Navel Gazing

by Michael Ian Black

  Chapter Twelve

  There are no good prizes

  First of all, it’s not a race. They can call it a race if they want, but the fact of the matter is, 99 percent of all participants are not trying to win. They’re trying to survive. No recreational road race is truly a race, because races demand competition, and in these endeavors there is practically none. Most people just want to finish the damn thing. Sure, there’s always a few folks at the head of the pack trying to win, but those people are dickheads. I mean, what does it really gain you in life to be able to say, “I won the St. Mary’s Autumn Harvest 10K Road Race”?

  Also, there are no good prizes. Real races would have good prizes. Cash, say. At these races, every single person who finishes the race receives a cheap medal to hang around their neck. Once they get home, the medal goes into a drawer along with all the other “prizes” they “won” for simply doing what they signed up to do in the first place.

  So it’s not a race, but there’s probably no better name for what these events actually are. “Fun run” doesn’t quite cover it either, because they’re not that much fun, at least in the way I define fun, which can cover a wide range of undertakings but never includes any activity I am trying to bring to an end as quickly as possible.

  Some races are described by their distances, as in the Waterloo Half Marathon. That’s a good name because it tells you where the race is and how far the race goes. There’s no need to jazz it up any further. If you are running a distance greater than from your front porch to the mailbox, you are already committed enough that you don’t need some creative race director to make it sound more exciting. Leafing through the back pages of Runner’s World magazine, however, it’s clear a lot of these directors disagree. There’s the Shamrock Shuffle, the Color Me Rad novelty race, the Hot Chocolate 15K, the Food Fight 5K, the Cherry Creek Sneak, Rock the Block, and the Viking Assault. (Granted, the Viking Assault actually does sound pretty cool.) But whatever they are called, and whatever gimmicks organizers use to make them seem like more than they are, road races all boil down to the same simple idea: Mark off a starting line and a finish line, then run between the two.

  Some of these distances can get stupid. For years, people thought marathoners were nuts. The idea of running twenty-six (point two, as marathoners invariably point out) miles seemed insane. But as more and more people began participating in marathons, the distance lost some of its mystique. The marathon, commemorating the distance traveled by the Greek messenger Pheidippides, who allegedly died after running it, has become humdrum. This has paved the way for the “ultramarathon,” or “ultra.” Typical ultra distances are fifty or even a hundred miles. Some go two hundred miles or more. One annual run is called the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, which is remarkable not only for its distance, but for the fact that the entire event takes place over sixty days on a single, half-mile block in Queens, New York. Runners literally spend two months running in circles. The record is held by Suprabha Beckjord, who finished the race in forty-nine days, fourteen hours, thirty minutes, and fifty-four seconds. His prize? A small bouquet.

  I chose a more modest distance for my first race, a 10K, or six miles, which seemed ambitious but doable. I registered for the event as soon as I started running, figuring I could use a tangible goal to work toward. Once I commit to something, I commit—at least until I quit, which can happen at any time.

  I’d never trained for an athletic competition before. The closest I’d come was memorizing a blackjack chart. The thought of actually adhering to a training regimen exhilarated and frightened me. Here I was, a middle-aged man attempting something new, something the younger and fitter teenage runner in me had shied away from, something my now-infirm mother would never be able to do, something I hoped would inspire my children to get off their own asses.

  I downloaded a training plan from a running site, and there, laid out in the same neat columns and rows I’d seen at the cross-country informational meeting years before, were numbers. Many, many numbers. Each number represented how many miles I would be running on any given day. It was a lot of miles. Day by day, though, the numbers didn’t seem too daunting. The chart had me starting at only two miles, which didn’t sound so hard. After all, two miles is only one more than one mile, and one mile is only one more than zero miles. I had already mastered the zero-mile distance, so I just needed to run what I’d already been running, plus two. Surely I could do that.

  As it happens, I could not. The first time I tried, the distance of even a single mile amazed me. When zipping along in a car, a mile seems like the smallest denomination of distance; anything under a mile is hardly worth driving at all. But by foot, a mile is something else entirely. For the out of shape and listless, it is the stuff of Lewis and Clark, an endless, almost insurmountable length: 5,280 feet. If you were to lay all those feet end to end, it would stretch for an entire mile! While jogging on the road the first time, I kept checking the GPS on my phone to find out how far I’d run. What I thought should be a mile turned out to be about a tenth of a mile. Had they increased the length of miles since I was a kid?

  Incredibly, the second mile was even longer than the first.

  I got through that first training session only after taking frequent walking breaks and allowing myself to drift along on a steady stream of muttered curses. It’s not that the distance itself was so draining, but my body was unaccustomed to doing anything more strenuous than raising itself from one couch and shuffling to another. My sweat glands, relieved to finally have something to do, deluged me. By the time I dragged myself home, I looked like I’d been dropped in a carnival dunk tank. Pathetic. One day was enough running for me. I decided to stop.

