Running with a Police Escort Read online

  When you’re sixteen years old, there is literally nothing more mortifying than needing to shop in the Women’s Department of the store. I was basically shopping at the same stores as my mom, which did very little for both my self-esteem and sense of style. And prom dresses? Bitch, please. While all of my other friends could go spend an afternoon at the mall trying on a wide variety of fancy dresses, my size sixteen prom dress was actually a bridesmaid dress that had to be ordered from a catalog. I’m not even talking about online shopping, either. Oh no, this was the kind of paper catalog that showed up in the mail and required calling the 1-800 number to place your order.

  Starting in my teenage years and going up through my late twenties, I basically wore my age. This means that by the time I got to be twenty-nine, I was wearing a size twenty-eight pair of jeans and tipped the scales at 311 pounds.

  Truthfully, I didn’t even really know how much I weighed because the analog scale that I owned didn’t go up that high. It capped out at 250 or something, and I could just see that little red dial pushing against the side of the window, confused and frustrated by its inability to register the information.

  I don’t know if I can verbally express what it means to be so heavy that you literally outweigh your scale’s capabilities. Like, seriously. Just think about that for a second, okay? A scale has a pretty basic function. Really, it only has one function: to display the weight of the item on it, whether it’s ounces of food or pounds of people. That’s it. That is the scale’s only job, and I had gotten so big, I put my scale out of work.

  I not only had to go out and buy a brand new scale but I also didn’t have the luxury of picking whatever scale caught my fancy. I had to read the boxes carefully to make sure that I bought one that would be able to measure what I was bringing to the table.

  Of course, my table looked like the local all-you-can-eat buffet so there wasn’t much room left for anything but dessert (because, duh, there’s always room for dessert). What I thought I needed was a new scale but what I really needed was someone to wake me the fuck up.

  So one morning, I woke up to an email from my younger sister Amy, who was very concerned about my weight and the overall impact it would have on my health. My family had attempted to have similar conversations with me in the past and I always got incredibly defensive, so I think Amy was prepared for the same kind of reaction this time around.

  Instead, I knew that my weight had reached a critical junction and that she and the rest of my family were right. I needed to do something and I needed to do something now, so soon after I joined Weight Watchers.

  I’d been on Weight Watchers for a year, and was down about fifty pounds or so when I found myself totally engrossed in watching The Biggest Loser. Almost all of the weight I had lost thus far was because of a shift in my diet and food choices, not my activity level. I was still pretty much as lazy as always.

  My feelings for this show are complicated because I do sympathize and empathize and identify with the contestants. But as a woman who has spent her entire life trying to lose weight, taking advantage of a variety of means and methods through which to do so, I really loathe the drastic techniques utilized by The Biggest Loser and the unrealistic expectations it sets up, for viewers but especially for contestants. In most any other situation where losing weight was the goal, two or three pounds in a single week would be tremendous and certainly worth celebrating. Instead, because of the competitive nature of the show, as well as the amount of time dedicated to exercise each day, two or three pounds in a week is seen as a failure and the contestants come away feeling bad about themselves, as though they haven’t done enough work.

  But I also recognize that the show can provide a certain level of motivation. I should know, because watching those men and women running on the treadmill, men and women who weighed a good 100 or 200 pounds more than I did at that moment in time, triggered something inside of me. I found myself watching them with a sense of wonder and awe. All I wanted to do was get up and move.

  So I did the only thing I could think to do: I decided to go for a run.

  I will totally appreciate if this is the point in my story where you’re giving me a bit of side-eye, just a little bit confused. After all, just a chapter ago I was all, I HATE RUNNING! RUNNING IS THE WORST! and now all of a sudden I’m all, LET’S GO RUNNING! YAY RUNNING!

  Honestly, I have no idea where the desire to run came from because, trust me, never before in my entire life had I ever felt this pull to go run. That’s really what it was like, though, a pull. Some outside force grabbing hold and tugging me along. It was just some little voice in the back of my head that bubbled up all of a sudden, and I decided it was better to just go with it and listen to that voice instead of waiting for some other voice in my head that would tell me this was the most ridiculous idea ever.

  Since returning to Northeast Ohio after graduate school and moving to Cleveland, I’d lived in a converted warehouse near downtown. It’s an industrial neighborhood lacking in close proximity to parks and public green space and sidewalks—basically all things crucial to a good outdoor run. Thankfully, it’s changed in the near decade that I’ve been here, but at the time when that little voice told me to get up and run, outside wasn’t the most ideal. It was also early February, which is a tenuous time when you’re living in a temperate climate.

  In the lobby of my building is a small little room that has been converted to a mini gym for the residents, including an elliptical, some strength training equipment, and, yes, a treadmill. Not that I’d ever really used any of the machines.

  After spending most of the day horizontal on my couch, I suddenly sat up and turned the television off, the episode only half over. Those contestants were running on that treadmill with speeds of 7 mph, which is like an 8-minute mile pace. Sure, because of their size, limited mobility, and unfamiliarity with exercise they could maybe only maintain that pace for a minute or so but that’s far faster and longer than I’d ever run before. Even in high school when I agreed to run the straight lanes and walk the curves of the track, I certainly wasn’t putting in any kind of real effort. I was doing the bare minimum of what it would take to get my gym teachers to stop nagging me so I could receive a passing grade.

