're greedy, and they're cowards.

They are a group split almost evenly down the middle - those whose presence uplifts me and those who the mere mention of leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth for days.  And they're all thrown together - connected, intertwined, enmeshed so deeply in each other and each other's business that I can't always distinguish who is who...

My track workout this evening wasn't the best ever.  It wasn't the worst ever, either, but I was having one of those (unfortunate) nights where my body wasn't cooperating.  The best nights at track, the more I run, the stronger I feel, despite the tiredness that sets in as the workout continues.

On lesser nights (like tonight), the tiredness is accompanied only by a feeling of weakness.

Except it's an illusion.  I'm not weak.  Not physically, and certainly not mentally.  And it's not weakness to give myself reminders now and then.  That vaguely uneasy feeling hovering just below the surface is a reminder in and of itself:  I want no part of this darkness.

I'm just here to run.

Progress

I've been pretty hard on myself recently in terms of running (alright, I'm hard on myself over everything, but whatever).  I actually got so fed up with the endless monotony of getting up every Saturday for a long run that I decided to do something that I've never, ever done before:  I decided not to run a race that I signed up for.  Post-marathon, when I was struggling with enthusiasm after (what I considered) a truly lackluster performance in my inaugural 26.2, I signed up for the Germantown Half as a way to force myself to keep going.

Weeeelllll, here's a little something about Becky Heineke:  you can't force her to do anything.  You'd think I'd know this, seeing as how I happen to be Becky Heineke, but I thought that if anyone had the power to force me to do something, it'd be me.  And I was WRONG.  Even Becky Heineke can't make Becky Heineke do something she doesn't want to do, and Becky Heineke does not want to train for the damn Germantown Half.

(Although Becky Heineke is a little peeved that she already paid for it.  But she's trying to get over that.)

So instead of focusing on long runs, I started getting back into my pre-marathon routine of going to track workouts on Tuesday nights.  When I originally started going, I was overwhelmingly intimidated, what with many times being the absolute slowest person there, and seemingly not improving at all, ever, despite weeks of effort.  But what I love about the track workouts, and always have, is that they're about running.  These other group runs that I show up to during the week are as focused (if not more focused) on the social aspect afterward as the exercise part.  But at track, you just run.  Hard.  And at the end of it, there's very little standing around and talking because all you want to do is go home and lie on the couch.

Apparently, this shift from long runs to sprint work was the right choice because I've set three personal records for speed in the last two and a half weeks.  True, nothing that I'm about to share is anything to write home about, BUT, considering where I started, they definitely show progress.

I already mentioned my first PR, for my 4-mile time.

I also ran a 7:53 mile last week at track, the first time I've ever broken the 8-minute barrier running a mile.

And two nights ago, I ran a 3:30 800.  Granted, someone very generously paced me (I respond remarkably well to positive reinforcement from a few feet in front of me), but my other (solo) 800s that night were all in the vicinity of 3:42/3:43, which is the type of time I only ran once last year, and that was only because I was angry enough at three people that I could have punched them all in the face, and two of them had the audacity to show up to the track workout that night.  (I also respond well to generalized rage directed at people who annoy me.)

And the thing about each of these milestones is that the sense of achievement has been shadowed by a lingering sense that maybe I could do even better.  I don't mean that in an unhealthy I'll-never-be-satisfied way, but in an I'm-starting-to-sense-that-things-are-possible-that-I-didn't-think-were-possible-before way.

And if I can do that with running, I wonder what other areas of my life I can do that with...  I don't know if it's the impending onset of spring, or the fact that I just switched decades, or a general product boredom, but I've felt like "working on myself" lately.  And it's nice that in one area, at least, where I thought I needed improvement, I am, indeed, making progress.

Flashback: Boston 2008

From MySpace, April 21, 2008:

The Boston Marathon is today.  When I heard it mentioned on NPR this morning, I turned up the volume and risked being a little late to work so I could sit in my car and listen to the blurb.

Not that I have any ties to the Boston Marathon (or likely ever will), but it's an incredibly big deal in the running world and I feel a weird (unearned) sense of camaraderie with the tens of thousands of people who are running as I write this.

Yes, I am excited that today is the Boston Marathon for no other reason than it is happening and I am aware of it.  I'm turning into a running nerd.

