One solution was a simple one: running. Running was hard and would burn the most calories quickly. I was too embarrassed to go to the gym because I had never been in a gym before. When I peeked into the one on campus and saw a bunch of machines with weird levers and arms and ramps, I kept on walking. Running didn’t need a gym. Plus I had sneakers and workout clothes that I’d bought for dorm lounging, so I didn’t need anything new in order to run. So, once or twice every semester, I’d put on my Nike Air Pegasus sneakers, still streaked with paint from making banners for my high school’s spirit week, and vow to run around campus.
The University of Tampa may have not been challenging to me, but it does have a gorgeous campus, anchored by Plant Hall, an old Victorian hotel that served as the center of school. Between Plant Hall and the Hillsborough River was Plant Park, which was small but stuffed with tall and squat palm trees, crabgrass, and a sidewalk. That’s where I’d always start my run, with a spring in my step and determination to run 3 miles to counteract the plate of nachos I’d had for dinner the night before.
Yes, I am going to do this! Running is great, I will love it! I thought as I bounded away. Yes! This is . . . hard! And hot! But I am going to love it! The spring turned into a muted bounce. Think about something else, like . . . Shakespeare! Or Dan! Or, no, not Dan! The muted bounce became a shuffle, then a walk, and then I was that teenager again, dragging her feet up the cul-de-sac after thinking it might be nice for a nun to find her passed out on their lawn. I’d make it about a half mile before stopping in a humid mess of sweat and panting. My lungs burned, my clothes stuck to my body, and this time there was no ceiling fan to lie under to cool off, nor rollerblades to strap on—just a window AC unit in a cinder block dorm. I didn’t like how I felt when I wasn’t working out, but if turning myself into a heaving, sweating heap was the alternative, I had to find another way.
There was one aberration to this pattern. In the spring semester of my junior year, I shipped off to Oxford University as part of the University of Tampa honors program’s study abroad exchange, which sent me to study post-World War II British theater and Shakespearean drama at the same cost as my University of Tampa tuition—and I could keep my scholarships. I convinced my parents to let me go after I won another scholarship to pay for my flights to and from the U.K.
I’d like to say that I set out every day to bramble forth through the English meadows and countryside and that’s how I fell in love with having time by myself while exercising, but I really walked every day because I didn’t have another choice.
The flat I shared with six other Americans was just outside the city center. I didn’t have a car or a bike. I didn’t come over with much money, and most of that was reserved for bars, so I didn’t take taxis, and the only bus I rode was to and from London.
So I walked everywhere: to Tesco, Boots, the library that was once a twelfth-century church, one of the two Gap stores in town, whichever bar the Americans met at that night, meetings with my instructors (I didn’t have actual classes; instead I met my professors once a week, go away and do some research, then come back with a six- to eight-page paper on what I’d learned).
I didn’t exactly mind all this walking—even in the rain, which was persistent. Plugging my ears with an iPod while walking wasn’t a thing then because iPods didn’t exist, so I stepped out the door and walked down High Street each morning with a blank mind. I let it wander around, with thoughts centering on calculating what time it was at home, themes in whatever Shakespeare play I was writing about that week, and that cute guy from the Naval Academy who lived in another American house in our program. I liked showing up with red cheeks, as if I’d accomplished something through the brisk effort of getting there.
When my dad visited (separately from my mom, of course—she had come a few weeks earlier), he went with me on my daily rounds and was agog at how much I walked.
“How do you walk all that way all the time?” he asked after he flopped into one of the two IKEA chairs in our living room. “That must be at least a mile each way. And then you walk everywhere in between.”
I’d never thought about it. I did it because I didn’t have another option to get from one place to another. Like when I mowed the lawn as a teenager, the brain space was a nice benefit, but one I didn’t walk to achieve. I didn’t notice a big change in my body, but was surprised that my clothes were a little baggy given the English penchant to drink a lot more throughout the day than I did at home—especially since I was legal at twenty years old—and that our frequent post-bar stop specialized in fries doused with shredded cheese and mayonnaise. English students were also a lot more covered up than my peacocking Tampa peers, draping themselves in layers of sweaters and scarves and raincoats while still managing to look stylish and appealing.
When I returned to America, and to Tampa, I fell back into old habits: feeling like the Hulk and looking for shortcuts to staying thin, then trying to run and flailing around before I stopped that too. After my last attempt to run during the fall of my senior year, I gave up on exercise and instead opted for the black coffee diet: Get a giant cup from the school’s brand-new Starbucks and then go as long as I could that day without eating.
This became a place for my former competitive spirit to live. It became a game: How long could I last? How long could I ignore my hunger? If I made it to three o’clock, could I make it to four? Maybe five? Once I made it all the way through dinner.
Playing this stupid game was much easier than trying to find a new kind of exercise that worked for me. I was still flabbier and always tired, but I felt slimmer and chalked up the exhaustion to the vague idea of “college.” I was editor of the student newspaper by then, applying to graduate schools and keeping up an active social life. Of course I was tired. Of course I wouldn’t have time to eat full meals.
