Welcome to Sunday Morning Hot Tea where I write about a little something up top then answer a legal question for you down below.
This week, I am giving you one from the blog archive (blarchive!), written before the newsletter ever existed. It’s called Run, and I enjoy it. If you’ve read it before, feel free to skip it. You won’t hurt my feelings, though I have made some tweaks, additions, and changes.
I’ll be back next week with a story about my first exposure to standup comedy and a legal question about fake Tom Cruise. For now, please enjoy Run.
Run
People often describe runners as sort of smug. For instance, someone may casually slip in during a conversation, I've finished three half marathons. For me, that's actually true. I did finish three half marathons. You wouldn't know it to look at me because I don't really look like a runner. I look more like the wacky best friend in a rom com.
But I have finished three half marathon races. Notice, I say "finished" them rather than "run" them. There is a distinct difference. What I do is not quite running. It's described by bystanders as a “slog,” or “narrowly escaping the scene of a crime.”
Running skills aside, it really is hard to keep myself from bragging. I think I’ve earned a little bragging rights. I put one foot in front of the other one and ran those distances. Especially when put together, that’s a pretty long way. Although I am told you are NOT supposed to put them together and say you have finished one-and-a-half marathons. According to real runners, that is “misleading”, even though the math checks out if you ask me.
I do have a friend who is an actual, accomplished runner named Jody. Unlike other runners, she is not smug. She is far worse. She's optimistic. She says kind things to me like, "You can do it!" and "You'll be fine!" which is true for her. She can do it and she will be fine. Me on the other hand?
Jody is so athletic she looks like a gazelle in a Disney movie who made a deal with a witch to become a princess. She’s both beautiful and fast. I believe birds land on her shoulder when she runs. She tells me all the time, "You can do it, I believe in you!" despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
After I had run two of my three half marathons and hung up my long-distance racing shoes forever, Jody called and asked me to run the Cowtown Half Marathon in Fort Worth, Texas with her. It is a historical race that snakes through rustic downtown Fort Worth, Dallas's cowboy-boots wearing sister city. My initial reaction was, "Under no circumstances will I do that." I had not trained. I was not hydrated. There are videos on the internet of people crapping their pants when they run races unprepared, and I didn't need any help in the pants-crapping department.
But Jody was insistent. "You're amazing! You have already finished two half marathons. How is this any different?" I still said no.
"You'll get a medal," she offered. I remained unconvinced. "Plus, they have chocolate milk at the finish line."
This I considered. Somewhere in my misguided brain, I convinced myself that it would not be that hard. After all, I had finished two other races this long. Surely that meant I could I run a half marathon with no notice, no training, no water, right? I had done it twice before. I would later learn that just because you’ve done something before does not mean it’s a guaranteed positive result. It would be like if your grandfather agreed to get into a fist fight just because he took out some Nazis back in World War 2. Maybe there were some legitimate acts of valor way back when, but now the valor has been replaced with delusion.
Nevertheless, I agreed to do the race. When it came to race day, I found myself standing in the 13-minute mile corral with the other hopeful runners. Because I was delusional, I told myself I could keep that pace. Jody was way ahead in the 7- or 8-minute mile zone, rightfully so.
Then, the gun went off, and the race started. I looked around, and I was doing it. I was killing it, trucking right along at a 13-minute-mile pace. I kept it up for three whole quarters of a mile. So far so good. Suddenly, everything from the neck down just gave up. I was surrounded by cheerful, nice people, including the pacer whose job it is to run with the pack and keep everyone on pace to finish at goal time. They're also like personal cheerleaders. When my pacer saw me start to falter, she tried to cheer me on.
Already defeated this early on, I told her, "Go on without me." Soon, she and the rest of the group disappeared over the horizon up ahead.
Another pace group went past, then another and another. In short order, I ended up at the very back of the pack with the walkers. Much like the zombies of the same name, walkers totter along, arms outstretched, hungry, confused, and dead inside.
Everyone at the back of that group was just trying to finish, and I fit right in. To my credit, I never quit. I made it to mile 3, then 7, then 9. It was right around that time that the whisper that my body had been making, saying Stop! Just stop it and save yourself, became a blood curdling scream of, If you don’t stop right now, I’m going to do something dramatic. It turns out my body can be just as much of an asshole as me under the right circumstances.
