Gut Rubber

I saw a student wearing this shirt today.  I wonder if the sweatshop workers who made it would find it ironic.  Or, you know, totally idiotic.

Maybe you were worried.  You knew I was going to run a marathon, but you hadn’t heard from me since.

“That was like two weeks ago,” you think.  “Did he make it?”

Yes.  Barely.

And while others might think, “hey, I ran a whole damn marathon, so now I’m going to eat three pizzas and drink a lot of beer because I deserve it,” my first thought was instead, “I really want to do this again.”

And then I had the pizza-beer thought.

I’ve heard that there are two distinctly different reactions upon completing one’s first marathon: 1) That was fun, but I can’t wait to do it better, and 2) Cars are the greatest invention ever.  I may have discovered a third, albeit subconscious, response: 3) This is the perfect way to turn my self-destructive tendencies into a positive thing.

My goal for the next one is to take close to an hour off my time.  This may sound difficult, but it’s akin to removing a bucket of water from a slow-moving river.  The super-challenge (for me, at least), is to get to 4:00:59 by the end of the year.

Well, that and staying alive.

For sure: 5/21 - Minneapolis.  10/11 - Chicago.

Likely: 4/25 - Nashville (1/2).  9/13 - St. Charles, MO (1/2).

Unlikely, but hoped for: 7/11 - Grandfather Mountain, NC.  8/15-16 - Pike’s Peak, CO.  11/29 - Seattle, WA.

It is now officially less than two weeks until the Knoxville Marathon, which I am foolishly spending a lot of money to travel to and then run, if you can call what I do running (my standard: just fast enough to get in trouble if I were doing it at a public swimming pool).  It’s dumb on a lot of levels for me to do this, but I think that most people think of recreational distance running as sort of stupid anyway, so a least I’m consistent.

Faith and I ran the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Run (a five-miler) on Saturday.  It was a massive event - something like 10,000 runners - and it was a blast.  How can you not have fun in a race that features a “costume” entry division?  It’s impossible not to enjoy yourself.  Unless, of course, you’re slow enough to be stuck running with the people dressed in foam rubber shamrock costumes.  I justified it by claiming to be dressed as someone’s drunk Irish uncle.  Which I sort of always am, I guess.

Faith was sweet enough to run alongside me the entire race, though she shamed me by going on to run another six miles at the park afterward, her next-to-last long run before Knoxville (where she’ll be shaming a lot more people in the half-marathon).  We finished just slightly slower than twice as slow as the guy who won it.  The same guy, incidentally, who fitted me with some new shoes last week and nearly choked on his own disbelief when I told him that I was running a marathon at the end of the month, and that I was trying to “catch up” on my training since I’d spent most of January in a seated or reclined position.

So this is my last week of any serious runs before the big(ger), slow(er) one.  I’m telling myself I’m going to go for 20 on Wednesday, which is probably wishful thinking (I got punched in the face by all 17 of the miles in my long run last Wednesday), but probably no more wishful than the thinking that told me to register for a marathon in March after almost zero running in the last two weeks of December and the first three weeks of January.

If I don’t make it through this foolishness alive, it’s been nice knowing (or not knowing) you.

I’ve been eating a lot less meat for a few months now.  It’s not really vegetarian because I eat fish (which science tells us are animals), and because, when some probably too-elaborate conditions are met, I’ll eat just about any meat.  For example, if you are a farmer who raised and then slaughtered a cow, and you offer me a piece of said cow to eat, I will gladly accept.  Especially if said cow’s filets are crusted in molasses and cayenne like my brother cooks them.  Or, for example, you are a hunter and offer me some venison you shot; I’ll totally eat that.

If you raise or kill the animal, I’ll eat it.

Or if you’re my mom and bought a turkey at Kroger and then spent a long time cooking it, I’m going to eat that as well.  Because I may have odd, self-imposed dietary boundaries, but I am not a total idiot.

But I still often say that I’m a vegetarian when I’m around other people.  I’m not trying to fool anyone, but it’s just so much easier to throw the socially familiar term out there than to go into details about what I will and will not actually eat.  Besides, when I identify myself as a vegetarian, most people also assume that I’m some sort of fair-trade-latte-sipping, liberal, gun-hating, academic commie-sympathizer, which is also true, so it’s pretty convenient shorthand for a lot of my identity, and usually keeps people from inviting me to church with them.

Except the gun thing.  I actually sort of love guns within the right context.  But don’t worry, fellow fringe leftists.  I feel appropriately guilty and awkward about it.

And when I’m inevitably asked why I choose to eat this way, I usually just cite frustration with the commercial meat industry, which is true, but also an incomplete explanation.  And that’s what I’m going for here, I think.  A more complete (but still incomplete) explanation.

I have a friend who is the best kind of drinking buddy because she can be interested in a conversation on just about any topic.  But what she can’t stand is when we get stuck in a conversation, say trying to remember the name of that other book by the woman who wrote Fried Green Tomatoes, and I pull out my most recent in a string of too-fancy mobile phones and do what you have either just done or are about to do and begin consulting the almighty web for information.  This kills conversations for her.  To her, when I do this, it’s like I’ve given up on thinking about it a little more, or giving up on being nagged by a question until I get home and look for the answer on a bookshelf.  For her, at least half of the joy of these conversations is the brain-wracking they inspire.