I didn’t cover up so much at the pool, and I let my sorority sisters talk me into wearing lower-rise pants, then bought a thong to wear with them. While I had a few shaky moments when I pushed the food timeline too far—like when I nearly blacked out in the middle of the street while walking to my newspaper office—I knew I was not my ninety-pound sorority sister. I can see now that I was already on a dangerous path, but I kept telling myself I wasn’t even close to doing to myself what she was doing to herself. The coffee plan worked—for a little while.
chapter 2
RUN FOR THE HEALTH OF IT 5K
JUNE 17, 2006
New Jersey Marathon — Mile 0
After the half marathoners started their race, I sat on the bench of a picnic table and listened to a mix of twelve songs that were played on every radio station at that moment but hadn’t grown stale to me yet. I ate half a granola bar. I checked Twitter. There were no lines for the Porta-Potty, and I hit them once, then twice. I pulled off my sweats and stuffed them into the clear plastic bag I would check, ate the other half of the granola bar, and sat back down on the bench.
Police with German shepherds patrolled the start area, and a helicopter buzzed overhead. This race was less than three weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings. I’d been searched before I entered Monmouth Park, and the finish line was already cordoned off. There would be no wall of screaming fans there to pull me through to the end. Mom planned to hand me a Clif Bar at mile 19.5, then drive to the finish line so she could stand as close to it as she could, despite me begging her to stand anywhere but there. It’s not that I thought anything would happen—this race was too small a target, especially when a 32,000-plus-person race was running through Philadelphia in the Broad Street Run on the same day. But my heart was still raw after the bombings, not just because of heavy sorrow, but because the targets of that attack were people like my mom. I couldn’t lose Mom. I didn’t want to take a chance even if it was a slim one. But she ignored me.
I closed my eyes again and turned up the volume of my iPhone so Icona Pop blasted in my ears. Breathe in, breathe out. I’ve never been big into warm-ups. I didn’t get the point when I wa
s about to expel so much energy in a race. Shouldn’t I be saving it? I maintained this despite what every running coach and every running expert has ever told me since I started running in 2006, and then writing about running for Runner’s World and the New York Times in 2010. I wasn’t going to change anything on race day, especially this one, when I was about to attempt conquering a distance that had vexed me three times before—once through injury and twice through terrible performances.
I peed one more time, stuffed my phone deep into my bag, slid a sleeve of Clif Shot Bloks—the package already torn slightly open—into my pocket, then hustled over to the gear-check trucks, because I knew they’d pack up when the national anthem started to play. Today the anthem was followed by “Sweet Caroline,” in honor of Boston (it’s the Red Sox’s song). Around me, runners were dressed in neon or shades of blue and yellow, some wearing shirts that read BOSTON: UNITED WE RUN, which had been sold at the expo. I tried not to cry. In the last seven months, Superstorm Sandy had destroyed my favorite place in the world, and my favorite sport had been subjected to terror. And that wasn’t even getting into the mess I’d made of my personal life in January.
I was in the last of four corrals. Each corral received the same treatment: A bugle played out “Call to Post,” a cheeky reference to the race starting at a horse track, followed by a recording of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” played at the exact moment the front of the corral crossed the starting line timing mat. I’d heard the same song at the start of the Chicago Marathon.
That’s when tears pricked my eyes. Not just because of that song in that moment at that time—we were about to run through towns that had been picked up and chucked aside by Superstorm Sandy, and Springsteen wrote “Born to Run” about Asbury Park, which we’d run through twice, but on the street parallel to the ocean instead of the boardwalk because the boards were floating somewhere in the Atlantic. No, tears pricked my eyes because I knew what lay ahead. This wasn’t my first race or even my first marathon. I wasn’t going in blind. I knew what was coming: Pain. Anguish. A vise squeezed onto my legs, lungs, hips, and everything else in between. The always-hovering threat that I’d poop my pants. And the finish line, where I’d either revel in the glory of crushing my goal time or not. And after eighteen weeks of beating my body into shape for this moment on this day, what if I failed? What if, with all the bad decisions I’d made and how terribly my life had gone in the last seven months, I still couldn’t get this one thing right?
“D CORRAL!” an announcer called. We shuffled forward, a swaying mass of nerves and energy with a slight sheen of terror.
“In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream . . .”
And we were off.
Seven years earlier, I stood on another starting line, this one in Medford, New Jersey, with a few hundred instead of a few thousand people. The goal distance was much shorter: 3.1 miles. I didn’t run my first 5K because I suddenly realized the joy of prancing around in a sports bra and running shorts, or to raise money for a charity, or experience that mythical runner’s high, or even because I was curious as to what all the fuss was about (by 2005, U.S. road races had nearly 9.5 million finishers, about 2.5 million more than in 1995, according to Running USA).
I ran it because a magazine paid me $750 to do it.