  I can claim I can’t run all I like and I can claim I don’t like running, but can I really say that either of those statements are fact when I’ve never really given running a good old-fashioned, honest try?

  This may come as no surprise if you gotten this far, but I’m someone with lots of opinions. I know what I like and I know what I don’t. But I don’t come to those opinions blindly or from a biased perspective. I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that I do not like the writing of Joyce Carol Oates. But I can also back that up by telling you that I have attempted to read at least half a dozen of her novels and quit halfway through each and every one of them. So, yes, when I say I do not like the writing of Joyce Carol Oates, I firmly say this with my own anecdotal evidence to back it up.

  But when it came to running, my anecdotal evidence was pretty much nonexistent because, honestly, I’d never really run. But being a mature adult, though, means that sometimes you realize that things you hated when you were younger are things you love as an adult, if you’re just willing to give them a second chance.

  Kind of like Brussels sprouts.

  Now during my teenage years my dad would go on and off the Atkins Diet plan, only he wouldn’t tell my mom, who was our de facto meal planner. She’d only know he was “on” plan when he would decline whatever dinner she had made that night and just eat a big bowl of Brussels sprouts for dinner. Brussels sprouts weren’t something my family really ever ate when I was growing up, and so my only real exposure was sitting there at the table with my dad and his bowl of steamed sprouts. Their smell was so pungent and funky that from a young age, I pretty much swore them off and anytime anyone would serve me Brussels sprouts I had a weird Pavlovian gag reflex response.

  Then one day my friend L
auren invited me over for dinner. A vegan, Lauren made me this fantastic meal that included the dreaded Brussels sprouts as a side dish. Not wanting to be an ungracious guest, I took a small bite and was delighted to discover I found them quite delicious, and cleaned my whole plate. She hadn’t really done anything fancy to them, shredded them and maybe roasted them in the oven. But whatever she did, they trumped whatever bad memory I had of Brussels sprouts from my youth.

  Turns out, running is kind of like the Brussels sprouts of athletics. It really is just a matter of how they are served.

  But, unlike unsavory vegetables, athletics requires equipment. For instance, running requires running shoes.

  My first position as a professional librarian after graduate school was at a minimum security prison on the far west side of Cleveland. My first professional day at said job was spent not at the prison, but off-site at an unarmed self-defense class where I got to interact with some of my new colleagues by pretending to break up prison fights and put handcuffs on the “inmates.” I was instructed to show up dressed to work out. The clothes portion of that was easy—despite rarely exercising I had enough yoga pants to open up my own yoga studio, but I was forced to go out and buy appropriate shoes. I went to Walmart per their website and bought the cheapest pair of tennis shoes they had in my size. I wore them to that unarmed self-defense class before I started and to the annual orientation a year later, and then put them securely back in my closet, where they sat collecting dust until that fateful day in February 2012.

  After silencing Jillian Michaels with the remote, I went into my bedroom and started digging through my closet. I pulled out a pair of yoga pants, a random tee shirt, and my tennis shoes. I laced the shoes up, grabbed my iPhone and headphones, and headed downstairs to the mini gym.

  Stepping on the treadmill, I decided trying to recreate what happened in The Biggest Loser gym was probably not the smartest nor safest idea, and decided to try slow-paced intervals instead.

  I started with 30:90 intervals, which meant I walked for 30 seconds and ran for 90 seconds on a treadmill set at 3 mph. One foot in front of the other, walk then run then walk. During the running intervals the pace of the treadmill stayed the same, I just picked up my feet and speed a bit more. I kept those intervals up for 20 minutes and by the end I had gone a complete mile.

  I hated every single second of those twenty minutes. My body hurt, moving muscles that hadn’t been moved in such a way in years, if ever.

  But after? Oh, after I felt powerful and strong. It was hard work but worth it.

  Turns out, running wasn’t so bad after all.

  I decided, though, that if I was going to give this whole running thing a try I needed a more structured plan. I am someone who likes structure, who likes to have a concrete set of instructions to follow. It’s probably one reason why these days I absolutely love training for a race.

  After doing a little bit of research about starting to run online, I decided to try the Couch to 5K plan, which is a pretty popular option for beginners. For someone who has done zero running before, it really does take you from the Couch to running a 5K distance of 3.1 miles. It operates on intervals, basically what I was already doing but in a more structured way. The plan has runners initially begin by walking more than they run, but as they progress through the program, those intervals swap until they are completely running without walking breaks. It lasts nine weeks and you only have to do it three times a week, with the runs being 20 to 30 minutes in length.

  Trying to pay attention to intervals while on a treadmill is pretty much impossible. For one thing, I can’t cover up the treadmill dashboard with my towel to hide the distance because I have to be able to watch the clock. For another thing, having to constantly watch the clock means I can’t go into that really awesome running zone. The one where I tune out the world around me and just do my thing. The not being able to cover up the dashboard is more annoying than anything else; I just hate looking down at the mileage and seeing I haven’t gone nearly as far as I feel like I have. But not getting into the zone is frustrating and can cause a run to turn into a bad one.

