What Are Your Goals?
I don’t like to make New Year’s resolutions. To me, a resolution means something is already decided. It’s resolved. All the investigation and thinking is done, and action plan is charted. All that’s left is the work. This is how to propose a federal research grant, not how to decide to arrange my life for a year. Resolutions are setting myself up to fail. I can’t predict the future, I can’t know how things will change over the course of the year.
But I do set goals, as everyone who reads this regularly knows. I set ambitious goals, that I don’t always achieve. What’s the difference? Well, to me, the difference is about allowing for the possibility of change, and reframing what happens if I don’t achieve it. Failing to achieve a goal doesn’t mean the same thing as failing at something I’ve “resolved” to do. If I had injured myself and been unable to run my marathon, I’d still have achieved a lot just by training for it.
I’m still in the process of setting goals for 2016. At work I want to continue to grow as a manager and employee. I want to find a way to exceed the expectations put on me by my director. I would like to finally find a way to get an Adjunct Professorship at VFU, so I can call myself “faculty”. I would like to run another marathon, break two hours in the half marathon, and visit another country.
And as always, my fundamental goal is to stay sober and enrich my life, personally, spiritually, and in my relationships. But those are more one-day-at-a-time kind of goals. I don’t set a goal to be sober all year. I’m sober today. Tomorrow looks good. Sunday can take care of itself. I’ve been doing well at that for almost 8 years now.
What about you? Do you set goals? Do you make resolutions? Care to share any?
Whirlwind.
Having a new employee is exhausting. I have to find things for him to do all the time. Like, eight hours a day, five days a week. It’s really taxing. And I have to teach him to do a lot of really complicated things. Fast. Without overloading him. I’m really kind of spinning and it’s revealing what a chaotic way I organize my own work. Luckily, this is my new employee’s first job ever. And so he doesn’t have much to compare it against. I’ll get my act together soon enough. But it’s difficult.
This weekend I had a long, tough, fairly miserable 10K run. Not sure why it was so bad, but it was. I plodded through with 11 minute miles and wanted to die. Then I went home and slept for 2 hours. It was harder than any of my half marathons, and I felt like garbage all day. Partly, perhaps, I’ve just been running less. I’m only getting in 10-15 miles a week right now, which is fine. I’m still going to the gym and biking. But I’m deliberately resting my feet.
Both of my feet hurt. On the left my Achilles is barking at me, especially in the mornings. On the right, I have a regular dull pain in my instep. I’m sure both will heal with time and rest. For me, rest doesn’t mean shutting everything down. It means easing off, getting in short, easy runs, and keeping up my fitness without pounding my feet so much.
I really like the fitness program my new trainer has me doing. He’s a good trainer, and gets a lot out of me. He’s kind of a stereotypical late-20s/early-30s fitness dude. A little brash, a little testosterone-heavy. He’s thoughtful about fitness and responsive to what I want to get out of it. When I talk about my goals, he always says, “We can get you there.” I like that confidence. He seems to think anything is possible. I even mentioned a half-Ironman as a possible goal, and he said the same thing.
Maybe I can get there. BB is adamant that I take the swimming more seriously than I have. And as much as my stupid male bravado wants to say, “I’m a strong swimmer, I’ll be fine,” she’s been right about literally every single fitness thing we’ve ever talked about. So I need to listen to her. I’m in the process of setting my 2016 fitness goals and I’m thinking of including a sprint or Olympic triathlon in them. But I’ll need to find a pool. And I’ll need a training plan that’s more sophisticated than “I ran and biked and swam a lot.”
I really crushed all my fitness and professional goals this year. And I kept up my most important goal of all: I’m sober heading into the new year again. I want to be steady, ambitious, and effective in 2016. I want to move upward and forward again. I like accomplishing my goals. I like feeling productive. I like having the life I thought was lost to me.
Exercise Response.
I have a new trainer. He’s a weightlifter, and my goals are around endurance, so I’m not 100% sure it’s a match from that perspective, but I’m giving it a shot. Our first day was really tough for me. Partly, I’m sure, because I was a little jetlagged, and partly because I’m still restricting calories. And partly because I was trying to impress the new dude. But mostly because he was working me really hard, and I overheated. I needed to lie down for a minute so I didn’t throw up. I’m going back to him today and I’m going to say that I’m happy with the weights and the reps, but I want to build in some recovery time between sets, because holy shit.
