My friend Dave, who is a real runner – not a just-this-once runner like me – and who keeps a blog – the kind of blog that you check each day thinking I hope there’s a new post – has made reference to the fact that one key feature of his running success is that he is a stoic. To quote a recent entry of his, “I could hold my breath longer than anyone underwater, not because I had better lungs, just because I cared less about how uncomfortable it became.” And I just want to be clear, right up front, before this becomes painfully apparent and you feel surprised and misled: I am no stoic. By no definition of the word, and at no point in my life.

To be fair, I am no drama queen or martyr either. And, in certain circumstances, I do some things that can be confused with stoicism. While traveling, for example, I can eat cheese sandwiches and sleep in bus stations for weeks on end. I can amuse myself in lonely, empty places pretty much indefinitely. But upon closer inspection what I really have is a very low threshold for happiness. I can do things that seem awful because I don’t really find them awful.

The key difference here is that when I actually find something awful, rare as that is, I can’t deal with it at all. I am particularly a wuss when it comes to sickness and injury. I really, really don’t like feeling bad. I don’t buck up. I don’t make the best of it. I wallow in misery.

I bring this up now because I just went for a solo run in the cold rain, and to my surprise it felt pretty good. But as I was running, thinking something along the lines of how surprising that this solo run in the cold rain feels pretty good, I had a sudden and unwelcome realization: this level of comfort is simply not sustainable. At some point in this training, as I have learned from various running blogs and books, my legs are going to feel like jelly and my mental health will deteriorate and – Good God! – my toenails are going to fall off. And nothing, nothing about this appeals to me. This is not the kind of adventure I’m seeking.

So I’m just letting you all know. That way, when the tone of this blog goes from self-mocking skeptical how-about-that to weary, angry, what-the-fuck, at least you will be ready for it. Because I like my toenails, and I’m not letting go of them without a whole lot of belligerence.

Yesterday morning at 7:30 my truck was covered in ice. Since I’ve recently been reading the running blogs of people in such places as New York and Michigan, I realize this is hardly cause for much sympathy. But it’s just not what we expect here, as evidenced by the fact that I had to scrape this ice away using a plastic cd case.

It had warmed a bit by the time we started our seven miles. Back in college my crew teammates and I would cluster around Isabel during our training runs, because Isabel grew up in New York City and was in good enough shape to spend entire runs effortlessly recounting her Manhattan sex-and-drugs teenage years. This captivated our seventeen-year-old new-to-New-York attentions and made the runs fly by. My TnT motivational equivalent is Emilee. Emilee isn’t like Isabel – because, for example, she grew up in Iowa – but she has Isabel’s extroverted energy and contagious fitness and unflagging spirit. Emilee talks about her family and friends and job, all things she loves, and the miles tick away.

I was able to keep up for the first half of the run, until the just-for-fun four laps around Hayward Field, at which point I fell behind and began serenading myself with Friends in Low Places. This morphed into Two Pina Coladas, which got me all the way back with only brief intervals of general discomfort and ill-will. And I felt tired, and my legs were a little achy, but I could have gone farther. And I remember that on my first run, not so very long ago, I ran only three miles and couldn’t stand up with ease for three days. Oh the body is a miraculous thing.

And also, fuck! I ran seven miles!

Stairmasters are stupid, and that is all.

Well, maybe that’s not all. But really. Just the name: Stair Master? Come On.

Ty is suffering from shin splints, so despite the sunny clear afternoon I went with Talley to the wreck center for my workout. She actually likes the freaky machine room. (Edit: Talley, after reading this, tells me she does not in fact like the freaky machine room. Her dedication to the freaky machine room is, therefore, just another sign of how Talley gets shit done that needs doing, like it or not. As she herself would say - and has said, on at least one occasion, to stunned softy northwesterners: Buck up, or get the fuck out of here.) Since the ellipticals were all booked we signed on for the stair machines. For half an hour I climbed hypothetical stairs while looking out a window at a big yellow sign that said “DEAD END.” No, really.

The Stairmaster encapsulates much of what I dislike about the whole idea of “working out:” it is completely contrived, whereas so much physical work in the world actually needs doing. And granted, it is not geographically possible for me to spend 45 minutes a day rebuilding homes in New Orleans. But the Stairmaster gets at the worst of it. The building I work in every day, after all, is full of actual stairs that conveniently connect one floor to the next. The Stairmaster reminds me of the year I worked for a woman on Park Avenue who would take a taxi five blocks to the gym.

In any case I “climbed” “stairs” for half an hour and now here I am back at my computer. Don’t spread this around, but I’m looking forward to the group run tomorrow morning. Not only will it actually involve moving through space, but it’s seven miles long. And, being both curious and impatient, I am anxious to see how it will feel.

