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.