  But I did not stop. I wanted to. I really, really wanted to. The next morning, competing voices screamed at me from inside my head. “Go out and run!” said one.

  “Stay home and sleep!” said the other.

  “Run!”

  “Tostitos!”

  I’ve never understood the ability that people have to hold opposing voices in their minds. There’s one telling me I need to get out and exercise, the other reminding me that I haven’t seen that cool documentary about whale abuse that I really should sit down and watch, preferably while stuffing my face. The only reason I hadn’t seen the documentary to that point was that I’d rather do anything than watch a movie about whale abuse, anything that is, except run. And then there’s a third voice, the “me,” listening to the other me’s, trying to decide what to do. Who are these voices, and which is my authentic self?

  Scientists have been working on this question for decades. What they’ve learned so far is that the “inner speech” we have in our heads physiologically mimics the “external speech” we use when speaking. Weirdly, even our larynxes make little vibrations similar to those made while speaking when we have these thoughts. It turns out that all these disparate voices are manifestations of brain processes that compare, judge, weigh evidence, and make decisions. The voices we “hear” are simply the process our minds use to translate these competing thoughts into ideas we can understand on a conscious level. So, when we hear ourselves “talking” to ourselves, what we are hearing is akin to a computer reading text to us. At least I think that’s a decent analogy, but maybe I’ve gotten it totally wrong. My inner critic is telling me that’s a terrible comparison and that I’m an idiot.

  All of this raises the question: When my mom heard her own Voice, a voice unlike any she had ever heard, what exactly was she hearing? Some omnipotent deity or a manifestation of calm her own body generated to comfort her in a time of stress? I choose to think it was God, because the voice turned out to be correct. And also because it makes a much better story. And also because it kind of makes my mother holy, and therefore me holy by extension.

  So, despite my internal tabernacle chorus singing “I don’t want to,” I got my butt out the door that second day and ran. And again the day after that. After the first couple weeks, two miles no longer
seemed quite so horrific. Soon I could jog the entire distance without any walk breaks. Then I expanded my range. Three- and four-mile jogs became possible, then doable, then done. The process was slow, and often ended with me back at my home collapsed on the grass trying to squeeze any extra oxygen from the air, but those times grew less frequent and eventually only occurred after I challenged myself to beat my personal bests at various distances. If I just took it slow, I found I could run for a good long while without any great suffering. Except for the pain in my scoliosis shoulder. And lower back. And knees. And shins.

  I ate better. Not perfectly, but better. No more garbage cereals for breakfast. Just a post-run protein shake. Lunch might consist of a salad and a turkey burger. I cut down on late-night pretzel binges. Weight started to slide off like snow from a metal roof. A few pounds, nothing amazing. But I felt better.

  Did I grow to enjoy running? In moments, yes. Although I belittled the runner’s high earlier, the truth is, I did experience the occasional blissed-out happy trance while jogging along to some funky jam on my iPod. Bouncing through the woods could produce a flash of happiness, a little burst of joy punctuating my runs. The high never lasted more than a quarter mile or so, but neither did the misery. My general mood during these runs leveled out somewhere between anxious and smug. Anxious because running can get a little worrisome if you’re too hot or too far from home. Smug because every time a car passed me on the road, I allowed myself to think, “I’m better than you.” And if believing yourself to be superior to the sedentary isn’t the ultimate point of any physical activity, I don’t know what is.

  Race day finally arrived, a crisp October morning three months after I began training. When leaving home that morning, I instructed Martha and the kids to meet me at the finish line a little under an hour after I began. I wanted the kids to see me finish, not so much for my own ego, although that definitely played a part, but because I thought it important that they see their father actually doing something physically demanding in the hopes that it would, someday, inspire them to take similar action for their own health and well-being. Role models are important, and I wanted to be one for them. Don’t get me wrong—they already admire the hell out of me—but I wanted to give them something else about their father to hold in awe.

  I wore my lucky black jogging shorts and neon yellow “technical shirt.” I have no idea what makes a shirt technically technical, but I believe it has something to do with wicking and/or fluorescence. After arriving at the church where the race would begin, I signed in, affixing my number 9 race bib to my torso with safety pins and collecting my souvenir T-shirt, which I scoffed at because it was non-technical. Then I walked outside to mingle with the others before the race. About a hundred and fifty runners congregated in the frosty air, stretching their hammies and quads, jumping in place, elevating their knees to chest height, executing quick warm-up sprints up and down the asphalt. I did not want to give myself away as a novice so I joined them in their exertions, even though I normally do very little stretching when running, because I’d read that stretching is overrated and also because it hurts.

  As race time approached, we shepherded ourselves to the starting line, faster runners in front, slower runners like myself at the rear. I’d read that I should run my own race at my own pace, and try not to let the emotions of the moment force me into a quicker pace than for what I had trained. It seemed like sound advice. No sense in wringing myself out during my first race. My only goal was to complete the six miles in an unhurried hour. Somebody shot off a starter’s gun, and I started running as fast as I could.