I woke up this morning feeling scattered and it hadn’t gone away by four. I was having this very specific feeling, a feeling that took me several hours to put my finger on: it was the feeling you get a while after a big breakup, where you’re not exactly sad and not exactly missing the person, but more missing the comfortable habits associated with that person. You’re missing the part where you wake up and they have your coffee waiting on the table. Which is an odd feeling for me to be having at this specific point because I haven’t gone through any break-up of any kind recently. Also because I don’t drink coffee.

With all this scatteriness my work wasn’t much getting done, and the weather was looking a bit ominous, so I decided to go for a run while the running was good. On my way out the door I bumped into Paz, who wanted to come along. This was exciting because I was resigned to running alone, but also intimidating because Paz is small and fit and fast. We definitely ran faster than I would have solo, which I know is good for me, and we ran for at least forty five minutes. And despite the speed and the duration, it all felt pretty good.

I am at a loss to explain why some of my runs feel so much better than others. Part of it I understand: I feel better if I am rested and in good company. But other variables are still a mystery. The whole nutrition thing eludes me, as does hydration, which really seems like it should be a no-brainer. Time of day is also a factor, but morning runs feel alternatively exhilarating and debilitating.

Today’s run just felt good. I feel warm and strong and not even a little tired, which is at least something for a scattered day.

I am in Los Angeles for the wedding of my friends Julien and David. Consequently I traded my 6-mile Saturday run with TnT in Eugene for three two-mile loops around the Penmar Golf Course in Venice Beach, all by myself. I do not like Los Angeles.

In a few months I will be moving somewhere, and it will be a city – a city bigger than Eugene. Beyond that it could be lots of places – preferably somewhere with access to the outdoors and a few cool museums and some significant body of water. It could be Portland or Seattle or San Francisco or Philadelphia or Boston or Chicago, and I’d even consider places like Austin or St Paul or other random spots for the right job or the right people. But it will not be LA. Not if the love of my life and my dream job were waiting for me here and nowhere else.

LA is more highway than anything else. It takes an hour in a car to get anywhere, and car is the only way to get there. It’s sprawly and scattered and for me has all the peculiarities of a foreign city without any of the appeal. I know these sentiments are neither fair nor original. I don’t care. I just got back from a six mile run and I can write what I want.

The run, actually, was not so bad. I ran by whitewashed houses and people working on their yards listening to Spanish radio. Half the run was on sandy southern California soil that, because of the unusual eighth inch of rain that fell yesterday, was sticky and puddled. The grainy mud clumped on the bottoms of my sneakers and weighed down my feet.

When I run I pass the time in my head in several ways: I sing songs – often just a particular part of just one song over and over, I think about my body and how I am feeling, I have elaborate day dreams. This works until I start to feel physically bad. Today this happened after four miles, just as I was starting my third and final loop. My face flushed and my mouth dried and stifling heat came up off of my chest and throat; my stomach twisted. That’s when I started thinking about how my body will only get better at this if I push it; how you have to constantly put yourself in an uncomfortable zone to improve. It’s not like I say this to myself in some motivational speaker kind of way. I say it in a grudging, angry, so-why-the-fuck-am-I-doing-this way. Also, and I mean this, I think about how many people have encouraged me, and how many people have supported the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society because I am doing this, and how doing this is my end of that bargain. That’s what I think about when I really want to stop.

Also I identify plants, because I am a science geek. But that was harder here in a different climate zone, where the plants are different. Today I could only i.d. a few: coast redwood, some cotoneaster, a bottlebrush tree, rockrose, Hollywood juniper. Most of the other plants were strange desert-looking things with smooth bark and glossy leaves. The air as I ran past was sweet and citrusy.

I finished my run by a taqueria, and it’s the longest I’ve run so far, maybe ever. And when I finish that on marathon day I’ll still have twenty miles left to run.

I just got back from a solo run. It was not as bad as the solo runs of my first two weeks. In fact for much of the run – the maybe 40% when I was not singing this particular verse of Christmas Carol by the Nields – I was thinking about how quickly things have gotten better. It has been less than four weeks, but I’m no longer breathless after five minutes. I no longer feel like vomiting after twenty. I no longer feel, when my forty-five minutes is up, that I could not possibly run any farther. I currently feel that if I really, really had to – if someone was very slowly chasing me, say – I could probably run for an hour and a half without dying.

Among other signs of progress is my disappearing stomach. I made it to twenty five with one of those eat-everything-in-site-with-no-consequences metabolisms, but for the past few years my waistline responds directly to my diet. And diet I don’t. I also can’t say I particularly care, aside from the sudden unwearability of some clothes I used to like. But! The first day I went running I was specifically unfond of my stomach. It shook and gurgled and felt unpleasantly heavy and off-balance. It felt like an unwanted passenger around my middle, and running, frankly, is bad enough as it is.