But I’m not as sore as I expected, and I’m feeling ready to give it another go. And, truth be told, I have to work hard. I have to work harder than other people to get the same result, when it comes to fitness. There is a class of people who have been called “non-responders” to exercise, because they don’t seem to increase cardiovascular fitness in response to working out. Some estimates put this group as high as 30% of people. There was a documentary out recently that supported this. Though, even in this group of cardiovascular “non-responders” other health processes, like insulin sensitivity, still improved with exercise.
This is somewhat supported by recent research suggesting that people like me, who have close relatives with type 2 diabetes, have inferior genetic responses to exercise than people without that family history. However, an exciting paper was just released in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, which – despite a somewhat small sample size – seems to show that the way to reduce cardiovascular non-response is by working harder. They took three groups of obese, sedentary people and assigned them to low-amount, low intensity, or low-amount, high intensity, or high-amount, high intensity workouts. By increasing amount and intensity, non-response was completely eliminated in their sample.
I suppose some people will think of this as bad news: it may be used as judgment or criticism of obese people for being “lazy”. I prefer to think of it as personal and hopeful: if I am not getting the results I want, I’m not doomed. I can work harder. I already work pretty damned hard at my fitness, and I’m still overweight. I’m obviously not a “non-responder” because I’ve made huge strides and increased my fitness and lost a lot of weight. But I’m also obviously not in any hyper-responsive group. I put on weight while marathon training. Though, I’ve taken most of it back off and am trending in the right direction.
It may not be fair that I have to work harder than others to get the same results. And it’s really super not fair that some have to work harder than me to get the same results. And some people won’t have the time or capacity – or have injuries, etc. – to work as hard as they have to work to get the results they want, and that sucks. And some people don’t care about fitness, and that’s fine. Condemnation of people based on their bodies and their choices about their bodies is pretty shitty. I’m opposed.
But for people who are looking to increase their fitness, or lose weight, this study seems to me to provide hope. We’re don’t have to give ourselves up as lost. We can work harder. I think that’s great. Now I just need to work harder.
The Disease’s Tricks.
A friend on twitter (@ProfLikeSubst) wrote that my post about drinking at the worst possible time sounded like one of those behavior modifying parasites. The kind that make mice run toward cats because mice pick up the parasite but it needs to gestate in a cat’s stomach, or whatever. Alcoholism is a disease that controls our behavior to sabotage our lives. Because it needs access to alcohol, and we’re the delivery system.
Even though I’ve been continuously sober for close to 8 years, I still am subject to the occasional burbling up of my disease’s tricks. This happens especially frequently when I travel. The disease searches out weaknesses and tries to exploit them. These impulses are short and feeble at this point, because I know how to do the work to keep them at bay. But they are there, and they will always be there. And if I stop doing the work, they’ll get stronger again.
I was in France this past week, as you know, and France is known for a lot of things, but one of the primary glories of France, a thing everyone knows about France, is wine. The best wine in the world, nearly everyone agrees. Unless you’re an Italian vineyard owner, you probably think the best wine in the world is French. And let me tell you: I love wine. I love white wine and red wine and champagne and I love the things people make from wine like brandy and cognac.
And, of course, I didn’t drink on this trip. And I didn’t much want to. But as I occasionally do, I wished that I had the ability to enjoy a thing that I used to enjoy. Even if the way I remember it and the way it was aren’t really much alike. At one point I found myself thinking, “I could have a sip and then spit it out. Like at a tasting!”
I almost laughed out loud at myself. My disease was working hard in that moment, I suppose. Trying like hell to find a way back into my life. But it was a hilariously pathetic attempt. Obvious. And I did what I always do: think the drink forward. I wouldn’t spit. Alcohol is absorbed through the mouth too anyway. I’d get drunk and ruin my relationship and my job and my life. And that’d be that. The slow, squalid, unmourned death that my disease wants from me.
