My time: 1:36:19. No records. Not even close. But finishing the race was more than enough for me.
That fall, I ran into Steve and his girlfriend in a shoe store. On a whim, I had just accepted an invitation to join the man I was dating in Siena, Italy, where he was working, and I was shopping for a new pair of walking shoes. I saw Steve first: the leather jacket, the bright white teeth. He introduced her as if she were a pageant contestant: this bag of skin and bones with the same sunken eyes I had during my Steve drinking days.
I don’t remember what she said. I was focused on trying to say the right things: boyfriend, Italy, boyfriend, Italy (even though he wasn’t really my boyfriend). Did I mention I’m shopping for shoes because I’m meeting my boyfriend in Italy? Then I excused myself and my flushed cheeks to the clearance rack at the back of the store where I spent a half hour staring at gladiator sandals, doing the same breathing exercises I used when running intervals.
Seeing him then—for the last time—was like my first trip to Disney World as an adult, when all I could see was manufactured perfection and junk food restaurants and screaming children who were not buying into the happiest-place-on-earth thing, and you know that somewhere in the bowels of the organization is a princess on a smoke break, perhaps next to the in-house jail. Stephen or Steve or whoever he was by then—he wasn’t for me. I went home and directed my email program to send anything he sent me into the trash, just in case.
And Italy turned out to be wonderful: six days of cheese and wine and gelato and trying our hand at Italian phrases we mangled with our American accents, and sex and sleeping in until 10:00 AM, and more sex followed by drinking little cups of strong coffee before we repeated it all over again. We broke up soon after, but it was a wonderful trip to take, a time capsule of a perfect week that made me feel wanted and loved again, even if it didn’t last when we came back to the U. S.
My only regret was that I didn’t pack my running shoes.
chapter 4
PHILADELPHIA HALF MARATHON
NOVEMBER 22, 2009
New Jersey Marathon — Miles 7–12
After turning south, we headed to Long Branch and ran through its downtown—the kind of downtown that tourists never see unless they’re driving through. It’s not full of cute shops selling flip-flops and sunscreen, but it has a funeral parlor, a hair salon, a locksmith: businesses for people who live there in town, businesses that were inland enough to be largely spared Sandy’s wrath, but still in a downtown suffering from blight from failed redevelopment projects.
The half marathoners split off from the marathoners at around mile 11 to complete their miles winding to the boardwalk in Long Branch where we’d all finish under the same banner. Since the half marathoners started before us, I didn’t see many, though when I came up to mile 9 I started passing the back of their pack—mostly walkers. Between miles 9 and 10, half marathoners who had finished were crossing back over the course, probably to walk home or to get to their cars.
I tried not to focus on them. I’m pulling double duty. I’m pulling double duty. Duty. Doodie? No, you don’t need to poop. You don’t need to poop. You’re fine. FINE. You don’t need Gatorade. Ever. FUCK GATORADE.
All cloud coverage had been swiped clear at the exact time that we lost tree-provided shade. Despite temperatures in the high 40s, that sun was still burning at early-summer strength. At the aid station between miles 10 and 11, I took one cup of water to drink and another to dump over my head. I still didn’t need to poop, but the pressure on my bladder, which I had ignored over six previous aid stations, pressed. I knew that a Porta-Potty was close to every aid station, and when I saw a kid’s bike blocking the one I intended to use, my nerves snapped.
“WHOSE BIKE IS THIS?!” I screamed. Goddamnsonofabitchkidusingthebathroomthatsforrunnersnotspetators.
I had so far tamped down my nerves by being consistent in my pace, talking to runners every now and again, and thanking volunteers who blocked roads, handed out cups of water, and directed us through the course. I kicked out perfect ten-minute miles, and any interruption could put my time goal in jeopardy. I didn’t want to stop to use the bathroom, but I didn’t want to pee myself. Not being able to get right into the Porta-Potty because some kid used it lit a temper I had worked hard to hold down.
