Back to the Finish? Back into a Ditch is more like it. In summer 2021, I got all jazzed up about getting back into distance running. With that pesky global pandemic thing slowly abating, and having spent over a year doing very little outside of about a one mile radius from my home, I decided this was going to be my time to get back into distance running. “Distance running” for me means something like half-marathon level running. I’ve run a few marathons (New York once and Chicago twice), and have done a slew of 5K’s, 10K’s, 10 milers, along with one recent half marathon. If I can pepper my year with a few races at those distances, and run the occasional marathon, I feel pretty good. But like I wrote in my last post, I had let my running habit lapse, and I was long overdue to get back in the game.

So partially as motivation, and partially because it seems incredibly appealing to me as a long-time wannabe writer, I decided to blog about the experience of getting back into shape. I was reading a book called “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron and it had made me excited to start exercising my creative muscles – for basically the first time since I was a kid – and in the process carve out time from my soul-sucking “career” which provides me no joy whatsoever. (It does, admittedly, help me keep the lights on and food on the table and so forth.) I also figured there would be some easy and inevitable humor inherent to the whole process, given that I’m a man of a certain age (for simplicity, let’s say that age is “my forties”), which would make the writing entertaining, and not just a recitation of how many miles I had logged in a given week. “The Artist’s Way,” incidentally, is not my typical cup of tea; I generally don’t dabble all that much in the self-help genre, but my neighbor – who is kind of a kooky Christian-New Age-Leftist mash-up – recommended it to me, and for whatever reason it appealed to me, and I worked my way through the entire book (the author takes you on a series of self-helpy exercises) that summer.

So with dog eared pages and highlighted sentences littering my copy of Artist’s Way, and a determination to write regularly, I signed up for the “Parkway Classic” in Alexandria, Virginia; an annual 10 mile race through the streets of scenic Old Town Alexandria. (I had run this race once before, but that was well over a decade ago.) In September I started training; huffing my way through sad 3 and 4 mile runs a handful of times per week, and I also figured out how to get the internet’s most pathetic blog up and running. I ran here and there through September and October, not much, just whenever I could get squeeze my runs in, and eventually I successfully hobbled my way through the Parkway Classic. During that time, I managed to create all of one whopping blog post, but generally I felt pretty good about all of this. It was a start, and I was slowly getting back into decent shape. Plus the thought of maintaining this blog and actually writing periodically – regularly – gave me a mental health lift that almost felt spiritual (that felt silly to write, but I’m leaving it here because it’s the truth).

I thought all of this would be a good jumping off point to launch a routine of running and blogging about it weekly and year-round, not as a pecuniary pursuit, but just for me and my physical and mental well-being. I needed something like this to make my life feel less like I was slowly dying, sitting at work everyday, on top of a heaping pile of sand which was slowly dissolving through the hour glass of life, or some depressing metaphor like that(sidenote: don’t go to law school kids). But instead of a jumping off point, I fell right back into my old habits. After the Parkway Classic in November 2021, I didn’t run again for three months. Then in February 2022, I finally ran again…once. 2 miles. In March, I ran…once. 2 miles. And then I stopped again, and didn’t run until June. I blame work, which is partially true, but partially just a bullshit excuse.

Feeling fairly disgusted with myself, last Fall I signed up for a half-marathon, almost as a punishment. I vowed to try again; to run and write regularly. I stumbled and wheezed my way through a handful of runs in the weeks leading up to the race, did two respectable 8 and 10 mile runs in October, and then I ran the Charlotte Half Marathon in November, at a pace and time which I’d prefer not to divulge (hint: do you know the world record for a full marathon? My half-marathon time was about that…plus another forty minutes). But still, I crossed the finish line upright, doing something that resembled running.

And then I basically started to fall apart. Pushing myself through a half-marathon with inadequate training led to injuries (shocking, I know). In the days leading up to the race I developed plantar fasciitis, which is Latin for “holy fuck the bottom of my foot hurts.” It hurt like crazy throughout the race, and kept hurting even though I didn’t even attempt to run for weeks after the race. So I fell back into the same rut, now officially a pattern: Run a Fall race without training properly; feel like hell; take the rest of the year off; then attempt to get back in the saddle in mid-winter (New Years’ resolution!); have that go poorly; stop running again. Oh and don’t write so much as a paragraph the entire time, but find plenty of time for work all day and mindless TV at night. Yuck.

I hit rock bottom last month when I committed the cardinal sin for runners: I signed up for a race (a 10-miler) and then I didn’t show up. Didn’t even go. I do have a bright orange polyester half-zip from the race folded up neatly on the shelf, mocking me for all eternity. Rock bottom got worse somehow a few weeks ago, when my left hand and left arm started tingling, with some intensity, like they had gone to sleep. A quick search on DuckDuckGo reveals that left arm/hand tingling is either no big deal, or it could be a sign of imminent death. One of the two. I didn’t die, not yet, so it’s probably not the imminent death thing, but the feeling that my left arm and hand have gone to sleep hasn’t gone away for a few weeks. Something is going on. Probably a pinched nerve, likely resulting from sitting all day, slowly dying as I trade bits of my soul for a paycheck.

But like the man in the wheelbarrow said, I’m not dead yet. And you only fail if you stop trying. So let’s try this again. I’m going to find another race, sign up, and get back in shape. And hopefully write a blurb about it every now and then.