In related news, Megan and I ran the Youth Villages 5k on Saturday and finished in just over 35 minutes (Megan slightly faster than me), putting us at a pace under 11:30 per mile.  11:30 per mile wouldn't exactly qualify us for Boston, but I think any time a person runs for 35 minutes straight without stopping, it's an accomplishment.  At least it is if that person is me. 

I can't believe that this time last year we were so into walking.

****

Never say never.

Here in 2012, I'm pretty sure I know at least a handful of people who were running the Boston Marathon that day.

I ran another race this weekend, and I did it in 35 minutes.  It wasn't a 5k, though.  It was a 4-miler.

I've never run a sub-9-minute pace in a race before, but Saturday, I ran four 8:45 miles.  Let me tell you...the person who wrote, with pride, above about her 11:30 pace, would never, ever have even dared to imagine she could run an 8:45 mile.

And you know what?  Someone kind of mocked me for being slow after the race.  And even though I kind of wanted to slug him in his smug face, I understand - deeply - that for a hell of a lot of people, 8:45 is still really fucking slow.

But I am not one of those people, and it was an accomplishment for me.  And every once in a while, it is extraordinarily nice to be given the reminder that you are capable of more than you give yourself credit for...

AND it was raining!  God, I'm hardcore...

What Running a Marathon Looks Like...

What Running a Marathon Feels Like...

What I Was Thinking After Running a Marathon...

I didn't have a good run on Saturday.  It was new and awful to be one mile into a run, realize it's not going well, and have to face down the reality that you still have 25.2 miles to go.  The temptation to stop at the half marathon point was damn near overwhelming, but I'm so incredibly glad that whatever idiocy it was that drove me to think this was a good idea in the first place propelled me to keep going and get through the whole thing.

You put that much into something and it doesn't go well?  There's a lesson in there somewhere.  I was pretty sure by Mile 8 the lesson I was learning was that next time I'm going to run a better marathon.

But even though I sucked and it sucked...wow.  I did it (!).  I don't think I've really processed that yet...

Or maybe I'm not okay...

My foot is no better.  

I had a meltdown about this on Thursday.  It was probably along the lines of how I might react if someone told me I had an incurable and deadly disease.  In reality, of course, it was nothing more than my foot hurting and not being sure I could run.  But if I couldn't run, then I might not be able to do the marathon in six weeks.  And if I couldn't do the marathon, then I wouldn't get to write the cover story for January's issue of the Memphis Runners Track Club magazine ("Becky's First Marathon!").  And if I couldn't do any of these things, then (possibly worst of all) I would be incredibly lonely during the healing process because, like a blow to the head, it hit me just how dependent I've become on running as a social outlet.  I live alone, I work in an office where it's just me and my boss...during the week, sometimes (many times) the only people I have real, face-to-face conversations with are other runners. 

Poor MEEEEEE, my life is oooooovvverrrrrr!

I went to Thursday night's run anyway because my doctor told me to try to run again on Thursday and even though I was depressed and knew it was going to hurt and that I'd have to stop, I wanted to try.  And then I tried and it hurt and I had to stop. 

So cue the waterworks (really, for the number of times I've cried throughout this shitty week, it's amazing my eyes still opened on Thursday) and everything is awful and I hate life and I was just starting to catch up but now everyone's going to leave me behind and I'll be sad and alone for the REST OF MY LIFE.  This is literally what was happening in the middle of Breakaway, along with my vocal and teary admission that I knew I was being irrational and that I had possibly become a little dependent on running as a means of leveling my mood and thus had been left somewhat unstable after five days of inactivity.

The universal response was:  "Becky, we understand exactly how you feel."

And then of course there was alcohol consumption.

I really can't stress enough how much comfort Breakaway gave me on Thursday.

Yesterday morning, a fellow runner got me in to see an orthopedic doctor.  He thought it was possibly tendonitis, possibly just a generic body-protesting reaction to running 18 miles last weekend, but most likely not a stress fracture and most likely nothing that would keep me from running the marathon.

Another friend got me in to see a physical therapist yesterday afternoon.  He thought it could be a stress fracture, but it could be a lot of other things too, including the bones in my foot getting slightly out of line after all that pounding, and that at any rate, it was far too early to count me out on the marathon.

As of this weekend, I'm on a steroid, I'm supposed to stay off my feet as much as possible, and then I'm to run again on Wednesday, at which point I have permission to keep running through the pain and try to make it four or five miles to really figure out how it feels.

All I know is that it hurts.  Quite a bit.  So...I'll guess I'll just have to wait and see... :-/