Mea Culpa, Homeskillets.

I know I've been a big wiener lately. For that, my sheepish apologies.

It's been an eye-opener for me to learn that I apparently only have so much extra energy--that of the non 9-to-5, bill paying, cat wrangling, handling my personal shit variety--in the tank, but the past few weeks have taught me that this is indeed the case. If I want to fervently pursue something outside the norm, another "extra" is inevitably going to fall by the wayside, and the first and most obvious one to nix is my navel-gazing here...but rest assured, there's actually an entirely NEW form of navel gazing that's been going down, kemosabes! The LITERAL kind, whereby I look down at my feet as they haul my ass up a hill and I suppress the urge to dry heave! Ha! Fuck yeah!

That's right. I've been spending the past month and a half preparing for my first half-marathon, which I hope to run at the end of May if I can schedule it around a work obligation. I'm totally amped about it.

Oh, running. This commercial is a pretty spot-on depiction of our tumultuous relationship, fraught with breakups, duplicity, and denial. Before our first nearly seven year breakup during my brief foray into cross-country in high school it was already very unhealthy. Lots of "awwww, you know I want to get with you, running, but my knee is killing me, baby--I'm gonna sit this meet out; but you know I'll be thinking of you (said in Barry White's voice). The physical results were fantastic, but only insomuch as they enabled me to eat four Otis Spunkmeyer cookies (wait, was that REALLY the name of those cookies? I just had to look that up...how come at the time that never plussed me? If some dude with the last name 'Spunkmeyer' personally offered me any foodstuffs I would immediately recoil and look at his hands) for lunch every day and not feel gross about it. I certainly didn't try as hard as I could have to strengthen my endurance, cutting corners at practices and missing lots of them entirely. I only participated one season and then pretty much shelved all athletic endeavors until my gym bunny phase toward the end of college.

As I've mentioned in other posts, it really wasn't until the iPOD Nano/Nike pedometer integration that I thought, "maybe now that I've matured we can work things out, running," since music has always been my key enabler with this activity. Have you TRIED running more than a few minutes without music? Have you? It completely sucks. In fact, I'm almost positive that even back in 1996 my walkman and Jagged Little Pill tape accompanied me to most of my cross-country meets (you'll just have to take my word for it that the lyrics "Wassamatter Maryjaaaane?" take on special, cockle-warming significance when you pass a girl barfing into a storm drain). No music, no motivation.

And yet, even with the wonders of technology, laziness persists. A week off turns into three that morph into nine, weather extremes and minor injuries conveniently lengthening each hiatus--"it's freaking SNOWING, I can't run in this!" You exclaim, fully believing yourself until your friend Majo calls your bluff and says, "If I can, you can." And you can. And I did.

With a little less than a month of preparation after a four month break from running for my first official, timed 5k I woke up at 5:45 on March 1st, left my house in the dark, and sat on the A train for over an hour, steeling myself for a cold, hilly run. Particularly the latter, since this looped course had us running a couple of smaller hills before making a vengefully long incline out Ft. Tyron park. Yeah, and I wasn't kidding about the dry-heaving thing--my body's delightful reaction to a sudden surge in heart rate when tackling a big hill is to ransack the contents of my stomach, even if there are none. So when faced with the choice between puking or walking in this instance, I opted to walk for about a half minute until I cleared the hill and was able to regain my pace and clock in just under 36 minutes, an initial disappointment. "If I had just kept running up the hill it would have been under 35," I thought, my target time for a 5k.

Then I looked around. The jacked elite runners were long past the finish line by this point, obviously, but I was still swarmed by spandex clad, ear-muffed participants, the kind you see individually on the streets in winter who look maddeningly unperturbed, and you declare/think to yourself, "wow, they're nuts. That's dedication." I still don't feel like one of those people-maybe I never will--but that morning was the closest approximation to that I've experienced. And you know what I want to do with that feeling?? Wait for it....I want to CHASE IT! Don't get me started!

Ergo, running and I are officially back on and pretty hot and heavy. If a full marathon is the equivalent of shotgunning it at City Hall, then I suppose the half is akin to moving in together; not quite as scary, yet intimidating nonetheless. Will I stick to my schedule? Will some unforeseen injury thwart me? Will running remember to pick up its socks and leave the toilet seat down?

I'll keep you posted. This time I think I mean it.