I put the thoughts away and they didn’t come back. Three days in France and there was just the one moment. Like there was that one moment in Spain last year. And like there will be one-moments throughout my life. And yes, I miss it. And yes, it’d be lovely if I could have that glass of wine and be the suave man I see in my head. But that man is a figment of my disease’s imagination. I’m the fat drunk bastard who deludes himself. C’est la vie.
I get to do all the things my disease would take from me. And I don’t get to do the one thing it wants. Fair trade.
Thanksgiving in Paris.
This Thanksgiving BB and I went to Paris. We made the reservations months ago, and were looking forward to a wonderful time in the cheery holiday atmosphere of the City of Light. Of course, then November 13th happened, and everything changed. Our hotel, in Place de la Republique, was only a few yards away from one of the shootings, where I think four people were killed. This was the memorial just down the block from where we stayed:
It was arresting. I’ve been in this plaza before, and the difference and the mood were noticeable. As were the soldiers with automatic weapons.
However, the fact that the terror event had just taken place – and that it was November – meant that there were few tourists in Paris. Not none, but many fewer than I’d ever seen before. We were able to see many things without waiting in long lines, and get photographs of famous art without dozens of gawkers in the picture.
For example:
The Venus de Milo
And Michelangelo’s Dying Slave
And we could see the great sites without waiting in horrible lines.
Like the Louvre
And the Arc du Triumphe
And the Eiffel Tower took a very short time compared with the last few times I was there.
In all it was a wonderful time. We saw so much and walked something like 43 miles in two and a half days. A fine trip.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous after the attack. But I don’t think we can let terrorists dictate what we do. So we went to France. And enjoyed ourselves unreservedly. Because that’s precisely what they’re trying to stop. And fuck those dudes. Vive la France.
Drunk at the Worst Time.
I don’t know much about Johnny Manziel. The Cleveland Browns’ quarterback has been in the news for a lot of bad reasons lately. Earlier this fall he was involved in a domestic assault incident, though I don’t see that he was arrested. He was in some kind of treatment facility of an unspecified sort earlier this year. And after finally seeming to get his shit together enough to be given a starting shot, he then went out and got bombed a couple of times, posted videos of it, and was demoted to third string.
A lot of people are commenting about the domestic assault. I’ll leave the commentary on that to others. I don’t know what happened, but I hope that it is appropriately investigated and adjudicated. A lot of people are talking about the NFL’s response to that incident and to the apparent substance abuse problems. I’ll leave that commentary to others as well. I don’t know the NFL’s rules nor do I have a relevant opinion as to what they should be.
I want to talk about drinking at perplexing times. I’m not here to diagnose Manziel as anything. But the behavior he exhibited this past weekend is a behavior that is familiar to a lot of alcoholics. After getting his shot to be starting quarterback, he performed very well on the field, and his coach announced that he would start the remainder of the season. Everyone seemed to think that he’d turned a corner and was ready to go be a force in the league. Instead, he went out and got drunk and made a public ass of himself.
This is a behavior both familiar and maddening to many of us who are alcoholics (And again, for the record, I am not saying Manziel is an alcoholic. I can’t possibly know. But this recent behavior reminds me of alcoholic behavior.) We get drunk at the worst possible times. We don’t seem to mean to. It isn’t malicious. Often times we are celebrating. But we don’t, or can’t, stop after a drink or two. We imbibe copiously and end up in desperate trouble. We sabotage our lives just when everything seems perfect. Or at least, on the upswing.
But there’s a real calculation behind it, even if we are not aware of it ourselves. When alcoholics are active in their drinking, our entire lives revolve around getting more alcohol, in the short term. We cannot risk lack of access to booze, for anything. And so when our lives seem to be slotting into order, we have to disrupt it. Because if we have responsibility and accountability and stature, we can’t be drunk all the time. It doesn’t work. And no matter how much we think we ant those things, we know we can’t have them because they interfere with our ability to drink the way we need to.
And so we get really destructively drunk at precisely the worst time. In order to prevent all that responsibility and accountability from happening. If our families or employers don’t trust us with real responsibility, then it doesn’t matter if we’re drunk. We don’t get in trouble for fucking things up if we have nothing to do. Our disease isn’t threatened by sloth and indolence. Only by accountability and industry.