Of course, she recognizes that the internet and all the various means of accessing it (including pretentious phones) are really little more than newer, shinier versions of getting information the old-fashioned way, and that the old-fashioned way was once the new techno-arrogant wayof doing things, but that’s not her point.  Her point is that it’s a little sad when we get another step further away from the satisfaction that we used to get from rumination and reflection and replace it with Wikipedia-fast solutions.

I began to think of meat a little bit like that a few months ago.  I don’t think it’s wrong to eat meat (though I won’t argue with or try to convince those who do).  Instinct and pleasure are evidence enough to me that it’s something we’re at least evolved to do.  But what I do not want to do any more is add distance between my food and the source of it.  I know it’s mildly hypocritical to apply this thinking only to meat or only to food, but this is where I’m starting.

I’m not a vegetarian, but for the sake of convenience, I’ll sometimes tell people I am, and you can know better.

After a night of doing to sleeping
what stumbling does to dancing,
I am swept up by the broom of the morning,
that glinting idiot metaphor,
clumsyknuckling me the way an old drunk does
trying to remember the way a necktie goes.

I wander into and out of the bathroom
delirious with the concrete taskiness
of evacuating, washing, mirroring, salving.

The other day I was transfixed
by a globe in the principal’s office
at the school where my friend teaches.
The blue plastic oceans bent out toward
my lunatic face like a joke.

Whatever yearning, longing, hoping,
expecting, and believing
are supposed to point toward,
I’m losing sight of.

I stay awake all night and never see the moon.
Neck-deep in my own life,
I see the brainless tilt of an ocean
and think only of decoding it.

I have so often heard the phrase “a trained killer” that, though I have not, to my knowledge, ever had a potentially deadly encounter with a trained killer, I am conditioned to fear this.  I suspect that you are as well.  “Dude,” your stoner friends and mine have more than once said, “be careful.  That dude is a trained killer.”

But, my good friend, do not sleep so restlessly and walk so fearfully.  Being attacked by a trained killer is actually much better than being attacked by an untrained killer, with his apologizing for the stops and starts and pauses to consult the manual.  The trained killer is swift, efficient, and clinically thorough in the dispatch of his life-ending duties, but the untrained killer relies mostly upon dumb luck and the vaguely destructive nature of the universe to stumble through his own incompetancy and missteps.  The untrained killer will likely complete the gruesome task, but he will first ruin your day and likely his own before the work is finished.

So please, regard still carefully, but perhaps more kindly, the trained killers among us.

the 25th of the month - the day on which my emusic account rolls over and I ge to download the only legal music I listen to.

8 minutes - the amount of time it will take my Trader Joe’s Chicken Pomadoro frozen entree (all natural, thanks) to cook.

30-40 minutes - the amount of time before I begin to regret eating the entire Trader Joe’s Chicken Pomadoro frozen entree.

9 days - how long it has been since I was not some form of quite ill.

5 days - how long I have before I must return to the actual work of teaching and being a grad student.

4.5 days - the amount of time we all have left to get in on donating to John Carrier’s Las Vegas Marathon fundraising.

Damn, I wish Joe Biden was my homeboy.

I ran my second half-marathon of the year over the weekend.  It was in Iowa, which we went to because the course was allegedly flat (it was sooo not) and because it was cheap (which it was, relatively speaking).  This was supposed to be my first full marathon, but a new job as a bartender (and the attendant “benefits” thereof) and the onset of school derailed my training (and my writing and sleeping and and eating just about all the other things I love), so this turned into a half.  It was great, though.  We traveled with friends, met up and ran with more friends, and basically did all of the things we wanted to do - I finished the miles and got to hang out with John (I’m also donating to his fundraising efforts for the Las Vegas Marathon, and so should you), and Faith knocked out a full marathon PR and carved away a few more of the minutes between herself and a Boston qualifying time.  Everything went really well.

So, of course I can’t leave it well enough alone.

I’m still determined to run a full marathon.  I ran my first serious (for me, not for the stroller-pushers cruising past me) race back in March,  so I intend to complete the marathon before April next year.  And though it got me nearly laughed out of the room when I told Faith and some of our friends who ran with us this weekend that I want to run both the Austin and Knoxville marathons in the next 6 months, that’s my new plan.  Plus the St. Jude Memphis Half-Marathon on the same weekend that John runs Vegas.  Plus, I’m guessing, a lot of painkillers between now and April.

What could possibly go wrong?

I don’t want to take credit for it, but I think that there’s a decent chance that Runner’s World was more than a little inspired by my spotty, but still ongoing predilection for confessions with their most recent blogpost.

What’s new, you ask?  Well, I’m bartending a little, writing a little (very little, unfortunately), running more (little by little) in preparation for my first marathon, and doing that daily trying-to-keep-shit-together thing I find myself doing when I’m not in school with every moment of the day planned and scheduled for me.

And that’s about it.