That kid—maybe ten years old—popped out from the crowd. He wasn’t going to the bathroom, but thought in front of the door of one was a great place to stash his bike. He gave me a look that mixed fear with annoyance. I’m guessing that between my already sweat-covered face and hair frizzing out of the confines of my hair tie, I maybe resembled Medusa. He moved his bike.
I locked the door, pulled down my pants and didn’t even bother to take off my gloves, which were by now soaked with sweat.
Go go go go. Stupid kid. Stupid bike. Stupid pee. GOOOOO.
I thought about yanking those gloves off to leave behind, but they were wet with sweat not from my hands, but because I was using them to wipe the sweat from my face like a sweatband.
I wiped, pulled up my pants, stepped out of the Porta-Potty and jumped back into the race, go go go gooooo, hustling a few steps faster to get back up to speed. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and I couldn’t afford to lose my groove. A few more half marathoners wandered across the course, now with beers in hand. I sighed as deeply as I could while running. I wasn’t going to think about how I could have done a half too and been finished by now. I had too much work to do.
The year 2008 bumped and clicked along. I published that first book in May. I did the grind of local TV and radio appearances, which included sitting on a chair on the Ocean City boardwalk next to a TV host and shielding a piece of prop pizza from seagulls so they wouldn’t dive-bomb at it the exact moment the camera flipped to me. I spent my weekends at book signings, the first of which I sold and signed exactly zero books.
That travel guide, though, saved my freelance career, not through the advance but from what came after it. I used information from the guide to pitch stories about the Jersey Shore to magazines and newspapers, cracking wider the work I’d done already for the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and New Jersey Monthly. Story by story, bit by bit, client by client, I rebuilt my income. I still stung from what happened with Stephen, but only very late at night when I couldn’t sleep, or when I thought I saw his car. I kept burying myself in that work. I replaced the washer that broke three months after I bought my house. I bought a dress that was not on final clearance at the Gap. My dog’s collar was no longer the one that came with her from the shelter. And yes, I took that trip to Italy after I ran into Stephen and his girlfriend at the shoe store. I could breathe again.
After the trip, I plotted my next running move: I wanted an easy one. In 2009, I set out once again to run the Ocean Drive 10-Miler and to beat my previous time. After shaking off the shroud of Stephen, running had gone from something I did to escape myself to something I did to reclaim myself. Sure, I still had bad runs, but for the most part running became a joy rather than a chore I did just to keep my head above water. I thought I could run faster, though, if I trained a little bit harder and cut out the walk breaks.
Except for when I worked with Lowell, I never tracked my runs. Instead, I’d cross off each workout with a felt-tip pen on the printout of my Hal Higdon schedule. I never wrote down my times. I never wrote about how the run went either. I didn’t think it mattered because I was doing it, and getting out the door and running and enjoying running was itself an achievement.
By 2009, doing anything on paper was passé, and a crop of new online logs promised to keep track of your workouts for you. One of those sites, which I still use, is Daily Mile. There, I could input where I ran, how far I ran, my time, the weather, how I felt, and how many miles I put on each pair of running shoes. In return, Daily Mile made charts of my work and told me how many donuts I’d burned and gas saved and how many times I’d run around the world.
Daily Mile is a social media site, too
. You can friend your friends, track each other’s workouts, and encourage each other by leaving comments on said workouts. You can also search for races and then share that you were running them.
That’s how I met Jason. In January, two months before the race, I checked that I was running the 2009 Ocean Drive 10-Miler, and he did too, then he friended me. Most of his photos were from triathlons where he was topless and, in one case, in a Speedo. He looked tall, lean, and tan, with a deep V of abs. (I later learned he was cheap and didn’t want to spend money on a triathlon suit until he figured out if he liked doing triathlons. That summer, he’d do a tri in an old surfing wetsuit from the 1990s with a color scheme that made it look like it belonged at a laser tag facility.)
He not only friended me but he also commented on my workouts. I responded, and then started commenting on his workouts.
