Best Story About a Time that I Ran

I see a lot of posts and statuses and tweets by people training and running—Ragnars, marathons, half-marathons—so I’d like to throw my hat in the ring and participate in this robust internet dialogue as well.  Because once I ran a mile and a half.

The author in his natural habitat.

It was the very beginning of my freshman year.  I was coming off my greatest summer as a swimmer where I had put in about five hours a day training in the pool, trounced the majority of my competition at meet after meet, and placed third in state in the 200 yard breaststroke, I was at the absolute height of whatever my physical prime would be.  That first semester I was taking this gym class called “Fitness for Life” (commonly and lame-ily called “Fitness for Death” by generations of students, I preferred “Fitness for Fatties”, a sobriquet of my own invention) where, to get an A and receive 50% of the PE credits you’d ever need to graduate, you just had to perform better on a fitness test at he end of the semester than you did on a fitness test at the beginning of the semester, and show that you trained a little in between.  The popular form to the preliminary fitness test: a mile and a half run with your class in the school’s field house. 

Seeing as I was as fit as I’d ever be, and knew it, I was excited for this run.  I’d practically never run before, except when earning my Physical Fitness badge and a few times in Junior High . . . the last time I remembered running was at the beginning of my junior year as part of a pre-swim season training routine with a number of my teammates.  I headed out on that run alongside my teammates but watched in mystification as these fellows, my peers in the water, grew farther and farther away from me.  One or two initially held back to keep company with me, but eventually abandoned me for the sake of their own fitness.  While they tore around corners and across lawns, I found myself walking with my hands on my hips, spitting frequently, with a feeling like my side was going to burst.  But I recognized this Fitness for Life run as the opportunity to see what I was really made of, to see what kind of decent mile and a half runtime I might score.  I gathered with my classmates in our blue and grey gym issue at the starting line, a few guys from my floor mingling around me with a few girls I recognized from other classes along with plenty of strangers.  I tried visualizing how far a mile and a half was.  Nothing materialized.  But it couldn’t be that far?  I imagined the walk to my old grade school and back.  That was probably a mile and a half.  The teacher, an upperclassman or physical education grad student, tells us that the mile and a half is 7.5 laps of the field house track.  This seems . . . long to me.  And then we’re off!

At first it is my plan that I’ll keep pace with this guy Scott, a known runner, that lived in the dorm room across the hall from me.  This delusion lasts no further than the first turn of the track.  I try to fall in with a clump of the runners, in my mind this mile and a half is just a little thing I need to get rid of.  A little thing that will be over quickly.  I feel like I must be able to do all right at this because my sister is an excellent runner, a renowned runner, a scholarshipped-runner . . . I should at least be able to put forth a decent mile and a half showing based on shared genetics, right?  But my key genetic traits at play in this physical challenge are my feet.  Long, wide, very flat footed, they turn out at a wide angle like clown shoes.  For the frog-like kick of the breaststroke, this is an advantage, my JV coach said he could tell from my feet I’d make a good breaststroker, he spoke of another coach that’d have his freshman walk around the pool just to get a look at their feet, to spot the breaststrokers in the bunch—but in running, they’re bad news.  They clomp clomp clomp out to the sides so awkwardly, so heavily, like a duck in rain boots.  Classmates pass me continually and I watch them go by, wondering if their feet are as heavy and loud as mine.

My endurance starts to falter, too.  Maybe I went out too hard?  Maybe it was foolish to have even tried to run alongside Scott as far as the first turn?  Immediately I fall into a pattern, along the straight approaching the second turn (you know what I mean by “second turn”, right?  I’m jogging a long oval track here, we started in the middle of the “top”, run counterclockwise into the first turn, then we run along the bottom, take the second turn, and after half of this next straight away a lap is complete) there is an aerobics class with pumped up workout jams playing full blast.  When this music comes into range I pick up my feet and pick up my pace, pump my arms a little harder and run with my head a little higher—the power of these jams brings me to a near sprint on each lap.  Once I’m out of range of the music my pace lowers, my heart beats in my throat, my side pounds in pain, and I pay for my minute of cockiness as I crash hard from my junk-pop sugar high.

