I'm now more skilled at playing keyboards than running, though luckily I refuse to prove it

A late-May snowstorm that chased various "out of season" wildfires made being outside this spring boring, but now it's time to be my authentic self and start planning races to skip

A few weekends ago, I came back from King Soopers with a jar of store-brand honey-flavored creamy peanut butter. Not the largest kind, but one big enough—18 ounces, maybe?—to contain so many calories that you could practically hear them rattling around in the jar, like angry bees, waiting to escape and bloat their purchaser not via an allergic reaction to venom but by the inducement of shameless gluttony.

I don’t weigh myself—EVER. That way, on the exceedingly rare occasions I do hop on a scale, I don’t worry too much about the data. But I was like fairly lean before the weekend started. But down the yap-hatch went over half of the jar of peanut butter, usually affixed to a cheese-flavored square of baked flour, and most eagerly between midnight and around 2:35 a.m. In the moment, I was okay with this frenzy, but although I was exercising in my usual way on Saturday and Sunday, I knew I’d be paying the piper a hefty toll once I decided to burn the bridges I was crossing my I’s and dotting my T’s. That’s when I realized how much I thought about sex! And peanut butter….sometimes in tandem! I decided that was totally okay, though maybe not with a dog nearby.

Sure enough, on Monday morning, I awoke, already flat on my back and partly woozy. And as I sat up, the fears I had been sublimating all weekend came literally smashing down on my head almost like a shat hammer. I had grown a huge gunt-like thing below my breastplate and budding manboobs to match, and the gunt was actually swaying in front of me like a fleshy version of one of those aprons X-ray folx make you wear to keep you free of radiation (the peer-reviewed literature is a treat, BTW).

I’ll admit it. I was freakin’ plumb disgusted with the slop-hog I’d so rapidly become. Not to be judgy about fat—all parts of you are equally you!—but candidly, all advice that it’s OK to be fat coming from a thin distance runner is possibly like 100 percent horsepuckey. (There was a white paper in The Peruvian Journal of Osteoimmunology about this recently, but it’s too technical for this space.)

Anyway, I’m like, frig this, and I was out the fucking door like a horny sailor carrying a wad of twenties off a docking freaking ship and yelling “HEY LADIES!” I had done the time, and now I was gonna do the crime. And so, by putting one foot in front of the other, I got rid of that peanut-butter he-gunt and most of the man-titties, too. (I did not wear biking shorts, or any shorts with a tight waistband. I did wear a hoodie despite temps approaching the surface of God. Did I mention back hair?)

Welp, I was back to normal by Tuesday and it felt good. I must have shed 35 pounds of revolting, rippling, stank-trapping FLAB in two days. Very cool! But also not the point. What I needed was another lesson, because I’d gotten off too easy. And boy howdy damn, did I get one!

Last weekend, the same thing happened, this time with diced chicken. You see, I often eat meals that would consist entirely of lean protein if not for my lifelong and immutable habit of emptying entire bottles of condiments onto whatever eggs and meats I ram down my head-fanny, never while watching porn in a darkened bedroom, and with all house-pets none the wiser.

In this case, I grilled 1.56 pounds of chicken breast, put it in Tupperware, and ate almost all of it while lying in bed watching stand-up comedy amid the aroma of potsmoke billowing into the room from the street like a giant THC wizard farting sideways and acridly. Despite this meal having almost no fat, and a ton of calories of carbs and protein, the result was the same: I was a tub of shit on two lean, mean legs again, like Baby Ruth. (For the non-sports-history fans, he held the Major League Baseball record for homers in a single season until Hank Aaron broke it with 714 during the 1973 campaign.)

I was learning, but slowly. I just had to remember to avoid these post-crepuscular weak periods somehow, maybe though mantras. I thought that if I started dipping snuff, that might keep me from stuffin’ my muffin’ while mostly asleep, especially if I dozed off with some in my mouth. That wouldn’t do, so you know what? I just didn’t by any trigger foods anymore. In fact I threw away every food item in the fridge or cubbard that wasn’t a fruit or a vegatable or a bottle of Jack Daniels. Meaning, I threw away everything! Sometimes, food is a mortal enemy. But if you go long enough without, any unseemly bloat with which you have saddled your undisciplined self will go away. This is where faith and science both come in. Luckily, science always goes hand in hand with being a good and truthful person to everyone.

In, like, seriousness, I should really do something with this modest level of fitness before I stop caring completely about everything in life. I rarely time my runs, but my Garmin keeps track of my activity for me. I occasionally refer to the heart-rate tab to see how long individual bouts of walking or running have been, but I have a haphazard accountant-coach-cheerleader-douchecanoe in my head that prods me toward about an hour of total running a day.

In the warmer months, mainly because of a need to not overheat a determined but black-fur-covered dog, I seem to spend about three minutes walking for every two minutes of running I do. But because my average running pace is about two and a half times as fast as my average walking pace, running accounts for a little over 60 percent of my overall foot-mileage at this time of year.

In the winter, I run a little less, but I walk considerably less, spending an approximately equal number of daily minutes on each. This translates to a little over 70 percent of my logged perambulation consisting of running during colder, darker, and icier times of year.

Granted, all of this is from a sample size of about 18 months. I like to look at my rolling weekly and yearly mileage total and see what it would take to, say, get myearly total over 4,000 within a few weeks, given what’s about to scroll off the lagging edge of the year-long period.

To the extent I even maintain running-related goals, at the moment, I’m happy to average between about 45 and 55 miles a week, with occasional strays on either side of those limits. But despite not wanting to be seen anymore by other humans in the act of running hard, or striving hard at anything, I will probably have to experience at least one more race. The time will suck no matter how fit I become, because such is the nature of being both 52 and devoid of meaningful talent to begin with. But if I give 100 percent in the one race I enter, after preparing for it responsibly and similarly without fear, then I won’t need to do a second one and I can go back to what essentially amounts to an unusually hyperactive form of people-watching, bird-watching (I saw a blue heron gliding over Boulder Creek last week), MILF-scanning, and daydreaming.

But the time does matter, a little. If I were to try to translate my profligate jogging around into a competitive effort tomorrow, the result would be so abysmal that I would tear my own genitals off at their moorings with a wet, gristly ripping sound, the kind that breaks teenage girls’ hearts, and throw them onto the synthetic infield at Nevin Platt Middle School in disgust. But the schools are closed, and moreover, it’s warm enough now so that if I go to one of the local tracks at 9 p.m., like I used to sometimes do even in the winter and even in New Hampshire, then I can get a lot of work done without anyone seeing me try. It’s actually better if no one knows anything about it or where parts of the drama might play out. But it’s all about me now, not you, which is totally okay.

(This post has been checked for narrative accuracy, and has been determined to fulfill the current industry definition of autobiographical journalism.)

P.S.: Oh, this post may have contained triggering content. Also meant to say: Sadie Engelhardt rhymes with Weighty Danglepart. You can’t make that shyte up!