  So I did that one thing I never, ever do: I actually paid money for an app on my phone.

  The C25K app is set up just like the information on the website, only instead of having to constantly watch the clock to see if you should be running or walking, there is a voice that tells you when to run and when to walk. That way all I had to do was speed up during the running parts and slow down during the walking parts and I could still cover up the dashboard so I didn’t have to see those stupid little dots moving around a big electronic loop, slowly marking off a mile.

  There are three “trainers” to choose from: one is modeled after a military sergeant, one is a nice encouraging female, and one is more of a hard-core female who reminded me quite a lot of a certain reality television trainer.

  Guess which one I chose.

  I mean, if I can’t have the actual Jillian Michaels yelling at me I might as well have some digital off-brand copy of her yelling at me, amirite?

  At the time I started running, my work schedule was weird. And by “weird,” I mean annoying. And by “annoying,” I mean I was working twelve hour days, Monday through Thursday. Four days a week, I’d work 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. and because I lived a good forty-five minutes away in summer (and closer to an hour in winter), I’d leave the house at about 8 a.m. and not get home until close to 10 p.m.

  Apparently my masochistic side decided it needed more pain, so I added in after work runs on Monday and Wednesday evenings.

  Looking back, I’m not sure why I settled on evening runs in the beginning, especially considering how late at night I was getting on the treadmill. But clearly it made sense at the time. Considering even now, years later, I pretty much want to hibernate every morning in winter, I suspect that was part of my reasoning back then, too. I am a total freeze baby and this is Cleveland and it’s cold in the mornings during winter. Really cold. Like, I can’t even, kind of cold. The kind of cold that can only be combatted by burrowing deep, deep under layers and layers of blankets and two cats.

  The only upside to this schedule was that I had three-day weekends every weekend. Having every Friday off was really glorious just from a sleeping in on a cold morning perspective, but it also meant that I could go running in the morning.

  My progress through the C25K app was going smoothly, and while the app allows you to repeat a week of exercises if you didn’t feel quite ready to move to the next week, I continued to move ahead week after week after week. As the weeks melted into each other, so, too, did the snow outside. Soon, running indoors on the treadmill held less appeal. It was just so boring. It had always been boring, but it was better than the alternative of bundling up, and I certainly didn’t have appropriate outdoor winter running apparel hanging in my closet. With the change of seasons, however, I was in a position to take my legs off the machine and into the great, big world.

  I mean, really. How different could it be to run outside?

  The thing is, I know the answer to that question. This one I actually had anecdotal evidence to back up and I’m not even talking about those four laps around the track out back behind my high school.

  Many, many years ago my friend Lisa was celebrating a birthday at a roller skating rink. Now while I say many years ago, Lisa was still in her late twenties at this point, if not thirties. Being a woman who celebrated turning twenty-nine with a Hannah Montana themed party, I’m hardly in a position to judge. The thing is, I never learned how to roller skate. My version of “skating” involves planting one foot and using the other foot to maneuver. It’s some weird fusion between roller skating and skateboarding. I just had never learned the proper technique of alternating your feet on roller skates.

  As such, I spent much of the skating party on the sidelines watching friends, but it was okay because, lemme tell ya, roller skating rinks make for fascinating people-watching.

  After hours watching peop
le skate, I decided I wanted to learn how to skate. I’ve always had this vision of being a badass roller derby girl (never mind the fact that I can’t actually skate) and this seemed like an opportunity to finally learn. As luck would have it, I was at a thrift store that weekend and came across a pair of rollerblades. True, not quite the same thing, but that’s what the thrift store had, so that’s what I was buying.

  The foyer and dining room of my apartment are hardwood and I actually spent a couple days just skating around my apartment on the hardwood floor, getting used to the feel and movement of being on the skates.

  Wednesday night I decided to take the rollerblades outside. After all, how different could it be from skating around my apartment?

  I’ll spare you the suspense: it’s different. Very different.

  Keep in mind, I live in an industrial area in a major metropolitan city. At the time, it was also a neglected area of the city. Don’t get me wrong, I love my neighborhood. I love living among the noisy city streets and bumping right up against the Cuyahoga. I don’t even mind being woken up by the sounds of ships passing in the night. But we are not high on the priority list of the City of Cleveland when it comes to maintenance. Sidewalks, in particular, are uneven. Quite uneven.

  To the point that I fell on my ass as soon as I was out the door.

  My balance has always been a little unstable so stick some fucking wheels on my feet and, well, shit’s about to get real. In my apartment I had the option of using a hand to catch myself against a chair or a table or a wall if necessary. Such luxuries are not afforded in the great, big, wide world which is why it is advised that those partaking in such activities should wear these newfangled gadgets called knee and elbow pads, neither of which I had, I might add.

  Never one to be deterred by a single fall, I crawled to a nearby electric pole and braced myself against it as I hoisted my fat ass back up onto the rollerblades.

  I made it half a city block before falling on my ass again. Only this time I didn’t just fall on my ass and wound my pride: I broke my elbow.