run

Week One, Day 3

Wednesday, July 19th, 2023

Ok. To be fair and honest, I’m on day three of this program. So we’re already off to a great start. If I were any kind of good at documenting things about myself outside of social media and if I had the right kind of foresight, I would have started whatever this is on day one. But I don’t, so I didn’t, and here we are—day three. Of a running program that I’ve had downloaded on my phone since month six of the pandemic, you know, right around that time when everyone turned to fitness like that was going to keep us from acknowledging that the world as we knew it was falling apart. But at the time, it was a great excuse to get out of the house for an hour or so, and there was something nice about being a part of this group of runners¹. 

I would plod down Riverside Drive, in the literal middle of the street, because cars were not on the roads, and I would see the other people, most of us still wearing masks as we hoofed it, and there would be that nod. You know the one. The kind of nod you give someone when you’re like, “Hey, nice to see a fellow insert-compatriot-who-is-doing-the-same-thing-as-you,” and suddenly it’s like you’re in this sort of club. This group of people all moving, literally, with the same intention. 

And then, the novelty of it wore off after I got past week five, and then eventually, life started to pick back up, and I never completed the program. Sometimes if I’m on a walk, I’ll go to the ‘free-run’ tab that they have, which I always roll my eyes at because, for me, there is nothing freeing in the act of running. It’s more like a wrung on some sort of fucked up twelve-step program that I just keep revisiting over and over and over again. But I’ll go to this tab and track how long I walk. And sometimes, I walk up to five miles, and I log it in my weekly workout thing that I’m doing, and I feel good about it. 

See, I could walk forever. Truly. Given the right shoes and playlist, I could walk for days on end. But you ask me to run? And my body goes into rebellious lockdown mode.  

I also feel like I should apologize. I’m starting whatever this is on a bad day. Like, not a great day at all. If, as I stated earlier, I had better foresight, I would have started this last week when I decided I was going to do this. It was Friday, the sun was shining, I had just completed a great workout at home, and I was like, you can do this. Go for the run. So I did. And I felt fucking amazing. And then the next day – a Saturday, I know! I mean, what even am I? A Runner? – I went again. And I felt fucking unstoppable. But then, Sunday we had to deal with this infestation of bugs that our neighbor left the whole floor as a parting present when he moved out, and Monday is my typical rest day, and then yesterday I drove with friends to the beach only for us to be pelted with hail and thunder and lightning the second we stepped on the sand, and then today, I spent the better part of four hours applying to serving jobs that I am overqualified for but will likely not get and have been in this low-grade panic attack about the state of my life and how I feel like this worthless blob of a human who has nothing to contribute and nothing to do with her time right now. So what better mindset to go for a fucking run, am I right? 

I should also mention, on top of being a writer and a fledgling runner, I am a performer. I find my purpose, I feel I am living my truest, best life when I am in some sort of process. I haven’t been in a process since mid-June. Which might not sound like a big deal, but I have had consistent work in theater since the fall of 2021, since 2018 actually but there was that tiny little blip of time where the world shut down, but pandemic not including, your girl has been #bookedandblessed which is an incredible thing that I do not take for granted. And now, I have nothing coming up. Not a concert, not a reading, not a “Hey, I wrote this thing, can you record it in your home studio for $35”. NO. THING. And it’s really hard when you feel like the best thing about you, the thing that makes you you, is so contingent on the whims of an industry that is wonderful if not magically fickle at best and an abusive boyfriend you can’t stop trying to please at worst. 

So naturally, being in this fragile state, I should try to do something gentle and familiar. Something that will bring me peace and comfort and purpose in other ways, right? Nope. I choose fucking running. Because apparently, I’m a glutton for both carbs and punishment, and I am in no way mentally ill. 

Here is what I do know. These are the facts. 

I know that: 