Although my brain said, “We are buckling down and doing this,” my body disagreed. I knew just how my body felt because that is when my foot broke. Just a little bit. It was only a small bone, but according to the doctors I saw later, your foot is full of those, and you actually need all of them.
Mid-race, I thought I would be fine. When I took another step, though, I knew I was out. I sat on a curb and took my shoe off to survey the damage. Wholly focused on my broken little foot bone, I didn't notice anything going on around me. This is how I missed the ten-foot-tall sheriff in a cowboy hat who approached me.
“You all right, little lady? You almost sat in a pile of horse shit.” Because it's Fort Worth and of course I almost did.
Out of nowhere, a frail older man ran between the sheriff and me. He was basically a skeleton in a fanny pack and a tank top. He was trucking along, ahead of the walker pack.
At first, I thought, Good for you, dude. Then the sheriff said with a chuckle, “I guess you’re going to let that old geezer beat you.”
My body said, “Yeah, I am going to let him beat me because I am too busy dying here. I am going to throw myself off this bridge and into the river below and let it take me away.”
Ever the optimist, my brain said, “No, we are not going to let him beat us. Get up!" I listened and shoved my shoe back on my broken foot. With a renewed resolve, I stood up and fixed my eyes on the back of the grey head in front of me.
Perhaps he was someone's grandfather, a lifelong husband and love of someone’s life. Maybe he was a war veteran or a titan of business. I didn't care. I wanted him to eat my dust.
I put a target on the back of his head and thought, If I can run faster than that man, I will feel like I won. This, of course, wasn't true. It wasn't even rational. Instead it was the combination of my bruised ego and good old fashioned jealousy. Still, at the time, it seemed like the answer.
I ran as fast as I could right at the older man and managed to pass him. I was shocked that I actually passed him then disappointed that I wasn't immediately showered with roses. With him in my rearview, I was forced to now drag my leg beside me, right past the 12- mile marker. A half marathon is 13.1 miles, which I’m sure you know if you’ve ever been cut off by a Subaru in a Whole Foods parking lot.
I still had a little over a mile to go, and I felt in my stomach I couldn't make it. I believed it was time to call the wagon. The wagon is a truck that they pile all the lifeless corpses into then wheel you back to the parking lot and give you a kids-size jug of chocolate milk. I decided that the next race official I saw, I would gesture that I needed help and officially tap out.
That is when I saw a woman running toward me, salmon-style, up the race course. She had a banana in one hand and a medal in the other, yelling, "You can do it!" It was my Disney princess, Jody. She had already finished the race, claimed her post-race snack of a banana, and turned around to make sure I also finished.
When she got up next to me, my body really started to give out. With every step, I accepted the inevitability of my death. I would perish on the race course, becoming roadkill for the yuppie elite. They would bury my body in the Stockyard, a service officiated by a rodeo clown, casket pulled by show horses. Though I was prepared, I couldn’t stage my dramatic death - I had a little bird on my shoulder, whose voice sounded an awful lot like Jody's, telling me that I could finish and that I shouldn't give up.
“You can do it,” she said again. “Come on, we'll do it together.” This enthusiasm to run again came despite the fact that she had already finished the race, much faster and more gracefully, I imagined. The race photos later confirmed it. Still, she was ready to re-run the final stretch just to make sure I’d make it myself.
When the finish line was in sight and with Jody by my side, I began to cry. I cried because my foot hurt, of course, but I also cried because I was grateful. How lucky I was to have a friend who finished the race then willingly exercised again just for me. I was also grateful that despite the set backs, I didn't give up. I also cried with relief because I knew I was never going to run a race that long again.
And most of all I cried with joy, because I crossed that finish line. The gentleman who had no clue I even existed may have finished before me, or maybe a few steps after. More important was the person beside me, my human gazelle and one-woman cheer squad.
I let out a relieved, “Woo!” when they handed me my medal as I crossed the finish line The medal was nice, but the real prize was something more. The real prize I found inside. That is, inside the nearby tent where I was given the chocolate milk I was previously promised. I raised the jug to Jody then turned it upside down into my mouth and drank it down, so cold and sweet, feeling so glad to have won.
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