Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 23: Trying to Enjoy Being Foolish

At the beginning of the school year, I tried to start a fitness club at my school.  We don't really have extracurricular activities because, frankly, ain't nobody got time for that.  The students who end up in my program are trying to spend as little time in school as possible, so staying late to hang out isn't usually on the agenda.  But when I shopped the idea around, many students expressed an interest.  I wasn't sure exactly what the club would look like - considering we don't have a gym, an open field, or funds for equipment (or a place to put that equipment), we'd have to connect with a local business or just make do with what we had.  When one of the counselors at the school heard what I was trying to do, he told me about this program called Dreamfar High School Marathon.

Dreamfar trains high school students to run a marathon.  That might sound crazy to you because it kind of is.  But the idea is that, by challenging students to push themselves and do something that less than 1% of people will ever do, Dreamfar teaches kids much more about themselves than most of their other high school experiences.  Teachers at each participating school volunteer to lead their teams and conduct the practice runs after school, and community members volunteer as mentors to run with students during the whole-team long runs on Saturdays.  I started with 4 runners and a lot of maybes.  By the end of first quarter, I had no runners left.  I didn't realize it at the time, but that was pretty much my last chance to back out.  I could have quit and no one would have blamed me for it - after all, my students up and quit on me, so it made sense that I would stop.

But I didn't even consider that.  I was training to run a marathon.  Just because my kids quit didn't mean that my training was less valuable.  So I stayed on as a mentor and just switched roles.  I do my practice runs by myself on week days after work and join the team on Saturdays.  This weekend, I'm going to run 11 miles.  As is the case with the last three Saturday runs, this will again be the longest distance I've ever run.  Seven was fine.  Eight was lovely.  Nine hurt like hell.  Nine was the first run I've done with Dreamfar that made me reconsider my participation in the program.  And not really reconsider, as if I was ready to stop training.  But for the first time, I recognized the reality that I was not bound to this program for any reason.  The only thing keeping me there was my own desire to push myself and be a part of something beyond just me.  No students would be abandoned if I left - there is no person for whom I am the only connection they have to Dreamfar.

The couple of practice runs I did the week following the 9-miler weren't great either.  I did them, and they were fine, but I didn't get that surge of satisfaction afterward that I usually feel when I complete a run.  I felt tired during the run, battled a voice in the back of my head telling me that I could do a partial run because hey-man-you-did-nine-miles-so-it's-cool, and felt like I was fighting a losing battle.  I thought to myself, Self, you never really intended to run a marathon anyway.  That's for crazy people.  You even said, when you first started running, that you didn't plan to get into real distance running.  So why are you bothering?  I went into this past Sunday's 10k race feeling pretty meh about running.

And then I beat my best pace and finished 15 minutes faster than I had planned.  A time of 1:15 for a 10k might not be great for a runner runner, but for me, it's amazing.  My fastest 5k time is 39 minutes, so even if I didn't have to slow down to double my distance, I still was 3 minutes faster than I would have been at that pace.  AND that 5k time was running outright, whereas this 10k (as all other Dreamfar runs) was an interval run with 3 minutes of running and 1 minute of walking.  It was a challenging run, but I kept a surprisingly consistent pace the entire time, enjoyed myself, and only cared a little that it was something like 15º with a brutal wind chill.

That 10k helped me recapture something I had started to lose.  I don't know if it's motivation or perseverance or just enjoyment of the activity.  But I reconnected with it then, and I felt it again yesterday as I plugged through another 3.5 miles on the treadmill (sidenote: I usually use my gym's window-facing treadmills if I run inside, but when those were all taken, Law & Order: SVU made a very compelling case for the TV-facing machines).  Hopefully, as I take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather this afternoon, I'll feel it again as I cruise down the Esplanade trying not to get mugged.

I genuinely don't know how the 11-mile run this Saturday is going to go.  If I split the difference between my standard slow pace and my most recent 10k pace, it'll take me 2.5 hours.  That's a long time to pound the pavement.  If I push myself too hard, run through "bad" pain, or get sloppy, I could be looking at serious injury, either acute or chronic.  Besides possibly killing my hopes of finishing the marathon in May, an injury could seriously derail my entire fitness routine and make my life miserable.  I'm doing this for my benefit, not as punishment, so I need to make sure that I'm pulling away from this experience with a net gain.  Last week, I wasn't feeling it.  I was putting more into the runs than I was getting out.  That feels different this week, and I hope it stays that way. 

For now, I'm trying to enjoy being foolish.  It's foolish to just fall into a marathon training program.  It's foolish to keep doing it even when your students quit.  It's foolish to try to do this while planning a wedding.  But I'd rather be a fool than a quitter.