Today, however, I realized that this passenger is substantially smaller. I didn’t come to notice this before because I tend to wear my pants and skirts somewhere around my hips. In any case the smaller stomach – which I’m attributing directly to the running – is, in turn, making the running much more pleasant. Three cheers for positive feedback loops.

I still don’t like solo running as much as running with Ty, who tells me about the cornfields and hickory trees of central Pennsylvania, and who wears a watch so I don’t have to think about how much longer we have to go. But I ran today in a big loop that crossed two bridges over the Willamette as the sun was going down, and I smiled at other runners, and - though I still think it would have been more fun to be playing soccer or lacrosse – I am home now, and I feel pretty good.

So, here’s something you runner-types predicted, but I never believed you: I am going for a run in half an hour, and I can’t wait. I would go right now if I wasn’t waiting for Ty. I am downright looking forward to this run.

I had a crappy afternoon. My thesis is behind schedule, a job that was offered to me turned into a different, less desirable job with fewer hours, and I haven’t been able to focus all week. I have no idea what I will be doing in four weeks, or where, or with who. I am sitting here at this computer, not working on my thesis, looking out the window and thinking, I would like to be running right now, it would be cold and sunny and I wouldn’t have to be dealing with any of this.

Well shit.

My plan was to write about this ridiculous running book I’ve been reading, full of stupid cheesy sentiments about running, but that’s on hold for now. Because yesterday I sent out a fundraising email, and this morning suddenly my inbox was full of encouragement. And the little runningman on my fundraising page is now running over a big “17%” instead of over a sad little “2%”. So instead of mocking the running book and all it stands for, I want to say thank you thank you thank you to everyone who let me know that this might not be such an awful idea after all, and who made pledges to push my little runningman forward, and who maybe did one or both of these things while also calling me a variety of creative names for crazy, which I will compile for a future entry. Really, thank you. I will think about it while I’m running and it will help me keep running.

Next time: more making fun of running.

Today was the Truffle Shuffle, an annual Eugene run sponsored by a local chocolatier. You run four miles and get a big chocolate truffle. Since (a) that’s one mile less than the run I was supposed to do this weekend and (b) a big chocolate truffle was involved, I signed up.

Eugene is currently in the midst of fake spring, the two weeks in February when the sky clears, the rain disappears, and the temperature rises. Consequently I decided to run in a skirt, specifically a skirt my mom made me in junior high that is blue with little palm-treed tropical islands printed on it. I pulled on this, my Team in Training jersey, and my speedy new sneaks and met up with Emilee, another TnT runner who is also the roommate of my friend Julie. We biked over to the park and found the registration tent, where we got big paper numbers to pin to our stomachs. I was 1462. My first big paper number ever.

We headed up to the starting line, where runners from the earlier two mile race were just coming in. We cheered and stretched and marveled that we were doing the long race of the day. As start time neared we ran into Aaron, another TnTer, and the three of us made our way to the start.

The starting line was more of a starting mob. The crowd numbered in the hundreds. Eugene is also known as Tracktown – it was home to Prefontaine and is about to host the Olympic time trials – and the crowd had its fair share of hard core. It also, however, had teenagers in skater clothes and seniors with sweatbands. We milled around chatting until a loud crack shattered the air. After about five seconds we realized that it was probably some sort of starting gun. After another ten seconds the crowd in front of us began moving.

The mob spread out quickly and we settled into our slow, steady pace. Coach Phil had been clear that even when running “short” distances like four miles we were to stick to conversation pace. For us this turned out to be 10-minute miles. For those of you new to running, that’s pretty fuckin slow. As a frame of reference, there are people who run 4-minute miles. Not that they do it for a whole marathon, but even so… people finish marathons in just over two hours. For those of you new to math, if we had maintained those 10-minute miles for another 22 miles – to total the length of a marathon – said marathon would have taken us 262 minutes to complete. That’s almost four and a half hours. Four and a half terrible, terrible hours.

Not that this mere forty minutes left me begging for more. Between feeling overheated in the sixty-degree weather and my first awkward, non-hydrating attempt at drinking-while-running, these four miles left me feeling unfit and graceless as ever. Fortunately there were good parts: all of mile two had an intuitive rhythm, where I just looked straight ahead and let my body run; the finish felt energizing and endorphiny. But the rest… ugh. This is going to get better, right?

So here’s one thing I’ve learned about myself so far: I don’t run well alone. I don’t run as far or as fast. Twice these two weeks of training I’ve tried to run alone, and both have been sad little runs. My internal running monologue is not nearly as effective as my internal rainbiking monologue or really any of my other I-don’t-like-this-but-I’ll-keep-doing-it-anyway monologues. And then I let myself cheat. So I’m going to try hard not to run alone.

Speaking of rainbiking, it’s time for Reason Two (again, in no particular order) that I am running this marathon: I hate running, and I’m always curious if I can stop hating the things I hate.