• Even when I don’t want to, moving my body makes me feel better. 
• I need to get my legs stronger for a potential thing that may or may not be on the horizon – see the abusive-boyfriend-type industry of it all. It’s super fun to live inside of a world where your whole life revolves around gossamer hypotheticals. 
• I need to do something to fill my time. 
• I am, technically and ridiculously, based on systems and practices that are outdated and harmful, obese. And it’s never a bad thing to try and live a healthier lifestyle, or so every influencer tells me on the gram. 
• Running is good for you.
  • Ok, this one I’m not 100% sold on. I know it’s good for your body as a whole, but sometimes it’s like, good Christ, at what cost? 
• I want to document this because it could potentially help someone else on their journey. Even if that means that it deters them from ever running, honestly, that might be the biggest win of it all. I kid, I kid, I joke, I joke…….🙄🙄🙄
• This app is designed to be friendly. I think it is, at least. No, I’m choosing to see it as that. For the first few weeks, it’s interval training essentially, so today, I’m going to be walking and running off and on, which feels simultaneously approachable and horrifically daunting to know that one day there will only be the straight run. 
• I need to do something to fill my time. 
• I enjoy writing and  I think I’m a decent enough writer that this might be interesting/funny and, dare I say, potentially profitable? 
• At the end of the day, I’m talking about a minimum of 30 minutes of my day; the maximum run on this program, I think, is an hour? Maybe less. I can do this for a maximum of an hour a day. I can. 
• I’m operating today on maybe 467 calories. Which is not enough calories. I know that. Eating disorders are fun, and I should be upfront now that I will likely talk about that from time to time. I’m working on it in therapy. 
• I need👏 to👏 do👏 some👏thing👏 to👏 fill👏 my👏 time👏.
  • Clarification – I need to do something to fill my time that is not only watching YA movies about a dystopian future, and if this gets me out of the house for even a half hour, it will be better than sitting through The Host or The Divergent trilogy again. To this point, I will hear nothing negative about The Twilight Saga or The Hunger Games Trilogy. Both are masterpieces, and they can and will have as much of my time as they like.
    • Also, the one takeaway from most of these movies? Everyone is so fit, and there’s always so much running. Like, the most running. If these YA novels turned movies are any indication of our future, I think there will be a lot of running involved, and I’d like to have a fighting chance. 
• I have been stalling going on this run for literally five hours at this point.
  • Seriously. I put the running shoes on at noon. It is now 5:08 in the late afternoon. I have been stalling so much so that I was even outside of my apartment about twenty minutes ago, in fact, and then came inside to write this because I knew I’d write more and for longer on the computer and therefore take more time and therefore procrastinate the run even longer. I even watched a youtube video to try and figure out how to add a footnote on Docs. That is the level of not wanting to do this I am at. 
• I am unbelievably stubborn. Sometimes that stubbornness can turn into something self-destructive. But it can also be a radiant light that pushes me on when I want to give up. And, though she has a flair for the dramatic, I’m not entirely convinced I want to give up. 

So, yeah, today is not a great day to be starting this. Or maybe it’s the perfect day. I don’t know. What I do know is that when I close this laptop, I am going to go out and into the world, and I’m going to open my fucking app, turn on some kind of music, and do what the little mascot tells me. I don’t know if I’ll like it today. With where my head is at, the odds are I will not love it. But who knows, maybe I will feel better after. And maybe I will actually commit to this thing. Time and the distance my foot comes off the ground will tell. 

It should be noted that I wasn’t going to open this doc until after the run to do my post-run thoughts, but then upon leaving the apartment, I absentmindedly stepped on one of the many glue traps we have set up as a response to said neighbor’s bug bomb departure. 

So. It’s going well. 

Let’s see how this fucking run goes. 

POST RUN MORTUM – 

Mortum just feels more right than thoughts. Let’s bring a little death into it; why not. 

Running Time: 30 minutes 

Distance Achieved: 2.0 miles

Calories Burned: (Insert sardonic and irreverently ineffectual chuckle here) Yeah, this is not something we are going to be tracking. So. If that’s what you came for, sorry not sorry ✌️

Tunage: Hamilton (you’ll likely see this quite a bit, and I make no apologies for it. This soundtrack is a bop, and the beats are actually super helpful to run with) from “What Did I Miss” – half of “One Last Time” 

Was it as terrible as I thought it was going to be? 

No. 

And don’t you dare say I told you so. 

Were there times I almost quit? 

Yes, five, in fact. The time when I almost turned the app off was when I gave myself a self-inflicted power ten, which I’ll talk about another time, past a man with more abs than should be allowed on someone outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I couldn’t stop in front of him or let him know that I was UNBELIEVABLY winded because of course I have to impress this stranger whom I’ve never seen nor likely will ever see again so I pushed myself perhaps a bit too far, but god damn it, I kept going? The fuck is wrong with me. 

Will I do this again? 

See my last bullet point from earlier. 

1.  I feel I need to address the use of this word upfront, and especially since I’ve chosen to call this Run. For me, in this body that I inhabit on July 19th 2023, the word run is more like a semi-energized jog where I get just enough lift and push off as I propel myself forward for it to count as something other than walking. I’m actually curious what the definition of running is. Hold please. 
   Ok so that was wholly unhelpful. Google defines running as “the action or movement of a runner” and “the action of managing or operating something”. I always thought, or at least they drilled it into me in high-school english, that you couldn’t define something with the word itself but, here we are. This at least makes me feel a little better, tough, if I’m being real. I thought there was for sure going to be something about the physics of it, the literal mechanics of pushing off the ground, or a certain number of inches one’s foot needs to be off the ground in order for it to qualify as running. So I guess anything can be considered running. As long as you consider yourself a runner??? Google can be more trouble than it’s worth sometimes.
   ↩︎