Running with a Police Escort

by Jill Grunenwald

  (Along with being a total bookworm, there was also that incident in first or second grade where I was attempting to cross the monkey bars and my hands slipped, ending in a sprained ankle. Understandably, I was a little gun-shy around playground equipment after that.)

  As a child, I was uncoordinated and unathletic. Even now, decades later, I’m only mildly less uncoordinated and only slightly more athletic. In the intervening years, between Jill-then and Jill-now, I also grew lazy, resisting pretty much any form of unnecessary physical activity. I mean, in a competition between me and a sloth, I’d probably win by a landslide. But, of course, such a competition would require either of us actually doing something which, well, y’know.

  My mother, bless her soul, tried her hardest to combat my sedentary lifestyle, knowing full well it wasn’t something I was going to decide to change on my own. Early on, she’d just push me out the door, tell me to get on my bicycle, and stay out for at least half an hour. Her intention, of course, was for me to actually ride the bike for half an hour. I, however, circumvented that by riding the five or so minutes it took to reach the local park, and preceded to hang out there for twenty minutes, and then rode my bike back home.

  I felt no guilt about this. After all, I was honoring my mother’s intention, if not abiding by its spirit. If nothing else, at least I was spending that time outside, instead of holed up in my bedroom.

  Eventually she either caught on to my ruse or simply decided more drastic measures were needed. Much to my dismay, these drastic measures were ones that could be measured at home.

  With the exercise bike living in our basement, although it technically belonged to my dad, who frequently used it, my mom saw a golden opportunity. I would ride that bike. Not only would I ride that bike, I was expected to keep track of how many minutes I rode and report back to her.

  There was also a carrot. Oh yes: eventually it got to the point where my mother decided her only recourse was to bribe me and she knew just the way to do it.

  My musical choices have always been a little, shall we say, questionable for my age. I straddle that generation between X and Millennials, and while I grew up in the era of New Kids on the Block, I spent most of my childhood absorbing the classic rock roots of my father. To this day, I can’t tell you a single song that NKOTB or Boyz II Men ever sang, but I can sing the entire lyrics to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and explain the historical and cultural significance of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio.” Before finally owning a personal copy on CD, I wore out my dad’s cassette tape of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and borrowed-with-no-intention-of-returning countless Led Zeppelin albums.

  As if that didn’t make me different enough, I also developed a strong attraction to the theatre. Mixed in with all of those hard rock musicians, there was a healthy dose of Broadway show tunes, often accompanied with father-daughter dates to Playhouse Square in downtown Cleveland to see live performances. Andrew Lloyd Webber was my gateway drug but my love soon progressed to Sondheim and Schwartz among other greats.

  So it was in the mid-1990s, when half of my female friends were freaking out about the latest boy band to hit the block and the other half of my female friends were still mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, I was glued to my television the night of Barbra Streisand’s triumphant return to the stage with her first concert in almost thirty years.

  When the live, double-CD album Barbra: The Concert was released in late 1994, I simply had to have it the same way my friends had to have their first row seats to the 98 Degrees concert so they could gawk over Cincinnatians Nick and Drew Lachey up close and in person. I wasn’t babysitting neighborhood kids quite yet so my funds were limited to the small weekly allowance I got for doing chores around the house.

  In my love for Barbra, my mom saw an opportunity and struck a deal: if I logged a certain amount of hours on that exercise bike, she and my dad would buy me the album as a reward. I already had a slight aversion to bikes, even indoor ones—thanks to a good chunk of my summers spent being told to go riding—but I also really, really wanted that album.

  I can’t for the life of me remember exactly how many hours I needed to clock in to earn the CD, but every day after school I’d go downstairs and I’d pedal my little heart out. I wasn’t doing it for enjoyment or for exercise. I don’t even think the fact that I was doing something good for my body even crossed my mind. I was down there working out for one reason and one reason only. As soon as I had that album in my hands, I never got on that bike again.

  Given my absolute animosity towards athletics of any kind, it probably goes without say that I still loathed gym class by the time I got to high school. If anything, I probably hated it more, if that’s even possible. Hell, I hated gym class more than I hated math class, which is certainly saying something considering my strong aversion to arithmetic throughout middle school and high school. (This came back to haunt me when I decided to get my master’s in Library and Information Science and had to take the GRE. My prep work consisted of vocabulary words and focusing on the English portion since I knew there was no way in hell I was going to do well on the Math section, so I might as well put my energy into working on the one area I knew I could improve on. Later, as a professional adult, I interviewed for a job at a college that required taking an evaluation test. I knew I aced the English portion but I distinctly remember telling friends and family, “If I don’t get that position because of stupid fractions, I’m going to be so pissed.” Either my math skills aren’t as horrible as I think or I guessed well, because I did get the job.)

