Candy-ass

I'm expecting new running pants and shoes in the post today. According to one of the major weather services, it's supposed to drop below freezing in Boulder at about 5 p.m. tomorrow and stay there until Wednesday at noon, and it will almost certainly snow at least twice in this period.

This shouldn't be a big deal. In the winter of 1995, I lived in Hanover, N.H., where did not rise above 32 degrees Fahrenheit for the entire month of January. According to my training log, I averaged almost 17 miles a day that month, almost all of it on very hilly terrain and much of it in the dark because I was often required to be someplace during the day. That might have been an unusually rough winter, but as a native of New Hampshire I can't say it was truly atypical for the region.

My trepidation arises from two unrelated factors. One is that, while I don't mind running in very cold weather per se, I have a bad habit of falling on ice around here when I do. OK, maybe it's not a habit per se, but I've had two serious wipe-outs on patches of ice here, in separate winters, one of them leading to bruised ribs and the other a sore knee. I think that despite the more favorable winters here overall, there is actually more ice danger to pedestrians here than in northern New England, because there, the roads are so fucked up by frost heaves that it's unusual for large, single patches of ice to form on them, if that makes sense. I do most of my running here on the paved rec paths, where large uninterrupted sheets of ice can form, and are often topped by the kinds of very thin dustings of snow that can literally put the finishing threatening touches on top of an already hazardous situation.

The other is that I just won't go running anymore if it's a certain number of standard deviations from "comfortable" or "safe" -- maybe as few as 1.0 or 1.5. Some might judge this to be a positive adaptation, and from the standpoint that I now see my own running as almost entirely pointless, this is true. On the other hand, it was gratifying to once embrace goals that required me to confront a certain amount of adversity, not in a reckless way but in a mostly thoughtful one. These days I'm just a candy-ass. (I'm trying to decide, without looking up the etymology, if that insult remains an acceptable self-description. I can't really call myself a pussy or a pansy anymore without upsetting someone, not because they disagree with my assessment but because those terms are largely off-limits now.)

I trained hard through a lot of tough winters because I used to give a fuck about goals. For a while, I stood a reasonably good chance of making the Olympic Marathon Trials standard when the cut-off time was slow. This alone was not a good reason to pursue running at the expense of other things; 2:24 marathoners are nowhere close to elite, and even guys 10 minutes faster than that are never going to make a living from running alone (parlaying this ability into coaching or race-management careers is a different story), I was almost doing enough to get by, and I actually had my two best patches of running when I was working at least 40 hours a week.

In some ways, about the worst thing I could have done for my psychological future is excel in the classroom from the start. Actually, from before the start. For whatever reason, I developed the ability to read when I was two years old, and could solve fairly sophisticated arithmetic problems before I started kindergarten. I had memorized a lot of arcane facts about geography and the like by then, and sometimes, a few of the sixth-graders at Conant School would gather around me in the morning before we were all shepherded into the building and ask me to recite these facts. I couldn't understand why it delighted them, and I was also nonplussed at the fact that almost none of my kindergarten classmates knew how to read at all. But because school always came so easily to me, I internalized the idea that I would eventually do Great Things, possibly without a lot of effort. And this illusion was abetted by any number of token honors along the way, such as being voted "most likely to succeed" and "most creative" by my high-school graduating class and getting into the only two schools I applied to on an early-decision basis.

There is no reason anyone should feel guilty about trending, in a piecemeal but undeniable way, toward a life of increasing safety and physical comfort, as I have. Yet I do and probably always will. It might be different if I felt as if I had "earned" this somehow, but I don't. I'm never going to be 25 with a chance to achieve something most marathoners never come close to achieving. I left medical school in excellent standing after I lost my Army scholarship, with every opportunity to return. But I fucked all of that up through a great deal of intermittent drinking over two decades and other deviant niceties. (For what it's worth, about the last thing I would ever want to be now is a doctor, but the overall point should be clear.)

Now that both the chaos and the potential to attain reasonably high goals in life are both in the past, I'm finding my own unwillingness to invite either tumult or any sort of real risk into my life depressing. But I'm also on the way to understanding that being "normal," and in fact still a bit of a fuckup, is a more sustainable journey for me than saddling myself with lofty expectations. It's a weird thing to reckon with and very much a First World Problem, but it's also pretty typical.

Merry Christmas.