Finished Being Fat: An Accidental Adventure in Losing Weight and Learning How to Finish (12 page)

Now at the end of the day, I knew I could look forward to saying that at least one thing got done. At night, I slept easier knowing I had done the best I could. I no longer felt frazzled and unaccomplished. While I still got a thrill every time I finished something, I had a general feeling of satisfaction that stayed with me. I was a finisher, and I made sure to prove it every day.

That’s how I knew that I was going to finish the marathon. All this time I had been going through the motions, doing all the training, saying all the right things, but I never actually believed that I could do it. Not anymore. I was going to prove to myself by running the marathon that anything was possible. If I could go from a 216-pound lump to a lean, mean, marathon-running machine in under a year, then imagine what I could accomplish in five years. Ten?

I
n the middle of what I’ve affectionately termed the month from hell, my sister Jaime sent me a present. She’s an occupational therapist by trade and deals with children that have much more serious problems than my daughter. If anyone understood my day-to-day struggles with Lily, it was Jaime. For the record, Jaime was the unattributed sister from
chapter two
that taunted me with Oreos. But we’ve both grown up in the last fifteen years and have become close friends.

One day, a small box came with a little note, “I know you’re having a hard time. It will get better, I promise. I love you.” Inside the box was a beautiful silver necklace. It was heart shaped with an Eeyore charm hanging down in the middle. That alone made it an awesome gift. (I’m an aficionado in all things Winnie-the-Pooh.) But what made the gift priceless were the words inscribed on the back: Some days look better upside-down. It’s one of my all-time favorite quotes from the gloomy little donkey.

So simple, yet so true. If you don’t like the way your day is shaping up, change your point of view. I generally don’t recommend standing on your head, though. I tried that in yoga… once.

***

Have you ever heard the phrase “hindsight is twenty-twenty”? Well, only if you’re wearing the right glasses. If you were wearing beer goggles, rose-colored glasses, sunglasses, or those 3-D glasses, everything you looked at would be different. The glasses that I wore when viewing the past were fat goggles.

That’s why I hated pictures. I couldn’t look at a picture of me without squinting to see if there’s a double chin visible or worse… a double lap. One day I was cleaning out my mom’s room to help her out. I came across a box of pictures from when I was a kid and a teenager. My first thought was to take the box down and chuck it in the fireplace, but I figured my mom wouldn’t appreciate that. Next I wondered where the packing tape was so I could seal this baby up tighter than a time capsule.

Morbid curiosity made me open the box. I figured it would be like looking at the Ghosts of Fat Past again. Thumbing through the pictures made me think that I needed to go get an eye exam. Where were all the pictures of fat me? Had my blessed saint of a mother already gone through and taken them out? I looked closer at the dates on the back. One in particular coincided with my eighth grade year. If I closed my eyes and conjured up an image of what I looked like at thirteen, that picture was not it.

It was a family picture from Hawaii. I remembered the trip vividly. I specifically remembered wearing large oversized tee shirts to swim because I felt so big compared to my smaller siblings and slimmed down parents. Memories portrayed me as a little white whale snorkeling on the beach, but my eyes told a different story now. I hadn’t been fat. I wasn’t small either, but I wasn’t fat. Yes, I was larger than all my sisters, but I was still well within the range of average.

I sat back on the bed, dumbfounded. How was it possible that my memories were so skewed? I spent all my teenage years feeling like the ugly duckling, and this picture was saying that I had been a regular old duck. Thinking back to my youth was a painful process full of feelings of being outcast and inadequate. Starting with the vet’s weigh in, I had seen myself as big, and that colored every single experience afterward. My dad had only been trying to help me avoid his pitfalls. Unfortunately in doing so, he made me aware of them in the first place, and I seemed to run headlong for them after I was aware of them. My little obsessive personality would not let it go. I could never see myself as normal or pretty after that. What I saw in the mirror at thirteen was grotesque, but the picture I was looking at now, and I’m sure what other people saw, was just a regular girl that hadn’t quite grown out of her baby fat.

