Runner’s Low

I ran a 5K Sunday.  I’m pausing here to bend an ear and listen for the faint sound of applause.  No sound.  Perhaps everyone is shocked.  I don’t blame you: I’ve painted a picture of myself as a very lazy person.  Don’t worry that hasn’t changed.  I’m still a loser. But a weird thing happened during my hiatus from this blog.  Well, actually, lots of weird things happened, but the weirdest thing was that I unwittingly became a runner.  Wait, “a runner” may be too strong a phrase…let’s just say I run.

My life-long relationship with running is long and tumultuous.  My father was a runner.  He was a runner before it was cool. He was also into health foods, taking us to museums and basically being a good father, also very un-cool at the time.  Turns out he was very cool, but I digress.  Nevertheless, he would go for a run each evening, us left to bicker and drool at the dinner table, stomachs growling, in wait for him, while my mother tried to keep the dinner from drying out or getting cold.  He’d finally return, dripping with sweat, exhilarated and apologetic, and try to tease us into running with him the next time.  I would have rather gouged my own eyes out with a grapefruit spoon.

Fast forward to my sophomore year of high school, when I learned that I could avoid taking gym class if I was on a team.  I hated gym for many reasons above and beyond my extreme lack of athleticism, coordination and self-esteem.  Mostly, I didn’t want to get changed in the locker room…I was positive that the sight of my flat chest and cotton underpants would somehow catch the attention of, and enrage, the tough girls who had boobs and wore sexy panties, who would subsequently attempt to beat the shit out of me. Getting the shit kicked out of me in the locker room in my underwear, was far worse than getting the shit kicked out of me anyplace else, which I also feared. Looking back I can’t recall why I was always so sure I was on the verge of being beat up, but as Donald Trump would say, believe me.  If I made it out of the locker room alive, the next gym hurdle, was…Dodgeball.  Need I say more?  Little D.Parker was always the last kid standing in this ridiculous game that should really be called “BULLYball” because that’s what it is.  I would hide behind anyone until everyone was out, my opponent left salivating in anticipation. The Goon would carefully set up his shot, usually right at my head, with extra cheers and jeers if he could knock my mauve-tinted, Gloria Vanderbilt, coke-bottle eyeglasses askew. Good times.  Lastly, the rumors that THIS would be the year we would be made to shower before going back to class, left me begging my parents to home-school me.  I will leave you to imagine what my thoughts on being naked in front of the tough girls were.  Suffice to say I had a recurring nightmare of being in the “Carrie” shower scene, if Carrie were a skinny, hairy, Italian girl with no special powers to unleash a bloodbath on my peers.

As my parents failed to grasp the urgency of my situation, my only option  was to join a team.  The only sports I could “do” were the individual ones. I was a pretty good swimmer, but there was no way I was gonna get up at five, go swim, then “do” my hair, which required two to three hours, depending upon the weather, two electrical appliances and several different products, in time for class.

That left track as the only viable option, providing the bonus of getting to watch the football players practice and who knew where that could lead?  I also had it on pret-ty good authority that the girls track coach was a huge pot head and a lesbian, so how hard could it be?  The answer was VERY HARD.  I barely made it through one semester.  I’m not gonna lie, the bloomers that they called our uniform may have also had some bearing on my decision.

Who knew that one day I’d go back.  Don’t get excited.  I’m into it only because it makes me sweat and then I can eat a guilt-free lunch.  And maybe also have a drink at lunch and then also eat carbs at dinner and have another drink.  A very, vicious cycle but when you get to be my age and your metabolism drops like a bag of dirt you have to think outside the box.  Throw my obsessive compulsive nature into the mix, that once I start in on something I have a hard time stopping, (a scary thought because I just realized I would make a great heroin addict), and my goose was cooked.  I’m a runner.

I’ve heard about people who love running who say they get this “runner’s high” and they can run for hours and hours and days and days.  I think they are liars.  I hate it…every aching, boring step.  Thank god for Bunny who runs with me and hates it as much as I do, cause there’s no way I could ever duct tape my earbuds in and just hit the trails alone.  No. Freakin’. Way.  We distract ourselves by discussing the important issues of the day, such as the Brangelina breakup, what I drank for dinner last night, and what we will watch on Netflix that afternoon…and when we run out of important topics we bitch and moan about how much we HATE RUNNING.  Which can actually be quite debilitating and not at all conducive to reaching that illusive runners high.

But we are as charitable as the next gal, so when we hear there is a run for a cause, as long as there are cocktails afterwards, we are in!  I don’t know how much you know about running, or exercise in general, but I can tell you that staying hydrated is extremely important.  So there we were Sunday, crawling across the finish line towards the cocktail bar, completely depleted of electrolytes and anything even remotely boring to talk about.  Don’t ask what our time was, we don’t give a shit and neither should you.  Once we had our giant Bloody Marys in hand, we were able to  segue from feeling really bad about ourselves, to feeling pretty damn proud. We decided to go watch the rest of the crowd cross the finish line: you know, cheer them on like all those people that didn’t cheer us on, which I am rather bitter about, but I digress. “Let’s see who we did beat!” I exclaimed.

It pains me to report that the group who crossed the finish after us consisted of paraplegics, mothers pushing double strollers containing infants  whose umbilical stumps were still pulsing, firemen in full gear carrying oxygen tanks, a few small dogs, one three-legged dog, and the elderly who represented in equal shares, wheelchairs and canes.  Oh, and one child that may or may not have been under ten.  She looked like a real loser.