And then! He asked if maybe we should meet up for a run because he had never run more than 5 miles and wanted advice from someone who’d been there. He lived in Feasterville, a suburb northeast of Philadelphia, which is a roundabout drive from my house with traffic patterns that made me want to stab kittens. But his parents had a house in Sea Isle City, a town I’d covered in my book. “Why not run down the shore?” he suggested, because he saw a picture from my first Ocean Drive 10 in my profile.
I had a few thoughts. He could be one of the following:
• Hot dude who finds me on the Internet and contacts me because he needs a training partner
• Hot dude who finds me on the Internet and contacts me because he is looking for love
• Hot dude who finds me on the Internet and contacts me so he can lure me into a murder house
• Random dude who steals hot dude’s photos and contacts me so he can lure me into a murder house
• Rival freelance writer who wants to embarrass me by making me believe a guy like that would be interested and then maybe lure me into a murder house
The night before our meet-up, I had two tickets to see LL Cool J at the House of Blues in Atlantic City. Why LL Cool J? Why not? And because the tickets were free if I wrote about the show. The casino public relations person offered them on Valentine’s Day, when I was halfway into a bottle of pink wine while watching Scrubs with my dog, so I had no reason to say no.
In my hotel room, I had one drink, then another. You can figure out if he’s a murderer in a public place, I told myself, then texted him to see if he wanted to be my guest for the show.
“Yes!” he texted back.
We met in the Fountain Room, a restaurant at the House of Blues. I sat as pretty as I could at the bar in tight boot cut jeans and a black tank top. I had short hair then, a bob that skimmed just below my ears. Every time I turned to the door to see if he had walked in, my hair swung and tickled my ears—at least that’s what I told myself was the reason for the little shivers skittering down my neck. I had focused on what clothes I’d wear running, not to the concert. If I’d have known he was coming, maybe I would have opted for something a bit sexier, like a skirt or a boob-focused shirt.
He looked exactly like his picture and not like he was there to turn me into soup. He wore dress pants, a white button-down shirt, and a pinstripe sport coat. His hair wasn’t slicked down by water or sweat. Instead it was a sweep of dark, almost black hair across his forehead.
The first thing he did was apologize. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I came right from work.”
We went to the show, and he later told me he had so much trouble not rapping along because he knew every single word of every single song. Then we went back to my hotel and had a drink at every bar in its casino, after which I grabbed his hand and pulled him to the elevators that went up to my room. We rolled around a bit without most of our clothes, but we didn’t have sex because that would have been a bridge too far for me. I still didn’t know the guy, after all. I woke up the next morning with the deep V next to me, but instead of diving down into a Speedo, it descended into tighty whities, which looked absurd. I woke him up with my laughing. He went downstairs to get us Gatorade and Advil, and when he came back up to the room, he looked at me, and said, “Let’s get breakfast.”
We never ran, but we did spend the day together. We started with breakfast at Ozzie’s, an old-fashioned diner in Longport with red leather booths and a black-and-white-checkered floor. We took selfies—with a real camera since we both had flip phones—in front of Lucy, a two-story wooden elephant that lived on the beach south of Atlantic City. Then we parked his car in a rest area outside of Sea Isle, and he changed into jeans and a zip-up jacket that he had in the trunk of his car. I drove us to Cape May and gave him the walking tour of places in my book, after which he asked me if I wanted to stop for tea.
“I could go for some fries,” I said, and then we feasted on two plates of them with Miller Lites at an old salt bar open that time of year.
The fries, he later said, locked it in for him. He told me he was a goner, and set out to woo me. For our first date—our first real date—he skipped work for a day and took me to a fancy restaurant, one with an actual dress code, for lunch, followed by an afternoon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the Cezanne and Beyond exhibit. He touched my shoulders, my back, my hip, lightly as we looked at the way Cezanne used blocks of paints to depict landscapes, nudes. Afterward, sipping champagne at the bar on Rittenhouse Square, he told me I dressed well for an athlete, then spent the next half hour trying to explain how that was a compliment. He always opened doors, bought flowers, ordered my food. He said he wouldn’t have sex with me until I was his girlfriend, and asked me to be so under Georges Seurat’s Models painting at the Barnes Foundation Museum. He took me to a black-tie fund-raiser—having bought the tuxedo and a real bow tie that his grandmother taught him how to tie—and I have never before or since felt so golden. Before the event, we had drinks in the basement bar of that same five-star restaurant of our first date, him in his tux, me in a short, gold, shimmering dress. And when the very French and very womanizing chef and owner of the place flirted with me, I shamelessly flirted back while Jason looked on with a half smile that the chef picked his date for such flattery.