  Now, the only thing that made high school gym class slightly more tolerable than middle school is that we were given options. No longer did our gym teachers decide for us what activity we were going to do that week. No more were we told we had to play soccer or we had to play basketball. Nope, we were now independent! and capable! and self-sufficient! young adults! Soon we would be driving and voting for the next president.

  Perhaps realizing that we were only a few years away from becoming legal adults, our gym teachers allowed some flexibility in the schedule by presenting choices at the beginning of the week: one option would be on the more athletic side like soccer or basketball, while the other option was something a little more on the non-traditional side.

  In high school, class schedules were somewhat random, and obviously depended entirely on what classes I took. This meant there was no real way to guarantee I’d have lunch with friends and thus get to commiserate about how much we hated baseball. I always seemed to luck out by having at least one or two friends in my gym class and we always had an unspoken agreement between us that when presented with options we would always, always pick the least athletic one.

  This variety meant that the majority of my high school physical education curriculum was comprised of multiple weeks of weight training on the same big industrial machines used by the varsity football team, learning just how exactly to score a bowling game by hand, and at least one memorable week of ping pong in which my friends and I played our own onomatopoeia version of ping pong. (This specialized version stipulated that each time we hit the ball we would shout a word like POW! or ZAP!, imagining bright graphics like those from the old Batman television show.)

  But for all the awesomeness that came with having choices like that in gym, there was one thing that we could never, ever get out of doing.

  The Annual Mile.

  Oh, the mile. Otherwise known as 5,280 feet of torture for awkward teenagers everywhere. It was only four measly laps around the track out back behind the school, but for me they might as well have been forty laps.

  The thing is, I couldn’t run. Not, I didn’t want to. Not, I didn’t like to (well, I mean, I didn’t like to then). Quite honestly, I could not for the life of me run for more than a couple yards without wanting to pass out. Between the inability to breathe and the fact that my legs felt like lead, there was certainly nothing enjoyable about running. I got hot. I got s
weaty. I hurt, all over. WHY WOULD PEOPLE VOLUNTARILY PUT THEIR BODIES THROUGH THIS? It was like being in a torture chamber without there being any bizarre spikes jutting out from the wall. From this experience, I didn’t really understand the point of running for exercise, let alone entertainment. Running for any reason other than being chased by a hungry bear was a completely foreign concept to me.

  As a child of the 1980s, I was introduced to a wide range of pop culture icons that still permeate our culture today. One of these in particular stuck with me, to the point that I take great delight in knowing that my birthday is the same date as the Hill Valley High “Enchantment Under the Sea” Dance of Back to the Future fame. I didn’t start driving until I was nineteen, but at sixteen, man oh man did I want a DeLorean. Never mind the fact that it would just be a boring car and not a time machine, but man I would have looked so cool driving one of those things around.

  (“Cool” in this context might be subjective, but I proudly let my geek flag fly.)

  In the third and final installment of the Back to the Future trilogy, there is a scene where Marty and Doc Brown are hanging out in a saloon in the Old West, trying to figure out how to, uh, get, y’know, back to the future. In a rare moment of consequence ignoring, Doc is explaining to some old cowboys in the saloon about technology in the future, including the fact that we no longer use horses for transportation because we have automobiles. So, the skeptical denizens of the past ask, if everyone has one of these automobile things, do people still even walk or run in the future?

  “Of course we run,” Doc Brown tells them. “But for recreation; for fun.”

  One of the cowboys scoffs. “Run for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?”

  Preach, you old cowboy you.

  I graduated from high school almost twenty years ago, so maybe it’s for that reason that I sincerely am unable to remember exactly how often we met for gym class. That, or I just completely blocked it all out, which is also a very fair guess, too.

  Anyway, it would have been maybe tolerable had the Annual Mile been only a mile. Or, well, I guess, only one day. But it wasn’t, because our class met more than once a week and so the gym needed to find a way to stretch the Annual Mile and make it last for several class periods. This meant that in the days leading up to Mile Day we were taken on short runs around the school. Sometimes we’d run one or two laps on the track, other times they’d take us out across the fields used by the cross country team. Either way, there was lots of running before we actually ran the Mile.

  Now, of course, I understand that this is what we fancy runners tend to call “training.” Just like you don’t wake up one morning and decide to go run a half marathon, in Hudson High School, unless you were on the track team, chances were you weren’t regularly running any distance even close to a mile. These days I know that following an appropriate training plan is one of the things that keeps us runners relatively injury free on race day, and our gym teachers were being judicious in their decision to provide us with a training regimen in the weeks leading up to the actual running of the Mile.

  But I didn’t know that back then. All I knew was that it was more running that I didn’t want to do.

  Before I go any further I should make one thing absolutely clear: I never—not once—ever ran the Mile in school. Never ever. I didn’t run it in middle school and I definitely didn’t run it in high school.

