Finished Being Fat: An Accidental Adventure in Losing Weight and Learning How to Finish (10 page)

I chose to believe that while yes, some things happen for a reason, one of those reasons was that I make it happen. As a driver, I decide which way I am going to go and how I let things affect me. Sure it means that I have to take ownership for my “accidents,” but it also means that I do not have to sit idly by waiting for a Mack truck to sideswipe me. And just like my car in real life, the driver not only gets to pick the radio station, but she picks the final destination.

R
unning an actual race was the real turning point in my life. It focused me so I could see how all these little changes were growing together to make a big change.

Jarom decided that if we were going to make Park City, then we needed to accelerate our training program. We needed to throw in a practice race to help us prepare. That sounded smart; I was on board for that. My friend’s hair school was hosting a three-mile fun run downtown. Apparently that wasn’t good enough. He informed me that he was signing us up for the Utah Valley Half Marathon.

“You want to do a practice race and you’re gonna pick a thirteen-mile run? That’s not practice; that’s just as hard as running a full marathon.”

“Nope, it’s only half as hard.”

Honestly, I have no clue what Jarom had against the idea of running a 5K, but somebody needed a reality check. We were barely managing our four-mile runs, and he thought we should run more than three times that amount as practice. He really wanted to push the limits of my budding optimism, didn’t he?

I had two problems with the thought of running in a real honest-to-goodness race. (I still refused to call it a practice race.) The first problem was that distance. Thirteen miles is forever long. That would be like running to the freeway from my house. And thirteen was just a rotten number anyway. It’s unlucky. People became triskaidekaphobic (fear of the number thirteen) for a reason. Maybe they’d let me do twelve miles and call it good.

The second problem went back to my fears. No, not of thirteen, but the fear of being good enough. Of doing it right, or more accurately, of not doing it right and being laughed at. Maybe I could get from point A to point B, but it took forever. I knew that because Jarom had a spiffy little watch (that required a college degree to operate) that measured your heart rate, time elapsed, and calories burned. Using its internal GPS it could also tell you how far you’d run and what your pace was. Pace is how many minutes it takes someone to run a mile. We were somewhere around a thirteen-minute mile. (There’s that number again. I’m going to get a complex.) As a point of reference, my friend Sarah Michelle, the Fat Pack instructor, ran a nine-minute mile. We couldn’t run together because she’d have to run backward just to maintain my pace.

So I was slow. I didn’t need Jarom’s high-tech watch to tell me that. Some people walked faster than we ran. Old people with their dogs passed us on the track. Snails secretly snickered as we went by. It was a constant irritant for me. I didn’t want to do something just to be lame at it. What was the point in that? A continual theme of my life: If I can’t do it well, I don’t want to do it. I was going to get faster. Maybe not Boston Marathon fast, but at least Sarah Michelle fast.

***

One day after a really difficult six-mile run, I’d had it. Aside from the pain in my knees, the only thing I felt was frustration. Using my own less-complicated watch, I’d timed myself at one hour, twelve minutes, and forty-six seconds. That averaged out to about twelve-minute miles, maybe a little faster, but I’m pretty sure that time meant I was still pretty lame. But maybe there was hope. I mean how bad could that be really? Perhaps Sarah Michelle’s nine-minute miles were considered fast, so that would make me just average instead of bad. I could work with average.

Icing my aches, I hopped on the Internet to confirm. It was even worse than I’d feared. Not only were twelve-minute miles considered slow, but they weren’t even considered running. That inauspicious time put me in the dubious company of joggers. All that time and effort I’d spent working up to six miles, and I couldn’t even call myself a runner. I don’t know why the label bugged me so much. To me “jogging” was something you did casually, but “running” was something athletes did. And I really wanted to be an athlete. Plus, who’s ever heard of a marathon jogger?

I sought out Jarom and braced him for the bad news.

“Turns out anything slower than a ten-minute mile is considered jogging”

His eyebrows arched. “And?”

“And since neither one of us can run a ten-minute mile, then we’re not really running at all. We’re jogging.” I spit out that last sentence with all the distaste it deserved.