He had one fantasy sex-wise, he told me one night as we lay in bed, with him tracing his finger up and down my leg. I braced myself for something that would require me to wear leather, a ball gag, or a harness, but then he said, “That we’re married.” Swoon.
And we finally did run. Jason ran cross-country in college. He was a sleek human being, not just in how he looked but also in how he ran. He was more muscular than the fast male runners I knew, but he glided over the road, almost like an ice skater. His recovery powers were incredible. I stuck to running, but he’d run, swim, bike at lunch at his company’s gym, then do a second workout after work. I picked him up one night from a bar in Philadelphia after his friends had run him through the wringer for his birthday. When I arrived, he tried to grab my boob and hit a pole instead, and then fell onto my car when I was trying to get him into the passenger seat. If I had consumed that much alcohol, I’d have spent the next day secluded in a dark hole until past dinner. But he woke up, bright and early and eager to run. I called him Wolverine.
I was slower than him by a lot, but he still wanted to run with me on weekends. That way, he was guaranteed to get in those longer miles by plodding next to me, someone who had done it before and had not collapsed. Our first runs were stutter steps of trying to figure out the best pace for both of us. He ran a little slower than normal, and I ran a little faster. He pulled me along.
We ran the Adrenaline 5K together—“together” meaning he finished more than four minutes ahead of me, which is a large gap in a race as short as a 5K. A week later was the Ocean Drive 10 that brought us together in the first place. We stayed in his parents’ shore house. His mother kept trying to feed us plates of bread and pasta throughout the day to carb load, even though what she offered was far beyond what we needed. I was loath to say no and offend the mother of the man I loved. This is a
woman who, two weeks later, told Jason she thought I had an eating disorder because I only ate one serving of every dish at her seven-course Easter meal. I didn’t want him to know that I’d been there before.
We went to the only two bars open in March for one drink at each, then went to bed, him in his shore bedroom, me down the hall. I couldn’t sleep, but not because of the next day. I felt calmer leading into the race than the year before because I knew the course and knew there would be no surprises. I was awake because I knew he was two doors down, just lying there too.
The forecast all week screamed “RAIN! RAIN! RAIN!” I’d run in the rain before, but I’d never raced in it, so in a panic I bought a blue running hat and pumpkin rain jacket from REI. But race morning was also a little bit humid. I stepped in and out of the car three times, with jacket, without jacket, with jacket, before deciding that I should wear the jacket just in case.
“This year it rained,” I later wrote in a story about the race for New Jersey Monthly. “This year I was cranky. Hundreds of runners were forced to stretch and shake off nerves in the lobby and hallways of Congress Hall. We spilled into the dining areas and even to the Boiler Room, a nightclub with floors still sticky from the night before.”
As we filed to the starting line, a woman banged her way through the runners with her bicycle, knocking into Jason’s calf and screaming that her thirteen-year-old daughter didn’t have her marathon race bib.
“Is this what all races are like?” Jason asked me.
“I haven’t run too many, but that’s a first for me—both that,” I said, pointing at the back of the bicycling mother, “and her,” I said, meaning a thirteen-year-old running a marathon.
At the starting line, Jason kissed me and told me to pick him up off the road at mile 5. He assumed he’d crash and burn by about then. I drifted further back into the crowd because I knew I wouldn’t be anywhere near the lead pack in the race, and as the national anthem played, and we had a moment of silence for fishermen who had been lost at sea the week before, I closed my eyes and breathed deep. I had seen the course before, and had run the course before. My only goal was to beat 1:36:00. I could do it, I told myself. As long as I could deal with the rain.
Running Page 7