Ew, Running

In which I make bad choices. TW for yet another dead dad mention.

Something that you should know about me is that I have a lot of audacity, and it leads me to sign up for things that are none of my business. I get so determined to do the thing that all logic gets thrown out the window. Also, if anyone dares to look at me and say “hmm, hey Brooke, have you considered that you are really unqualified for this task?” my hotheaded (read: stupid) nature will have me set to do the task more than ever before. 

So, anyway, I signed up for a 10k. 

I think it’s important to note here that I married a marathon runner. I have witnessed this man waking up at the ass crack of dawn in the middle of winter (sometimes when it’s RAINING) to go on a run. I have seen, first hand, just how much your nipples can bleed after a race. We have had extensive conversations about how some people shit themselves while crossing a finish line. A devotion to running is not a joke, it can be terrible for your body and downright torture if done without care. 

But, little ol’ me liked the idea of wearing a pair of HOKAS and silly little running shorts. When I imagined running, I saw myself jogging through the neighborhood, listening to an audiobook (cool girl alert!), sweating like hot people sweat, my feet hitting the pavement in satisfying strides. The idea of being good at something that I was always comically bad at appealed to me greatly. That I could see and feel myself getting better, my soft legs becoming strong and resilient, my (shitty) lungs breathing easier over time. It felt really good to picture myself saying, “oh, I’m a runner” when people asked what things I liked to do. I liked to imagine their faces looking really impressed as they say “oh wow, I can’t even run a mile”. 

Well, guess who can’t even run a mile.

Friggin me. 

When I sat in the passenger’s seat of my car the day I signed up for the 10k, I didn’t think about how high school Brooke elected to walk the mile at a leisurely stroll in gym class. I was just thinking about how this was a great excuse to buy new shoes. I am who I am. 

I proudly declared my $120 race purchase to my, once again, marathoner husband. The one who heard me complain about running a hundred times a day. I insisted, cockily, that I could always just walk the whole thing. I had hiked before, how many miles could a 10k possibly be? 

The thing about my husband is that he will never tell me I’m embarking on a terrible decision, because he is very nice. Instead, he told me how great of an idea this was, but to remember that races are typically timed, and there is a time limit. He thinks that it’s a 15 minute mile, but he doesn’t know off the top of his head (because my guy runs an 8 minute mile, and therefore does not need to know this information). 

The last time I went on a hike, I walked a 21 minute mile. When I have done 5k races sparingly in the past (entirely motivated by the T-Shirts that come in the race packets) I have always been at the tail end of the pack. It went: the serious runners, the casual runners, the walkers, the moms with strollers, some space for a pause, and then me. 

It turns out that races do not offer refunds. I am running this race. 

Running with the summer sun beating against the back of my neck is the cruelest form of punishment. Gatorade and water is cloying in my throat, and air will not reach my lungs. Everytime I go to run I feel like I’m going to hurl. One time, as my feet thudded clumsily on the pavement, I hoped that I would stumble and break my ankle. I needed an excuse to quit. 

Training for this race is the hardest thing I have ever done. I started by running on the treadmill at the gym, and once I started to feel like I was making progress (aka being able to run very slowly for exactly one song length), my dad died. I got the call that he was actively dying when I was about to be on the treadmill. I cried the whole way out the gym. I stopped running. 

I still haven’t been back to the gym. Each time I think about going I’m stricken by the irrational anxiety that someone else will die. I am avoiding this problem by running outside.

Just in case you didn’t know, running outside is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Any piece of elevation is pure agony. All of the progress I had felt at the gym vanished, and the worst part was, after several runs,I wasn’t improving. I cried through the (copious) sweat several times, acutely aware that running was not improving my mental or physical health. I still couldn’t run a full mile, and by October I needed to run 6. I felt like a failure.

I wish I could tell you that this is an article about how I overcame these feelings and went on to run the full race. But, it hasn’t happened yet. I am in the thick of running feeling hard and unforgiving. Finishing the race next month feels like an impossibility. I know I will not run the entire thing, and there is a high likelihood that I will not be able to finish it at all. Despite this, I will be showing up on race day, aware that there may be a portion of my day where a kind volunteer tells me that I need to get off the race track so that they can turn it back into a normal road. Cars will honk at me, and because it is Maryland, they will most likely run me over. I know that if this happens, my husband, fresh off the marathon that he’s doing the same day, will be there for me anyway -- whether we meet at the finish line or a random city street. Afterwards, I will get drinks with my friends and we’ll joke about how stupid it was to sign up for a 10k when you haven’t run a mile. Maybe the most important part of all of this is trying the hard thing anyway, pushing past embarrassment and failure just to prove that you can feel those things and still be alive.

But, sometimes, when I’m at my most delusional, as I’m tying my running shoes and taking selfies in my running outfits, or when I’m feeling the wind brush against my face on a cool evening run, I get caught in the idea that maybe there’s hope somewhere in all the sweat and the wheezing and the desperation for a broken toe. Like maybe, if I keep going, I’ll cross that finish line. Maybe I’ll even be running when I do.