After college, I came back to South Jersey to work on a master’s degree in English literature at Rutgers University—Camden. I thought I’d like to be an English professor. Twelve out of thirteen PhD programs I applied to thought otherwise. Rutgers let me into their Camden master’s program with a promise to look at me again if I did well there—and Camden was a short drive from my mom’s house, which meant I could live rent-free. I was still out of shape, and my black-coffee-no-food diet didn’t work so well when I was living with a mother who expected me to eat breakfast with her. While going to school at night, I worked part-time again for my dad’s company, writing press releases and newsletters for the marketing department, and I could not resist complimentary soft pretzel Fridays.
I tried some of those ridiculous magazine workouts that promised a beach! ready! body! In six! easy! moves! One featured exercises done in bed. The model, who looked like she was fifteen, wore pink menswear-inspired pajamas and did things like . . . stretch her arms in the air. I like stretching in bed, and I dig menswear pajamas, but it took one rotation through a workout of stretching into a yawn and lifting my feet above a pillow and then spreading my legs in what I assumed was something sex-related, wink wink, before I realized it was bullshit and would do nothing to get me back in shape.
And I was single again. After bouncing around between hookups through most of college, I met a medical student training to become an Air Force surgeon the last month of my senior year of college. He walked by my room while I was making cookies with the door open, and stopped to tell me they smelled good. Three weeks later, we took each other’s virginity, and we swore we’d make it work while he went to medical school in Maine and I went back to home to New Jersey. As with most long-distance relationships, it didn’t last.
I didn’t attribute that relationship to anything special about me—sure, he thought I was smart and pretty and fun, as he told me many times, especially when we decided to split—but instead I chalked it up to an accidental meeting and both of us not wanting to leave college virgins.
I re-joined some of my high school friends who’d also moved home after college and went out to bars to survey the men before me, but also to size up the other women. Sure, my sorority sisters had instilled in me some womanly habits like wearing thongs and mascara, but I still felt like I was now swimming in an adult world without having grown up. I didn’t know how to straighten my hair or do a smoky eye. Maybe if I lost a little weight, I could overcome those gaps in my knowledge of being a woman.
When I’d almost finished my master’s degree, I quit working for Dad and started real full-time employment in the public relations department of a major Philadelphia hospital, a job I quickly despised. It wasn’t because of the work, which was fascinating (whenever you hear a news report with the words “researchers have found that”—I interviewed the doctors to write the press releases that led to development of those stories), but because of my boss, who liked to pull my ponytail and call me “Jenny.”
I’d also started writing commentaries for the Philadelphia Inquirer almost as soon as I moved back home, and had parlayed that into writing for a local South Jersey publication called SJ Magazine. The buzz from seeing my name in print in something other than a college newspaper was addictive and soon trumped my desire to become an English professor. I wanted more than three people to read my writing, so I passed on moving up to the PhD program. When the SJ Magazine editor quit and asked me to write for her at a new, competing publication, I called her former SJ boss and asked for her old job instead.
While editing that local yokel magazine, where I assigned and edited hard-hitting stories like “Top Doctors” (as determined by our advertisers), “Holiday Gift Guide” (as determined by our advertisers), and the “Best of SJ!” (as determined by our advertisers), I wrote articles on the side for cash and broke into a national book magazine, a Philadelphia lifestyle magazine, an airline magazine. Freelancing was my fallback plan since the magazine was under constant threat of closing, especially when I returned from a vacation to find the sales team had moved all of our files and computers out of the office, and I was told to work from home.
When my paycheck bounced ten months into the job, I quit (the magazine’s since been sold to new, wonderful owners who seem to have a much better grasp on journalistic ethics and have made it a thriving publication). I’d scraped together enough freelance work to cover my $600-a-month rent, a $110-a-month student loan payment, and a few essentials like food and beer, so why not try freelancing while I was twenty-three? If I fell flat on my face, I could blame my failure on being young and stupid and get another office job.
But I didn’t fall. I f
lew. This was in 2005, the go-go days of freelancing when everyone had vats of cash. I wrote an annual report for a state university’s college of business; healthy-eating stories for a website published by General Mills; a travel article about places to drive your Jeep in New York City for Jeep Magazine, even though I neither owned a Jeep nor enjoyed New York City. I raised my hand, and work high-fived me back. I even wrote for the Jewish Exponent. I’m not Jewish. I am a blond-haired, blue-eyed Catholic who knew nothing about Judaism except that pork is not kosher. But another writer referred me to the magazine, and I turned in clean copy on time, so the editor kept giving me work. When he asked if I wanted to go through a fitness boot camp and write about it for the magazine, I said sure, why not? It’s not like poking at my stomach was doing anything to firm it back up to high school shape, when I was hitting hundreds of softballs against a fence per day.
Boot camp class met three times a week at 5:30 AM at a playground with a track about a mile from my apartment. This wasn’t one of those military porn-lite classes. The guy running the class was a nice man with oversized biceps who also owned a personal training company. He didn’t yell or bark. He pushed—nicely—when I said I wanted to quit, and laughed when the class groaned at another session of planks and squats and sprints and burpees and crunches and arm exercises with stretchy bands that moved my muscles in directions they hadn’t gone in years.
Running Page 3