Seen through this lens, behavior that is baffling to outsiders makes perfect sense to the alcoholic. And to the recovered alcoholic. When a person self-sabotages by getting drunk at the “worst possible time”, it is utterly obvious to me what’s happening, most of the time. The disease is protecting itself. The alcoholic is protecting their ability to drink from anything that threatens it. It is an existential assertion against the terror of being unable to drink as we please. Unable to satisfy what feels like a necessary ingredient of life: intoxication.
If this is what’s happening with Manziel, I hope he gets help. And regardless of what’s happening with him, I hope he owns up to his behavior and takes responsibility for what seem to be, from the outside, some pretty inexcusable acts.
But I get it. I get all of it. The disease protects itself, and we act out whatever theatrical charades are necessary to preserve its access to the only thing that matters. Alcohol. And if that means we have to destroy our lives, and the lives of others? So what. Nothing else matters.
Goals Accomplished.
This year, I set out to run 52.4 competitive miles. Either two half marathons and a full marathon, or four half marathons. I have now run all the competitive miles I’m going to run this year, and I surpassed that goal by quite a wide margin. I ran:
- The Virginia Beach Half Marathon
- The Providence Half Marathon
- The Philly 10K
- The Navy/Air Force Half Marathon (Washington DC)
- The Marine Corps Marathon (Washington DC)
- The Philadelphia Half Marathon
That’s a total of 84.8 competitive miles. To train for all that, starting January 1, 2015, I ran a total of 1057.7 training miles. Well, probably closer to 1025, considering my GPS usually reads about 2-3% far.
I don’t know how much further I’ll run this year. I’m tired. I have my gym plans, and I have my bike. I’ll certainly run a little bit more. But I am going to lay off the road miles for a bit. I liked having my streak of 100 mile months. But it’s over now. I’m not going to run 36.7 miles in the next week. And I’m ok with that.
My feet are beginning to bicker with me about running. My right foot is starting to give me some nerve-zaps from time to time, just like my left. And it also features some plantar fasciitis-like tightness in the arch. So I’m going to give them a rest. They’ve done their fair duty this year. I owe them.
Emotionally, it feels a bit weird to be planning a break from running. Like I’m grieving a bit. But I’m not taking a break from fitness. And I want to be ready to hit Virginia Beach hard and try to break two hours in the spring. I think it’s in reach, and I’d like to do it one time, maybe. I’ll never be fast. I’ll never be great. But I showed myself this weekend that I remain capable of being better than I was before. And that’s thrilling.
And I have a collection of medals on the wall. And while they’re all just for finishers, not winners, for me, I feel like a winner every time I cross the finish line. I don’t win races. I win health and life and freedom and joy and accomplishment and satisfaction and pride. I’d bet no one in the world has exactly the same collection of little medals as I do. My running is in no way extraordinary. But it is mine. And I am extraordinary to me. And that’s what matters. I’m proud of doing the things that only two years ago I could not possibly imagine. And I think I’ll keep going.
Sort of!
Well, updated stats edged me out of the top half of men. But I’m still *just* in the top half of men 40-44. So, compared with my closest peers, I’m better than average.
Better than Average.
Yesterday was perfect running weather. It was about 50 degrees when we woke up at 5am, but it quickly dropped to 45. A little windy, but not too bad. Crisp. And 25,000-ish of us lined up to run the Philadelphia Marathon and Half-Marathon. I was a half-marathon runner. As always, BB was right beside me.
We took off at a pretty good clip. Fast for me, anyway. We were running about 9:30 miles according to the marathon clock, which really means a little faster because we don’t run tangents perfectly and we have to weave around slower runners. People like us, in the pack, not elites, always end up running about 1-2% further than the actual course distance that’s laid out.
We passed the 10K mark at 58:51, which is a pretty damn good pace for me. I felt good, and the weather was holding perfectly. It was cool enough that I was sweating a lot less, and that meant I didn’t have to stop for water as much. Though this might’ve been a mistake, strategically. At the 9 mile mark, BB suddenly felt awful, because she hadn’t been taking in enough calories.