Scott laps me.  His mile and a half is over and I’ve got plenty to go.  When I finish I do not finish dead last, but my time is nothing to be proud of.  There is a sheet with star ratings on a scale of, let’s say 0 to 6, assigned to times—my time is a three star time. There is a little blurb for each star score, a three star score gets a blurb like “Not bad, but you should have worked out in high school.”  It is appropriately humiliating.  I walk away from the track and my legs are just trembling.  I hack and spit.  I keep my head low and make eye contact with no one.  I gather my things at my locker with shaking arms and head for my dorm without changing.  It is a bright fall day, fresh and new fresh-faced freshmen frolic on the dorm lawns around me.  I hold my belongings to my chest like the survivor of a great wrong.  Returned to my dorm, I stand in the shower for nearly an hour, fully clothed.  While the water drenches my gym issue into a skintight darkest possible grey I shudder, I dry heave, I shake.  My legs feel like they’re going to give like a footstool kicked out from under me at any time.  The dorm building seems silent and empty and I am grateful.  No one else comes in for a three o clock shower and I am grateful.  I close my eyes and rest my forehead against the wall beneath the showerhead.  I fixate on my three star score.  That I did not soar like an eagle through this challenge does not surprise me, it was my often sited self-assessment that I was not good at any sport that involved land, a ball or a team.  But my athletic self-esteem had been dinged, my hard-earned high-regard for my own physical prowess was taken down a notch by this apparent non-transferability of skill.  To quote Vonnegut, in the water I was beautiful—but on land, an absolute disaster.

I would never run more than a block again in my life.

Fearing a return to the track at the end of the semester, I examined my Fitness for Life materials.  Turns out there were assessments available for other sports, including swimming.  On my first practice swim (as we were required to log a number of work-outs before our official final performance) my time translated into something that completely shattered the Fitness for Life star-scale, mine would have been a fourteen star time or something.  I’m not saying I swam the required distance in super-Olympian speed.  The swimming times were obviously set out for people who never swam competitively, for folks figuring they’ll give a lap swim a shot, people who couldn’t do a flip turn or didn’t realize that more than two people could share a lane.  Whatever the distance required for the swim was it was short, in no way a proper analogue to a mile and a half run.  Whatever the goal times set out were they were generous, allowing for breaks to catch your breath at the wall.  My Fitness for Life A was easily achieved, but my pride as a runner never won. 

Best Complete Account

At then end of my post about the duck dinner I mentioned a subway incident involving a wayward youth, here's the whole story.  Sorry about my white print on black blog, I should do something about that.

On a downtown Q train headed from to Canal Street from Union Square I watched with some subway bemusement as a young hipster, late teens I’d say, wearing a denim jacket and a pair of stretch pants whose lycra limits she clearly was testing, as she ate a fistful of beef jerky straight from the bag.  She ate the thin, wide pieces with enthusiastic abandon. One piece fell from her fist onto her leg and watched her, wondering when she’d notice.  She leaned down—I thought at first to get the jerky, but instead she was stuffing her jerky bag into the baggy purse held between her legs.  Her face disappeared into the bag for a deep moment, then she raised it—I’d say she was Hispanic, she wore thick brimmed glasses, after the popular fashion, and her upper lip was darkened a bit by unattended hairs—the piece of jerky fell from her leg to the floor, she lowered her face to her bag again.  Seemed like the jerky show as over.  I walked down the car a bit to a better door, my stop was coming up.

Leaning on the door, I noticed a passenger was reading Cat’s Cradle, a book I’ve had an intense on and off relationship with for sixteen years.  I walked back over by my original spot on the train  to see who was reading it.  A young lady but not a young young lady.  Back at that end of the train, I caught another glance of the jerky girl, rooting around in her purse, it was occurring to me that she looked a touch out of it.  As the train slowed for Canal street I pulled out my notepad to scrawl “hipster jerky” for future remembering.  I stepped out of the car, Cat’s Cradle was right behind me, but she hung a hard left when she got off the train and ran to the nearby conductor’s compartment at the head of the train.  She tapped on the window urgently.  Funny, I thought, she doesn’t look like she’d need directions.  The conductor lowered the window, I heard the woman exclaim “There is a girl on the train who is huffing!  Huffing.  Inhaling something.” Between each sentence she looked more intensely at the conductor “Isn’t that a problem?”