Jarom shrugged. “Humph. Feels like running to me.”

“Well, it’s not. It’s jogging.”

“I repeat… and?”

Ugh. Was he really this dense or had all the running addled his brain? “Obviously it means that we can’t do the races.”

“Why is that?”

I threw my hands up in exasperation. “Because you can’t jog in a race. Even if we finish, we’ll be dead last. It’ll take us so long nobody will even be at the finish line anymore. Seventy-year-olds will be passing us. People with prosthetic limbs will be passing us.”

“Who cares?”

It was too much for me. I was cranky because I still wasn’t eating enough food, I was tired and sore from a tough run, and my husband was being a moron. So I did the only thing I could. I started to cry.

“I care.” I gasped out in between hitching breaths “I don’t want to lose.”

Jarom chuckled even as he gathered me into his embrace. “I’m sorry honey, but did you think you had a shot at winning the race?”

Wiping my nose, I said, “No, that’s stupid. I just don’t want to be last.”

“And you won’t be; I will. You complain about being slow, but I’m always behind you. So don’t worry about being last, I’ll take care of that. You just worry about getting across the finish line. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Unknowingly, Jarom had offered me a lifeline. As long as I beat someone, I wouldn’t be a loser. A horrible and unhealthy way to look at it, I know, but there it was. Looking back, I think it was a case of my self-esteem being so poor that I needed to step on someone else to get higher. Back then, the idea that even finishing the race was a huge accomplishment didn’t even occur to me. All that mattered was that I had to be better than somebody, and that poor somebody happened to be Jarom.

Over the next two months we trained, and I focused on pushing myself harder until I could literally run laps around Jarom. And bless his heart, he bore it with a grace that I know I couldn’t have mustered. Before long I was running faster, breaking the ten-minute per mile average on short runs. Jarom, on the other hand, seemed to be getting slower. His calf began giving him trouble, at first sporadically, but soon became a constant running companion, causing him to cut crucial training runs short.

At first, I’m ashamed to say, I was annoyed. Here I was busting my butt for his dream, and he was sitting on the sidelines. In my head, I was telling him to “Cowboy up.” If I could force myself to run through knee pain, then he could get over his calf problems. Then he started skipping one or two runs a week. No longer annoyed, I was worried that he wouldn’t be able to run in the half marathon at all. Running by myself wasn’t much fun, and that was just the training runs. The prospect of having to run my first race alone was terrifying. Just like that, I no longer cared who came in last, or how many minutes faster than Jarom I would be.

My plans of breezing ahead and then waiting at the finish line were gone. I was seriously concerned that if I left his side, he wouldn’t have the support he needed to finish. Well, I was going to be there for him, and I would drag him across the finish if I had to. I remember going to sleep the night before the half marathon thinking it was a good thing I’d been lifting weights in case I had to carry him.

***

On June 11, race day, we forced ourselves out of bed at the ungodly time of 3:30 so we could catch the 4:30 bus to starting line. Between the adrenaline and cold temperatures, I was hopping out of my skin. I was anxious that I would do or say the wrong thing and utterly embarrass myself. The night before had been plagued with nightmares, dreams of being confronted, then turned away by world-class athletes because Jarom and I were too slow and obviously didn’t belong. I even had the quintessential dream of showing up naked and having everyone laugh at me.

Fifteen minutes after getting off the bus, I realized I had been flipping out over nothing. At the starting line, the race organizers set up fire barrels so participants could stay warm in the predawn hours, and with twenty-five hundred people vying to get a spot around a barrel, you get a little close to your neighbor.

In general, people were nice and super chatty. When I told people that this was our first race, they would infallibly tell me how much we’d love it and how great we’d be. Then they’d go on to regale us with stories of their past triumphs and defeats, sharing their venerable wisdom with the newbies. Whenever the conversation got around to asking about running times and personal bests, I would gently sidestep the question and say, “Since this is our first race, we really just want to finish.” A few racers kind of scoffed and suggested we aim higher, but most people were really supportive, assuring us that we could do it. I gave that line so often that I actually started to believe it. Maybe I really didn’t care what our time was, or what place we were in, as long as Jarom and I finished it together.