She slammed down a package of Skratch chews, about 200 calories of sugar, and then took Gatorade and water at the next station. Feeling better, she turned up the speed. I accelerated with her, and thought about asking her to dial it back a bit, but decided to give it everything I had for as long as I could before easing up.
I had it until the end. We accelerated through the rest of the race. I was watching the time on my wrist, and felt like a personal record was in play. Just running harder and harder for the last mile I felt really good, even though it was a lot of work (My heart rate was well above what the American Heart Association uses as the rough age-guideline max. I hit 190, the “max” is 179.)
We crossed the finish line at 2:02:15. Well BB did. I was 1 second later, despite the fact that we were holding hands. But that’s a new personal record by a minute and twenty-seven seconds. Or six seconds per mile. I know that six seconds per mile doesn’t sound like a lot, but a 10-second difference in pace feels enormous to me. And so I could easily feel the difference in speed between this race and the Navy/Air Force half we ran two months ago.
So far, every race BB and I have run – with the exception of Providence, when we were deliberately running easy with a friend – we’ve set a personal records. The margin keeps getting narrower, but we’re doing it. I think there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to break the two-hour mark when we lace up for Virginia Beach. If we don’t, that’s ok.
But the really cool thing about this result, in Philly, is that for the first time I placed in the top half of both men, and men my age. I finished faster than 52% of men, and 51% of men 40-44. I cannot begin to write about the pride that gives me. After so long, so much work. So many deep sloughs in my life. After being obese, and a pack-a-day smoker, and an embittered, suicide drunk for 12 years. Now, sober nearly 8 years, finally basically fit and healthy, I am finally better than average.
I am better than average. Compared against my peers, at this thing I’ve chosen to invest myself in. For thousands of miles run and tons of weights lifted. Hundreds and hundreds of hours put in. Years of effort. Going from some days unable to get out of bed to face the world. Unable to make it from sun up to sun down without a bottle of liquor. Unable to go an hour without a cigarette. Going from there, to running 13.1 miles in just over two hours, faster than half the men who tried that day.
I’m proud of myself. I don’t know how proud one should be for finally being ever-so-slightly better than average at something. But for this, for now, for me, it’s a lot. And that’s tinged with a peculiar shame and sadness that I can’t quite put my finger on or wrap any words around. But that’s where I am.
Race Sunday!
Well, I have the Philadelphia half-marathon Sunday. BB and I signed up for it six months ago as insurance against finishing our full marathon and then just falling down and quitting. Marathon training is so exhausting mentally, as well as physically, that we were worried we’d burn out if we didn’t have something else to plan for shortly after the Marine Corps Marathon. So we signed up for the Philly half, which we ran last year as well.
Last year we ran Philly in 2:14 and change. It’s a good race with a few hills, including a big one at mile 9. Really a runner’s race. Not much in the way of silly costumes and large groups of people walking and chatting. It’s a race that seems to be attended mostly by people who are there to put their foot down and run like hell. I like that, though I’m certainly glad there are races for all comers. Last year we ran the Philadelphia Rock and Roll half marathon, and that was much more of a party atmosphere, and it was a lot of fun as well.
We don’t have a time goal for this race. We didn’t have a time goal for our last half marathon either, back in September when we ran the Navy/Air Force half marathon in Washington DC, and set our personal record at 2:03 and change. But I’m really not planning on running this race hard. As usual, I’ll let BB set the pace, because she’s better at it. And lately we’ve found that we tend to run negative splits and push hard at the end. I suspect we’ll end up doing that again.
I haven’t been training for this one much. I’ve only run about 50 miles in November so far, which means that my streak of 100 mile months will come to an end at 8. But we’ve done 10 mile runs each of the last two Sundays, and we did some hill training and some regular weekday runs. In addition, I’ve been in the gym about two days a week. I’ve dropped about 6 pounds and feel good with my plan for that moving forward.
I’m eager to put another medal on my wall. I like collecting things. I really like that this way of collecting things helps me stay healthy and sober.
Infactorium 