Entropy

"But if I had never tried, how could I try again?"
-Joey Eppard, Balloon

Running is one hell of a drug, and I seem to have relapsed. And believe me, it was a drug I abused. Some people ran for recreation, or for breast cancer, or to get balls of color thrown at them. I was apparently on a mission to destroy myself. I'm surprised it took me so long to do so, because my body is apparently held together with dental floss and chewing gum.

Once I stepped away from the track (at the time, I thought it would be forever) my body was no longer saturated with cortisol and I could think clearly. It was then I began to realize all the things I had been doing wrong, all the coulda shoulda wouldas in my career. But then I realized all the things I could do which had been so off limits before. Simple things like staying up late or making spontaneous road trips were now things I could do as I tried to integrate into baseline humanity. I also realized something else. Since I had never needed to exercise just to stay in shape, I had no concept of recreational exercise. I couldn't fathom that you just go to the gym or hit the roads just to keep the entropy away. Or that you even had to. So entropy happened to me.

At first, everything started to feel better because it didn't have to carry my 80 miles every week. It was nourished by high energy foodstuffs such as hydrogenated soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, and flour so refined it doesn't even know what farting is. For a while, this was all good. I needed to repair. You can't make repairs while you're moving, and you certainly can't make repairs without parts. Then the aforementioned entropy started creeping in. Everything just got so weak that all the injuries that forced me to quit running started getting worse even though I wasn't running a step.

That's another thing I learned. I used running to escape my crippling social anxiety. It makes sense that you're staying in on a Saturday night if you have to get up and run 18 miles on Sunday morning. But when you don't have anything to do on Sunday except watch football and maybe nurse a hangover, it's a lot harder to reconcile why you're sitting in your room watching Netflix on the preceding Saturday night. (I guess now I could justify it to the world by posting "LOL I'M AN INTROVERT" on my facebook page but that seems like cheating, and would most definitely be lying.)

I had both the indulgent personality and savviness of a college freshman away from controlling, moralizing parents for the first time. Lump on top of that a kid from a household where soda and candy were taboo and who certainly wasn't allowed taco bell. Maybe even throw in a pinch of an Amish kid on Rumspringa. And all of this was hitting me at age 21, where I first had the opportunity to live like a reckless young person but paradoxically felt I had the body of an old man.

A brief side story about the Amish because this is too good of an opportunity to pass up: There was an Amish man from a nearby community who would show up to parties at my cousin's frat house at Penn State. At the end of the night he would stumble to his buggy. My cousin once asked him if he would be able to make it home on a night when he seemed particularly intoxicated. The man replied "I'm fine, my horse knows the way!"

Right when I started being able to jog for a mile or two without feeling like the disintegration of my body was imminent, I got a concussion by falling and hitting my head after giving blood, proving that no good deed goes unpunished. Now that was entirely my fault, since in the course of the previous two days I had killed half a 30-rack of Coors Banquet Beer and then only had two bags of fruit snacks for breakfast. Upon being revived, my blood pressure was 80 over 20. In layman's terms, that means my heart was pretty damn close to stopping. Now being in a blood bank is a pretty good place to have your heart stop, I would imagine, since they have a couple AEDs in the room. So concussed and unable to exercise, I grew soft and doughy.

There were bouts of regular physical activity. I would go on a few runs in a week, I would play Frisbee, I would swim in the ocean. But I kept getting sick or my back would get jacked up again and then I was back to being Cecil the Sessile Slug

I remember at one point, walking for two miles made my hip hurt a great deal. But three months later, after a journey across the country and back, which included lots of walking and some mad dashes to catch buses, I walked from the rim of the Grand Canyon and back in a single day, chafing at the bit because some people in my group had to slow down for a thing as silly as heat exhaustion. Spine in allignment, hips stable, ankles sturdy, muscles moving in perfect rhythmic integration. A journey makes you younger. I wanted to get back in the shape I once was, because now I knew I could. And I don't know how to do that by just exercising; I have to train. So I thought, why not, I'll try again.

This time is not the same. I don't have the time, resources, or durability to train like I used to. I'm training for shorter events, probably solely focusing on the 800 meters, because it requires less volume. I have no delusions of grandeur and am not expecting any kind of success. I don't ever expect to run a personal best ever again, (although I will certainly try). And I'm not using a training calendar, or even a specific workout schedule. I have a list of workouts which I plan to do, in order. When I do them is entirely based on how I feel. If I feel good enough, I'm hitting the track hard. If not, I'm jogging easy on the roads, or just sitting on my ass and letting things heal. If I miss a day of training, it will get done eventually. I'm under no time crunch and I certainly have no expectations.

Training is kind of like making a mix tape for your physiological systems. You need to send the right message, not too strong, but you also can't beat around the bush. That's why you have to calibrate your intensity to Goldilocks levels. And I didn't realize this until it was too late.

But now I'm just glad to run and to move around. Maybe just for my sanity, maybe just for something to focus on. I've got a stack of index cards with workouts written on them that I draw from every few days, and a dirt track right down the street with my name on it. I might not have any money for shoes or nutritional food, but neither did Kip Keino at one point. So fueled by frozen food and a lack of fucks to give, I'm off, once again, booking it to nowhere in particular.