The thought that I had needlessly tortured myself for years was almost enough to make me go back on antidepressants again. When you hear something often enough, you start to believe it. When I was teased and taunted as a kid, I began to believe it. Then my little voice started repeating it back to me, distorting my self-image even further. And while I may not have started out very big, I definitely ended up there. But how much is real, and how much is imagined? Even now, some days I struggled to look in the mirror and see that I was any smaller.

I’ve already established that I was good at lying to myself, and it seemed my mind was good at playing tricks on me too. I realized like with this picture, there were probably plenty of other things I was misremembering. My past was full of battle scars that had never quite healed. But maybe, if I were to go back over them now and see them upside down, so to speak, they would look different.

I gently packed the box back up. I had a lifetime of misconceptions to fix, and it was going to take a whole lot longer than a single afternoon to smooth over. Not now, though. I had a room to finish cleaning. But I had time. My misconceptions weren’t going anywhere.

***

After the half marathon, Jarom began having more trouble with injuries. With only two months until the full marathon, we were unsure how he could train without causing more harm to his calf. After reading a book (of course), Jarom decided to try training using the run/walk method. Run/walk is where you run for a specified interval, then walk for a specified interval, then repeat until you’ve gone the required distance. Jarom’s fancy watch even had a special setting built in to accommodate this style of running.

To me it felt like cheating. Would it still count if we ran/walked a marathon? Were there little marathon police that pulled people off the track if they walked? Jarom showed me various articles in running magazines and assured me that it was a popular practice and was even beneficial for preventing injuries and recovering. He programmed his watch to run for four tenths of a mile, and then walk for one tenth. To say that I was skeptical about this new plan, would be putting it mildly.

The run started out normally, and we ran side by side for the first four tenths of a mile. I was just getting in my groove when I heard a
beep, beep, beep
emanating from Jarom’s watch. It was time to walk, only I didn’t want to—my legs wanted to run. Since I wanted to stick with him and not run ahead, I came up with brilliant idea of running around him while he walked. When the watch beeped again, signaling it was time to run, I went back to running in step beside him. I did that for three miles before I realized that not only did I look like a moron doing some sort of runner’s Chinese fire drill, but I was getting tired out from expending way more effort to go the same distance. Plus it annoyed the heck out of Jarom, and he threatened to quit if I didn’t knock it off.

So I tried to put my pride aside and walked when the watch beeped. Ugh, I hated it. Seemed like as soon as I’d get comfortable and hit my stride… beep. Stupid watch. Recently, I’d been skipping the music and would spend the run conversing with Jarom. This time, I turned up the tunes full blast just to drown out the grumbling in my own head. I was mad at the watch for its incessant squawking yet still unable to resist checking it to sneak a peek at our pace time. What I read did not do anything to endear me further to the device. Here I had worked my butt off to break the ten-minute mile barrier and now those two tenths per mile recovery walking had put me back at eleven-and-a-half-minute miles. I was so grumpy that it made running the remaining seven miles nearly intolerable.

I was having a rough time. It had been easier for me to run the whole thirteen miles of the half marathon than it was to slog through ten miles run/walking. I had never wanted to quit more than I wanted to on that run. It was even worse than the run in the rain. I was in a foul mood when I finally got done and hopped in the shower. I was in foul mood when I picked the kids up from day care. And I was still in a foul mood when I went to bed that night.

I lay there under the covers, stewing about the day’s run. Jarom had remarked upon returning home that this had been his easiest run to date. He had enjoyed the change of pace and probably the peace and quiet my cranky silence had given him too. On the other side of the coin, this had been my hardest run. I couldn’t make sense of it. Ten miles was ten miles. Why would it be so much tougher today? I wasn’t injured physically, but my pride was hurt. And that made my attitude stink. And that was the difference. It felt the same as when I could only run for five minutes at a time, and now somehow I was back to square one. But that wasn’t true. I wasn’t walking because I was physically unable to run longer; I was run/walking so Jarom could continue to train.

