Running on Empty

My mother asked me once, as we sat in my car outside a bakery in Boca Raton, getting ready to go in and buy goodies for one birthday or another, “is this how you pictured yourself, and your life, when you were young?”

It was 2007, and we were talking about me quitting smoking.  Again.  I had quit 13 times before.  That may sound excessive, perhaps a little crazy, but unless you’ve had an addiction, well then, you just don’t know.  I was desperate to be free of it, and I had tried pills, which gave me hives:  a wonderful experience involving a midnight trip to the emergency room and an IV full of antihistamine, punctuated by a nurse not pinching hard enough and me squirting blood across the room.   I tried nicotine gum, which is perfectly disgusting unless you like chewing minty ass (apologies for that visual), and nicotine patches, with some limited success.

Mom never nagged me about quitting smoking, although she hated it - her father had smoked cigars her whole life, and he died of lung cancer.  But she would subtly work information into my consciousness through articles on refrigerators about deteriorating smokers’ lungs, or other terrible ailments that befall the smokin’.  One evening, when we were in Key West, I had stepped outside to light up.  I was sitting on Grandma’s front steps enjoying a smoke in the night air when Mom opened the front door behind me, poked her head out and simply said, “The roaches down here fly, you know,” and closed the door.

My eyes widened.  I smoked faster.

But it was that one question that stopped me cold.  Was this how I pictured myself?  The answer was simply:  no.  I had been an athlete - starting in first grade I played softball for years, ran track, played basketball, and even cheered for one year.  But it was running that stuck.  Into my teens, I did it as a hobby, not just a team sport.

The only reason I stopped running was because I started smoking.

And it was that thought - of myself as a runner, that did it.  I quit for the fourteenth time, used a patch to help, and started to run.  That made it sound easy.  It was not, not even a little easy.  Smoking is a nasty habit in many ways, but it is one serious addiction.  Withdrawal can be terrible - not like coming off of a hard drug, but that’s just the thing, your addicted mind tells you it’s not that big a deal, so go on and have just one.  The worst part of withdrawal for many is not just the intense craving, but depression sets in - smoking alters many things, including hormones and cortisol production, and that affects the mind.  

But running helped with all of that, and finally, I was free.  I found that I still loved running, so much so that I knew I’d have to give it up again if I took a puff, so I never smoked again.  The first album I bought and added to my iPod Shuffle was The Cult’s Sonic Temple - which I used to run to as a teen - oh yeah.  That was it.

For those that think runners, real runners, just do it for the exercise, well, they’d be mistaken.  The runners ‘high’ is real, but it can be a ‘low’ as well.  Challenging yourself, pushing yourself to the absolute limit evokes all kinds of emotions.  And they can burst out of you, just as you finish that push.  It’s powerful, and it's addictive as hell.  Not sure I would call that a ‘low’, actually, it’s more of a cleanse.  But it can be a tough process sometimes. 

I replaced one addiction with the other - a healthy one this time, and that’s how I finally did it - I quit for good.  I was 34 at the time, and that was not the only thing that changed.  Now I had a new way of assessing my life:  is this what I pictured when I was young?  

Until this point, I realized it was almost as if I had been afraid to dream - I was never one to make any real plans.  I had no firm goals.  I worked hard, and followed what I thought was the flow of my life.  And that had served me pretty well, I was doing just fine.  But now, I knew I could make real change.  And now I had done something that was difficult as all hell.  I decided not to be afraid to dream, to not think that if I dreamed or set a goal, that would somehow jinx it and keep it from coming true.  It was never a conscious decision to do so, but once you zoom out to the proverbial 20,000 feet, you can see all of your bad habits.

I learned to not only be comfortable with a dream, but to become what I had pictured in my youth - a believer in good things coming, a gatherer of physical challenges, a protector of animals and nature, and an architect of a career with meaning.  I vowed to never stop dreaming, and never stop evolving.