If you are someone who likes to party, and you don’t decide to just train for a marathon, but to punch above your weight with a very specific goal, then you should know that each week will be a negotiation of pain and pleasure. Learning what you can get away with will give you new language, a new math system: plus three beers and minus three hours of sleep cancels each other out and baby, my mere EXISTENCE is an EQUATION of INVINCIBILITY!
Picture this: you’re leaning over the bar, elbows planted in unknown stickiness, waiting to order a drink. Everyone around you has bad haircuts on purpose. You close your eyes and envision Sunday’s long run disappearing from the note on your phone that holds the weekly schedule prepared by your coach whom you pay $100 per month and you order a midnight shot of Fernet-Branca and pop an adderall and slide, head first, down the gullet of night. The DJ plays “Tainted Love.” A pool stick breaks the rack. Fuck those 14 miles. All your friends are here and none of them have to run 14 miles, and what have you ever wanted more in this life than to fit in? Than to be on the same loosey goosey drunken page as every other soul blasting off on a Saturday night?
So yeah, that was last weekend. The assignment was as follows:
3-mile warmup
3 reps of 3 miles at goal marathon pace with a 5-minute jog between each
Cooldown to 14 miles
Whenever it crept into consciousness, I’d tell myself, “you should drink some water,” and then I would proceed to order a Miller High Life. The boys were back in town and I had something to prove! Vibes were high and they all wore beanies and some of their beards were wintery and overgrown. That’s Pennsylvania.
At one point I remember sneaking off to the bathroom. When I sat down in the cramped stall, my quads started screaming from the morning’s HIIT class. Indeed, I had to run 14 miles hungover and sore. Things were not looking good.
Any party girl worth her salt has a knack for self-deception, so crafty in her justification for endless debauchery. Washing my hands, looking in the mirror, I smiled something demonic. I wasn’t ruining my training. No, no. I was adding challenges!
I would run on tired legs.
The concept of “running on tired legs” is a whole ass thing, particularly in the marathon distance and beyond. You build it into your training to mimic the pain and fatigue you might face in, say, the last 10k of a marathon (which is, ostensibly, when the race actually begins). Last year, ultrarunner Sally McRae ran a 100-mile race as a training run before taking on the elusive Triple Crown: three consecutive 200-mile races over the course of four months (cannot recommend her YouTube docuseries enough). It’s a biblical endeavor, something only those who devote equal time to lifting and recovery as they do running high mileage up mountains (like Sally McRae!) can survive. It takes a lot of running on tired legs.
So much of running, and therefore, life, is about chasing the edge: riding a line of consciousness and collapse to go a little bit faster, a little bit further. The blurrier the line becomes, the more respectable the effort. Black out to see what you’re made of type beat. Only then does the white light appear. Dizzy and salt-faced, black toenails dangling from bloodied feet, you proclaim, somehow, “that was fun.”
In 2014, Kelly Cordes wrote a blog post for outdoor retailer, REI called “The Fun Scale.” Of the three Types of Fun, Type II worked its way into the shared vernacular of outdoor enthusiasts and endurance athletes. According to Cordes:
Type II Fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect. It usually begins with the best intentions, and then things get carried away. Riding your bicycle across the country. Doing an ultramarathon. Working out till you puke, and, usually, ice and alpine climbing. Also surely familiar to mothers, at least during childbirth and the dreaded teenage years.
Maybe I’d be so bold as to call Type II Fun “love.” Just love. That’s not to say love is all miserable while it’s happening. Plenty of love, or rather, moments in love, are baked with the butter and sugar of a comfortable existence. But we’re all running on tired legs in one way or another. Usually out of love, if you dig deep enough.
There is nothing more American than being hungover for something you shouldn’t be hungover for. And there is nothing more American than praising that person for their resilience, as if they just overcame adversity and not a totally mundane hell of their own creation. My friends treated me like a war hero upon learning I had to run 14 miles the next day. “I GUESS I JUST REALLY LOVE IT,” I shouted over the din of the bar, knowing full well that it was bound to suck, but that skipping it wasn’t an option… even though it was. Even though it always is. Such is love.
Over the holidays, my friends threw me a surprise bachelorette party. I was so present—like, psychedelically fucking IN IT, drinking beer and eating burgers and taking photos—that I’d forgotten about Andrew’s uncle’s funeral the next day. (He’d been really sick for a long time and I’d only met him once, briefly, a few years ago, if you’re wondering how I could possibly forget a funeral.)
That morning, I woke up still hammered, protesting my attendance. Andrew was rightfully fuming. And so I dressed in my coziest all black, took some ibuprofen, and climbed into the passenger seat where I whimpered softly to myself, head pressed against the window, offended by the whole ordeal. He knew about this bachelorette. He helped plan it. And he still expected me to attend a funeral for someone I don’t even know the next morning??? I would never expect that of him. His family wouldn’t even notice if I wasn’t there.
(I am haunted by the ghosts of versions of myself that I hate.)
We pulled into the parking lot of this grand Catholic church in Princeton, New Jersey. I swallowed an Ativan and prayed to go numb. But sitting through the service, surrounded by all the Italian and Mexican families that comprised Uncle Ben’s world, I became deeply aware of the importance of being there. Of showing up, even when I’m sweating Modelo and aching for my bed. I look back on that day fondly. Sharing pasta with his sons, finding moments of laughter on the worst day of their adolescent lives. That was running on tired legs. That was Type II Fun. That was love.
When that 14-mile Sunday came and everything ached like it promised to, I knew my run was getting put off. I ate a breakfast sandwich. A lunch sandwich. An in-between sandwich. Whatever I could get my hands on and shove between two pieces of bread was fair game. Marathon training makes that feel casual. I made it out the door at 3 PM and I don’t know, chalk it up to all the sandwiches or that mysterious, post-drinking burst of energy, but the miles just clicked away. On the final 400-meter stretch, I started crying. I knew those tears, too. They were the same ones that leveled me as I bolted through the finish line of my last marathon in October. And no doubt, they affirm my entire pathetic existence.
Ram Dass said, “you can do it like it’s a great weight on you, or you can do it like it’s part of the dance.” I think even when I’m on my deathbed, I’ll be wired to seek the cha cha slide in everything. That’s what running on tired legs teaches you: to divest from the belief that exhaustion is all bad and boundaries are fixed. There is love in going beyond. There is self-love in going beyond.
Goddamnit, go beyond.
Oh my god this is so good. A howling laugh and a punch in the gut…my favorite kind of writing. Also, until I reached the bottom of that quote all I could think was—sounds like childbirth.
As an ex-runner just getting back into the game after 11 years, you weren't really selling me on returning back to those weekend long runs with all of the reminders of black toenails and caked-on salt cheeks... but by the end of this essay, I ain't gonna lie, I was totally feeling some of that magic again. I've cried some of those same tears. This was awesome Dia.