In my adult life I have warmed up to lots of things I once hated, and some of them I have even come to love: Ethiopian bread, cell phones, country-western music, Volvos, the Economist, oak trees. In addition to Things I Once Hated That Now I Love, I have two other hate-related lists: Things I Once Hated That I’m OK With Hating, and Things I Once Hated That I May Yet Come to Love. Right now running falls into this last list, keeping good company with curry and wheely suitcases. This marathon, then, will be the decision-maker: will I come to love running, or will it be relinquished to the middle pile, languishing for unexamined eternity with radio call-in shows and caraway seeds?

We opened the front door at 7:30 on Saturday morning and a crack of thunder shook the porch. This didn’t seem like a good omen, since thunderstorms are even less common in Eugene than neckties. Nevertheless Betsy and I hopped in my truck and drove to meet the crew.

We ran from Oakway Mall down to the river, then followed the bike path for a mile between the highway and the brown, churning Willamette. We crossed it on one footbridge and looped back on another miles later. The rain fell in slanty streaks, and wind whipping off the water blew across our path. But it’s not so bad, running in the rain. Not nearly as bad as I expected. The warmth of running balances out the cold elements, and the rain washes the sweat from your forehead. I felt a little messy, but I didn’t feel freezing. I didn’t feel soaked. I didn’t feel defeated.

I ran the second half of the course with Jeb, a recent grad of my department who I recognized at the first organizational meeting. He keeps a faster pace than I would on my own, so I kept it too. I think this is really good. I think this is the sort of thing that helps me push outside my comfort level and eventually improves my stamina. Of course eventually hasn’t come around just yet, so on this particular morning the pace made my breathing hard and my stomach sloshy. I have discovered that I can control my breath if I focus hard enough – I can actually will my breathing under control, which I find amazing and Matrix-like; there is no panting – but there’s nothing I’ve been able to do about my stomach so far. It bothers me every time.

At the end of our run we had a shoe clinic at the Eugene Running Company. Shivaun, one of the owners, put me on a treadmill and filmed my running. We watched the tape and she explained the various inconsistencies of my foot physiology and how the right shoes would prevent these from causing me injury. Ever since my college co-rower Bridget told me freshman year that my shin splints were likely the result of my three-year-old sneaks – which proved absolutely correct, and to my great gladness cleared up the problem – I look upon good gear with grateful awe. So I left with a new pair of Asics that feel like slippers. They have silver and purple stripes, which I think will also help my speed.

Understandably, quite a lot of people have been asking me why I am training to run a marathon, since the more obvious “I enjoy running” is clearly not the answer. Since I can think of six reasons right off the top of my head, I am initiating a new series of blog entries to address the question.

I’ll go ahead and kick that series off now, since I don’t feel like working on my thesis. So with no further ado and in no particular order…

Reason Number One: I am inexcusably out of shape.

Admittedly, I have not spent much of my life “in shape.” There was that one year in college on the crew team, working out six times a week for several hours a go, running up stadium steps two at a time and erging until I fell off. At the end of that year I had the realization that I would never, ever in my whole life be that in shape again, which was both inspiring and discouraging.

Since then I’ve only exercised accidentally. As in, I don’t avoid activities that are exercise-like, but I don’t exercise for the sake of exercise. So I hike in the summer and bike to school and play random sports and walk just about everywhere, but I’ve never signed on to that three-times-a-week-for-thirty-minutes thing. Sporadically I’ve had periods of serious fitness, like the six months in Costa Rica working in a garden almost daily, or the two-week timber framing course. And then I get in shape really fast, and I get strong and I feel great. And then I stop and it all goes away.

Usually backpacking gets me in shape – and I mean the kind where I travel around with a backpack, not the kind where I’m hiking – and I was backpacking through Central Europe for several weeks last summer. But this particular bout of backpacking was preceded by six months in Amsterdam, where my second home was a bar. If I listed out the ingredients of my Amsterdam diet, FDA regulations would require that beer appear first. In addition to picking up conversational Dutch and an adolescent fondness for text messaging, I also acquired what the Dutch might refer to as “ten kilograms.”

I had arrived in Amsterdam in January with several pairs of pants. When I dug these out of the closet depths in June to re-pack them, I found them resoundingly unbuttonable. Though at first I hypothesized a high-temperature drying accident, the localization of shrinkage to the waistbands did not support my theory. With passing worry I donated them to my chain smoking but endlessly skinny Spanish friends and filled my newly roomy suitcases with flashy Dutch design books.

Though I made lemonade from these lemons, the beer’s damage has lingered. And now I am ready to once again climb multiple flights of stairs with ease. I am ready for the return of some muscle tone. I am ready to broaden the scope of my recreational sports participation beyond travel bocce.

So that’s one reason.