When I gave my answer about finishing to one older lady, she smiled and nodded knowingly. “Ahh, so you’re a penguin like me. Just stick to the back of the pack, and you’ll be fine. Good luck.” Then she wandered off to find the rest of her group. Like her, they had the words “Penguin Pacers” on the backs of their shirts.

A penguin? Thinking I’d just been insulted, I went to complain to Jarom. “I think that lady just called me fat.”

“Why? What’d she say?”

“She said I looked like a penguin. So was she talking about being thick in the middle, or do I waddle when I run?

Jarom laughed. “Neither. She was probably referring to your place in the pack. Remember rabbits up front and penguins in back. Come on let’s go line up next to the other penguins.”

Now that he mentioned it, I did remember reading something about that. In one of the many books Jarom had checked out from the library so he could learn to run, there was a book written by a man named John Bingham, otherwise known as the Penguin. They called him that because he looked like one when he ran I guess. The point was that he became a racing celebrity of sorts, and so the term penguin had become synonymous with a slow runner in the back of the pack, like he was. I supposed there were worse things to be, but still the association didn’t sound flattering.

Before I had a chance to ruminate any more on the topic, the loudspeakers blared, giving the countdown to the start. Okay, my legs were warmed up and ready to run. As soon as that gun went off, I… would shuffle my way forward toward the start line, trapped in the throng of twenty-five hundred sardines? What? This was not how a race was supposed to start. I’d seen the Olympics, and I imagined that this would be much the same—taking off like a rocket as soon as you heard the shot. Maybe that’s what happened way up at the front of the pack, but here in the back, it was like rush-hour traffic. Perhaps that’s where the term penguin came from—from the herd of people at the back shuffling from foot to foot, inching their way forward. Heck, we couldn’t even see the start line yet. Jarom’s fancy watch informed us that from the sound of the shot to when we stepped over the start line was four minutes.

The herd finally started thinning out after the first mile, and I’ll admit that I for one was not having fun. To start with, my iPod had died, so I was forced to listen to the inane chattering of two twenty-somethings running (shuffling) next to us. Really I did not want to know about your husband’s stress at work and resulting “marital issues.” TMI. I was also ticked because Jarom made me toss the box of Tic Tacs I kept in my pocket as a pick-me-up. Too noisy, he said. I said I needed it to drown out Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dummer over there. He won, and I reluctantly took them out and left them by the roadside.

The most disconcerting thing so far was our speed. Even though I’d been saying I just wanted to finish, a small part of me was still worried about getting a decent time. On the bright side, everybody else was going slowly while trying to get through the logjam. Except that guy running through traffic to get past us slowpokes, but he was probably going to get squished, and wouldn’t that screw up his time?

Once we were out in the open and not bottlenecked anymore, we settled into a steady pace, what I like to refer to as Jarom speed. My legs were itching to go faster, and I felt that if I could just open the throttle up, I would fly down the course. Instead, I set my cruise control to Jarom speed and got comfortable. We weren’t the slowest, not by a long shot. Sometimes we would pass one of those “Penguin Pacers.” I was thrilled that we were passing anyone.

Since I didn’t have my tunes, I needed to keep my mind occupied so I wouldn’t think about aching legs and how much farther we had to go. Those penguin shirts, combined with the race and Jarom’s comment about the front runners being rabbits led me to think about the story of the tortoise and the hare—and where exactly the penguin fit in.

Everybody knows the story, right? The tortoise and the hare have a race. The hare, overconfident, keeps stopping to take a break. The tortoise continues at a solid pace, proving that slow and steady wins the race. There was no penguin in that race, but there were in mine. I figured out the hares were the guys sprinting at the shot, giving everything they had within the first five miles. Sure they made excellent time, but the time they gained in those five miles was lost when they were darn near passing out on the side of the road. We’d run by a few that had petered out and were now being carted off by staff, ending their race.