That was my upside-down moment. My brain clicked, and I saw that day’s run from a different perspective. Once again I had become obsessed with speed and expectations instead of getting the miles done. What should have been another sticker on my mileage reward chart was instead a huge disappointment. For no good reason—except that I was being a stinker. Just because I learn a lesson once doesn’t mean that I don’t need refresher courses now and then.

The next run was so much more enjoyable—and easier too. I approached each walk break as an opportunity to rest my knee that was sore from the previous day’s run. Our speed was the same if not a little worse than the day before. If we were measuring the success of the run by our pace, then it would have been a failure. Thank goodness we weren’t. Jarom and I had a great morning and relished the hour and forty minutes of together time. We finished, and we had fun. So which kind of run did I really want? The faster run by myself with Jarom left by the wayside, or the slower run/walk that was a little harder on me but easier on Jarom? After cardio class that evening, I talked to the Fat Pack about my dilemma. I lamented the loss of my ten-minute mile and explained our new training technique. The pack’s speed demon was horrified on my behalf.

“That’s awful! What do you think it’s going to do to your final marathon time?”

“Well, duh. It’s going to slow it down, of course.”

“But I think it would be much better to do it together, don’t you?” Lori piped in.

I had come to basically the same conclusion but thought I should take a poll to confirm. The tally was two for leaving Jarom in the dust and two for the walk-a-thon. Sarah Michelle was the deciding vote.

“Well, what kind of time are we talking about? How much slower?”

“It will probably take us about forty-five minutes longer doing the run/walk. But I guess that’s still faster than if we ran ten-minute miles and couldn’t finish.”

“Wow, Betsy. That’s an awesome way to think about it. Very glass half full.”

“Thank you, but I hadn’t actually thought about it that way until I said it.”

But now that I had said it, that became my new point of view. No matter what time we ended up with, it would be faster than not finishing at all. So if we needed to go a little slower to make sure we could go the distance together, then so be it.

***

Not too long after that, I was talking to a friend at church. She had just run her first half marathon the day before. I noticed that she didn’t seem particularly pleased about this fact. She wasn’t even wearing her finisher medal.

“So tell me, how did it go?” I chose my words carefully because I wasn’t sure if she had finished or not. I didn’t want to make her feel bad by asking what it felt like to cross the finish line… just in case.

“Oh, it was all right, I guess.”

“All right?”

“Yeah, it didn’t really go the way I wanted.”

Okay, this was like pulling teeth. Rocks would have given me more information. If I wanted to know what happened, I was going to have to come out and ask and hope she wasn’t offended.

“So you didn’t finish then? Why not?”

“Oh, I finished. My time just stunk.”

She’d finished, but she was still upset. Her time must have been really bad, like over four hours bad. Usually you didn’t get a medal if you took longer than the allotted time. That must be why she was upset. I was about to give her a heartwarming pep talk when she interrupted my musings with more details.

“I finished in an hour fifty-two. I was really hoping to beat an hour forty-five.”

I was flabbergasted. There were so many things wrong with this conversation I didn’t even know where to start. My friend had just finished her first half marathon, and instead of being ecstatic, she was upset over seven measly minutes. Then there was the fact that her time was faster than mine by twenty-five minutes, and I didn’t care. This was backward. I should be upset that she whipped my butt, and she should be happy to have finished her first race.

“Why on earth did you need to run it in an hour forty-five?”

“That’s the time my sister ran her first half in.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I guess you can try again next time.”

“No way. I’m not doing that again. It wouldn’t even count anyway. It had to be on the first one.”

I gave her my condolences, and we parted ways, but I was still scratching my head. We had run nearly identical courses, but our experiences were so different. We both finished, and looking at the race data objectively, she had the more successful run. So why was I still secretly wearing my finisher medal at home while she had thrown hers in her closet? Because we had each gone into our respective races with different goals. Mine had been to finish the race with my husband beside me. When I accomplished that goal, I felt on top of the world because I had succeeded. My friend had gone into the race determined to beat her sister’s time. So even though she finished the race she still failed in completing her goal. What should have been a proud moment became a disappointment, all because she picked the wrong goal.