  Yes siree, I was a walker. Walking was easy. Walking was something I did every day. After all, I walked around the school to get to class. Friday nights during the fall I marched (a close cousin to walking) as a member of the Hudson High School “Swing” Marching Band. Walking I could do forever, unlike running which I could only manage for very, very short distances or perhaps if I was in fear for my life.

  Naturally, the gym teachers would get frustrated by me and classmates like myself. Every year, there were the runners—the real runners— out there on the track, completing their mile in five or six minutes. I was only just starting my second lap at that point. For four Annual Miles in a row, I didn’t even try and pretend to pick up my pace when I was crossing in front of the teacher with the stop watch; I just kept my slow and steady twenty minute mile walking pace. The teachers would try and encourage me to gain a little speed and suggest I walk the straight lengths of the track and run the curves.

  Just try, they’d say.

  So I would. For maybe a lap, maybe less. But then I went back to my walking.

  Running made me uncomfortable. In the act, I felt ungainly, lumbering around the track in front of all of my classmates. I was exposed and vulnerable. As someone who has always been on the heavier side, I knew I didn’t look like a runner, and when you’re in high school looks count for everything. Runners are lean and lithe. Runners are athletic with thick calves that carry them quickly across finish lines. Runners are built for speed.

  I looked like a walker. So, I walked.

  Year after year. Mile after mile. Four laps around that track.

  My gym teachers tolerated my walking because they obviously had no way of physically forcing me to run, but it was clear they wanted me to run. Alternative methods like walking weren’t just frowned upon, they weren’t even discussed. Nope, all the students were just expected to run and run well and run fast and, worst yet, run for a grade.

  To be fair, the grade given was mostly a participation thing where as long as a student showed up and did something they were given an A, but compulsory running is a very different experience than voluntary running.

  The problem isn’t the grading of the Annual Mile. The problem is treating all students as if they are members of the track team, expressing the sentiment that running is no big deal, and if you think it is a big deal, then there is something wrong with you. Bottom line, it meant that if you couldn’t run fast, then there is something wrong with you. If you can’t keep up, then there is something wrong with you. And if you need to walk or are having trouble breathing, then there is really something wrong with you.

  For a physical education class, there was very little education related to running. We were set loose on the track and expected to just run without any discussion about healthy habits such as the benefits of run-walk intervals or how to find the right pace. Nope, we were just supposed to run, and if we couldn’t compete with the 5- and 6-minute mile averages of the track team then we should be grateful for that participation grade because we’d be failing otherwise.

  But in the end, it’s all okay because I still managed to graduate, so in all reality gym class really isn’t the end all be all class they often make it out to be.

  2

  One Foot in Front of the Other

  Jillian Michaels is yelling, her aggressive voice filling my living room.

  On my television screen, that is. Jillian Michaels is yelling on my television screen to the newest group of recruits who have been rescued from their gluttonous lifestyles in middle America and swept away to glamorous California, home of the California avocado and the California sushi roll, which is made with avocado, and probably other Californian foods that sound like they can only be consumed in a sunny spa with a glass of sparkling water on the side, by the extravagantly glamourous and wealthy.

  (Did you know that all Hass avocados can trace their ancestral roots and actual roots to the same avocado tree that was planted by Randolph Hass in California in 1926? She’s literally the Mother Tree of all Hass avocados. I sort of secretly hope Randolph named her Eve.)

  So. Jillian Michaels is yelling at the contestants, and Bob Harper is doing his Zen Master thing on the yoga mat, and I’m on the couch for the second weekend in a row binge-watching The Biggest Loser.

  The irony of this situation is not lost on me.

  My feelings for this particular reality show ebb and flow, not unlike the waistline of a yo-yo dieter. As a woman who has spent her entire life as “fat,” I connect with the journeys of the men and women on the show in a very visceral way. I understand them. I underst
and what drives them to drive to the 24-hour McDonald’s at two o’clock in the morning for a twenty-piece McNugget and a large side of fries. I understand how they can consume 3,000 calories in a single meal and still be hungry an hour later. I understand their reluctance to join a gym and risk making an ass of themselves in front of all the regulars.

  And most of all, I really understand their aversion to the dreaded treadmill.

  I understand all of this because I spent much of my adult life being one of those people. I understand them because more than once I’d head to the local fast food joint several times a day, snarfing down an extra-large value meal in front of the television while watching other people work out.

  Growing up, I’d been a pretty chubby kid and so clothes shopping was the absolute worst. Now that we live in an age of positive body love, I enjoy needing to go out and buy a new dress or work clothes, but in the mid-1990s the majority of designers were loathe to make garments for fat people. Because obviously fat people deserve to wear ugly clothes as punishment for being fat. (Granted, some designers still don’t like fat people wearing their label, but there are less of them these days and, even better, more designers who design specifically for those on the larger side of the size spectrum.)