  Despite my best intentions to do otherwise, I definitely got swept up in the moment and began the run at a much faster clip than I’d intended. The first bit was downhill, anyway, so I could do that part fast, then slow down to my regular pace and still beat my hour goal. As the downhill section flattened out, however, I did not slow my pace, because I found myself running beside a twelve-year-old girl and she did not slow hers. How could I slow down if she did not? Fortunately, owing to her superior athleticism, she pulled way ahead of me and I was able to relax my stride a bit in time for the big uphill we’d been warned about. The wilds of Connecticut are a hilly place, and I’d trained on hills already, but I still found this particular climb a bit dispiriting. It wasn’t that steep, but it seemed to go on forever. Already, some of my competitors were slowing to a walk. Not me. No, this was a running race and I would run the damned thing even if it killed me. I made it to the hilltop without too much trouble and settled into an easy groove for the first half of the race, which looped me back to the church, where the 5K participants dropped out, leaving us hard-core 10K runners to do the course again.

  By lap two, I found myself flagging a bit, but I was buoyed by thoughts of my kids seeing me cross the finish line, arms raised in triumph, 1976 Bruce Jenner hair flapping behind me. (Never mind that I did not have 1976 Bruce Jenner hair; my hair, as I have said, more closely approximated 1999 Bruce Willis hair.) As far as pace, I wasn’t doing too badly. True, the front-runners had already finished by the time I began my second lap. True, my breath was a touch ragged, and yes, many of the runners traveling at my pace were overweight women several years my senior. And it galls me to admit, many of those same runners were offering me encouragement instead of the other way around, because I apparently looked as though I needed additional encouragement. None of that could ruin my mood as I conquered the hill for a second time and glided through the rolling suburban streets.

  As I reached the final mile or so, I spotted a couple of older women just ahead of me: one thin, one stout. I could pass them. I knew I could pass them. I picked up my pace a bit, reeling them toward me one yard at a time. Maybe they heard my wheezing behind them, I don’t know, but they picked up their pace too, keeping themselves just out of reach. I sped up again, as did they. I could get no closer than twenty yards, but kept pushing myself. I resolved to pass them, and in doing so, destroy them. I would destroy those two mommies.

  I finally blew by them as we raced down the big hill again, not even offering a conciliatory sidelong glance as I sped past. Going downhill is actually harder than going up because of the terrible pounding it gives your legs. It hurts, particularly after already having run several miles. By the time I reached the bottom, my legs felt as though they’d been sunk in lead, and it wasn’t long before the two mommies passed me right back, casually chatting to each other as they did so. Chatting! Casually! A gentle breeze carried them away from me and out of sight.

  At least I was in the homestretch, less than half a mile from my triumph. I resolved to get myself together for that last little bit, to look confident and cool as I crossed the finish line, to give my kids a picture-perfect ending they could carry around in their mental wallets for the rest of their lives. Their father: young, athletic, the picture of health and virility. As I neared the church, volunteers exhorted me to “finish strong!” I waved them off, as if to say, “I do not need your exhortations, volunteers. The looks of adulation I will find on my blessed offspring are all the motivation I need.”

  Spectators clapped for me as I wound my way up the church driveway to the finish line. I could see a clock clicking off the seconds. I was five minutes ahead of pace! I was going to set a personal record in front of my family! The announcer congratulated each runner as they finished. I raised my arms as he said, “Number nine finishing in fifty-five minutes, twenty-three seconds.” I’d done it. I’d run my race. I’d beat my goal time. I was a hero. Now to collect congratulatory hugs from my wife and kids. Who were not there.

  Slowing to a walk, I looked around the finish area. No wife and kids. I walked to the aid station and orange-slice-distribution center. No wife and kids. I couldn’t understand. Where were they? Somebody put a medal around my neck. I thanked them and kept searching for my family. Were they along the race route somewhere? I walked around, heart pounding, out of breath. No. Had they not come? It seemed like maybe they hadn’t come at a
ll. My heart fell into my running shoes.

  Why hadn’t they come?

  I stumbled around for several more minutes, scanning faces, and, not finding theirs, decided to go home. As I dragged my feet to the car, I saw Martha and the kids approaching. They’d just arrived.

  “Did you finish already?” Martha asked.

  I couldn’t even answer I was so upset.

  “You said to come about an hour after the start.”

  I nodded and looked at the digital clock, still ticking off seconds as the last stragglers crossed the finish line. It was well past an hour after the start. I gave the kids each a hug and mumbled something about leaving.

  “But we just got here,” said my daughter.

  “Daddy’s mad at me,” answered Martha.

  “I’m not mad,” I said.

  I got into my car and drove off, furious. Didn’t she understand how important this was to me? That I’d been training for months? That I wanted the kids to see me finish something, to inspire them? Despondent and hurt, I stomped upstairs, ignoring Martha for the rest of the day despite her repeated apologies. The medal got thrown into a cigar box, the race bib shoved into a sweater cubby.