My jerky friend.  Of course.  I looked behind me at the car, there she was, face in the purse again.  I heard a muffled airy hissing sound that hadn’t registered earlier.  I realized I had heard that sound over and over on the train.  Didn’t really know what to make of it, I walked up the stairs to the J platform.  I looked back down the stairs, the train was still there.  I heard the recorded voice over the PA announcing that the train was being held momentarily.  I felt like I should be involved in this, wasn’t sure how.  I went back down the stairs.  Were the cops going to be there?

Riders remained on the train blank faced, people waiting for an N train lined the platform, and I saw the jerky girl slip off the train just as the doors were closing and it was pulling out of the station.  She was not well, there was a weakness in her knees and she walked in a very wide, loose swerve down towards the other end of the platform.  I trailed her, maybe 8 feet behind, tensing up every time her sine wave course brought her back to the yellow edge of the subway platform.  A white knit scarf fell from her bag, someone grabbed it and handed it to her, without paying a bit of attention the jerky girl took the scarf back and slung it over her shoulder again.  She raised an aerosol can wrapped in a magazine to her face.  I thought of boys with bags of glue I had seen in Mexico.  She was getting so close to the edge.  Her butt was so big.  Her hair was so greasy.  Her clothes looked so normal.  I glanced over my shoulder for maybe the Cat’s Cradle woman or anyone else with an eye on this girl.  Didn’t see anything that looked like either.

The jerky girl reached the very end of the platform, looked for a moment like she was going to keep going—Is she a mole person?!—I thought to myself—Returning to her lair?—on not-nimble feet she pivoted and hunkered down on the floor, first with her legs and feet sticking out over the edge—in my mind I saw a train taking them clean off—after one more bag-immersion she tucked them under herself, Indian style. 

I looked at her.  I needed a cop.  I headed upstairs and down the too-long hall of the Broadway side of the NQ station at Canal, through the turnstyles, shouldn’t there just be a cop right around here?  The station was empty, an MTA worker was inside his booth.  He looked up as I approached.

I told him there was a girl on the tracks, very close to the edge, getting high, huffing—On the tracks?! he asked No, the platform.  I could tell he knew that’s what I meant, but was just checking.  He asked me to describe her, he copied my words down on a piece of brown paper bag in a private shorthand,  “In her twenties?” He asked “Ehh . . . late teens . . . wearing a denim jacket, leggings, she has a white scarf” My voice was quivering?  My voice was quivering.  “White?” He asked. I looked at the MTA worker’s brown skin “Hispanic, light skinned Hispanic . . . hipster looking.” He wasn’t losing his cool but he was with me, he was listening. “I’ll call it in” he told me.  I thanked him, stepped back.  Would she still be there?  And does it mean he’ll “call it in”? Didn’t know what to do so I swiped my metrocard and headed back to the platform.  A train hadn’t come yet.  She was still in her spot.  I stood close by with a pillar between us, she huffed.  She was more mid-teens, now that I had a better look.  We both heard the squeal of an approaching train.  She turned herself around and stood, uneasily, slow to straighten out her knees.  Her butt was over the line, sticking out into the subway’s path.  I noticed that the tunnel turned sharply as it arrived at the station, I could see the train’s lights on her butt but couldn’t tell how close the train was, in my mind I saw the train take it clean off.  She stood.  The train arrived.  She’d had plenty of time. 

Are police coming? I wondered.  I looked around for police.  She headed to board the train, I put a hand on her shoulder, “Are you okay?” is what I said, I didn’t know what I was going to say, apparently my brain chose the least useful thing  “I’m fine” she said, like a disgruntled teen that  doesn’t want any help from their guidance counselor.  She stumbled aboard, dragging her white scarf but wearing a darker scarf.  I didn’t remember the other scarf!  Was my description going to throw the authorities off her trail?  She sat down, nearly fell into her seat, the other passengers gave her a look.  I stood and watched. should I be getting on this train?  The next stop is in Brooklyn.  The doors closed, there were no cops on the platform, the train rolled away and I watched her pass by.

Her mom wishes I got on that train, I thought, turning for the staircase.