Six Years of Clean Air.
Quitting smoking and quitting drinking were very different things for me. I never gave sobriety any real attempts until I was just done. Alcohol had so thoroughly defeated me that I was ready to quit or die. Which is where we – that is, people who drink like I drank – have to get to in order to attain sobriety. A place of complete surrender and abandon. There was no more doubt in my mind that I could not keep drinking. I was a walking dead man. And so, when it came time to let it all go, I was ready. It was hard, but I knew it was real from the start.
Smoking was not like that. I continued to smoke for about 18 months after I sobered up. I tried to quit in my alcohol rehab. I remember asking when I signed up to go, “Can I quit smoking at the same time?” I was delusional about who exactly would be doing the work. I thought they were going to fix me. Luckily I was rapidly disabused of that notion. I tried, I took Chantix. It didn’t take. And it didn’t need to. I was there to stop intoxicating myself. Cigarettes could wait.
I had quit a few years prior, while I still drank, for about a year. But being a drinker and a non-smoker didn’t work well for me. My self-destructive nature rears up regularly, and if I drink at the same time, I tend to say, “Fuck it.” Then I smoke a pack of cigarettes and feel dramatically depressed and creative and deep and sophisticated, as a defense mechanism against feeling useless and stupid and ugly and worthless. All of it is my diseased brain’s way of convincing me to give it access to the chemicals it loves.
So when I quit smoking, after I became a sober man, it was a different kind of work. I didn’t feel defeated by cigarettes. The “war” metaphor for addiction to alcohol doesn’t work for me. I didn’t battle my alcoholism. I was vanquished by it. Utterly. But I fought cigarettes. I fought like hell.
I had help. When it was time for me to quit, there were a couple of fits and starts. Finally, I did what I should have done long before and listened to my sister. She had quit using nicotine gum, and she told me that I needed to read the directions and use it as indicated. Fancy that. But in sobriety, we become people who are not ashamed or afraid to take direction. So I did that. I read the packaging and I took the medicine (well, poison) as directed.
That was August 17th, 2009. I tried to make that my quit date. But I also gave myself permission to fail, without failing. Meaning, I knew that if I needed a cigarette or two over the next few days to make it through, I would allow myself that. And so, driving home from work the afternoon of the 17th, I had my last cigarette. August 18th, 2009, until today, I’ve had no tobacco of any kind. I kept using the gum for about 4 weeks. I feel confident that I would not have succeeded without it.
I feel differently about my status as an ex-smoker than I do as an ex-drunk. Even though we take sobriety one day at a time, my ex-drinking status feels permanent and solidified in a way that I’m not sure my ex-smoking status ever will. I haven’t had a craving for alcohol since day 12 of sobriety. I have occasional cravings for cigarettes to this day. But I let them move through me and pass away.
My life as a non-smoker is a good one. Obviously, I can run now. Even if yesterday I quit after 2.2 miles in the 93 degF ECC heat. But I’m so much healthier than I was. And according to all the stats, I ought to be only half as likely to have a heart attack as a current-smoker. And my lung cancer risk is dropping steadily. I’ll never be what I might have been. But that’s true of all of us. What I am is here. Now. Sober. Clear lungs. Looking forward, living the life I make for myself, instead of imagining what I wish I were.
Four Days in St. Louis.
Last week I was in St. Louis for four days and four nights. I had a pretty good trip though I now kind of wish that I had stayed longer, because I didn’t get to see Jimmy Legs or a couple of other friends that I’d hoped to. But I did get to do most of the things that I’d wanted to do, and all of the things that I needed to. One reason I needed to go back to St. Louis was to check on the house I own there that I rent out.
There were a couple of leaking bits on the roof that I had to fix. I was terrified that I’d need a new roof entirely, which would have been somewhere in the $6K-8K range. Luckily, I think I did a two-year patch job on it myself, and that I’ll need to replace a skylight and a furnace vent at some point thereafter. Which I can probably do for nigh-on $1,000 or so. Maybe a touch more. The roof will need to be redone eventually, but I had a professional roofing contractor look at it and tell me it didn’t need doing now, or soon.
I kept up my running while in St. Louis, and even turned in this gem of a 10K:
Which made me super happy. I did that run in 84 degF heat, and pretty significant (though not awful) humidity. It’s listed as my second fastest, but it’s only 1 second per mile slower than my fastest. That’s within the margin of error of my device. And it had an estimable hill from the 3 to 3.5 mile mark. This was my first time running in Forest Park, which is something considering I ran in St. Louis for like 2 years before I left for ECC. But the park is 4-5 miles from my home, so I ran at a different and smaller park, closer in.
So, life seems good and I’m doing well. I needed the vacation. BB is back from Iceland and had a fabulous time running there. I’m hoping she’ll do a blogpost soon about it, because the pictures are unbelievable. I think I’m going to have to go back there. But it’s always hard to decide where to go next. We’re making plans, and looking forward to traveling together again soon. This March is going to be a good time to go far, far away.
I also got to go to my Men’s Meeting and to a Friday meeting I used to go to before I was employed. I saw my old sponsor, and spoke Wednesday night. It was really good. Important to do. Good for my soul and my sobriety. Time away from the races is like that. Calm and smooth and restful. Just what I needed.
New Podcast.
I spoke at my St. Louis Men’s Meeting this past Wednesday, on Progress, not Perfection. It’s about 7 minutes.
Heading Home.
I still feel like a visitor in ECC. Even though I bought a house (which is finally, 18 months later, in nearly livable condition), and have been working here for two and a half years and establishing a career. I’ve explored my new city and started a new relationship and all of the things that one does to be settled in a place. And I still don’t feel at home here. I feel like a visitor. I wonder if anywhere but Seattle and St. Louis will ever feel like home.
But I’m going back to the last place I called home today. I’m returning to St. Louis for a few days, to check on the house I’m renting out and set up a couple of fixes. See friends I haven’t seen in a year. See my old therapist. Enjoy a few days off and rest.
Physically, I’m very tired right now. This weekend I ran 15.4 miles Saturday, and walked another 5. Then Sunday I rode 21 miles on my bike and then ran another 3.3 miles in the afternoon. All told, it was about four and a half hours of exercise in two days. Then, Monday, I ran 5.1 miles in a new pair of shoes. Unfortunately, they bugged my Morton’s neuroma. Hopefully new insoles will help. Putting everything together, I ran 23. miles and biked 25.0 miles in three days. It’s a lot.
BB is in Iceland, doing trail runs with a women’s group. The next few days will be the first days we haven’t spoken since we first met, more than 27 months ago. I’m sad, but I’m happy for her. I’m jealous as hell. But I’m also looking forward to the down-week in my training. The goal this week is another 5 miler Wednesday and a 13 miler on Saturday, which I will probably do Sunday due to my flying schedule.
The other big thing I’m looking forward to is my Men’s Meeting. God I miss those assholes. It’s going to be a good week.
“Nothing Profound.”
At my men’s meeting on Wednesday, Rich took the chair. He’s been sober a little over a year, maybe a year and a half. He’s a little older than me, with a wife. He’s doing well. He’s a quiet guy, and seems to work a good program. When he sat in front to lead the meeting, he started with, “I don’t have anything profound to say.” Then he talked about his life for a few minutes and opened up the meeting to discussion.
And I thought, was a marvelous way to start a meeting. Nothing profound. When I drank, I always had something profound to say. Before I drank, I always had something profound to say. I loved to hear myself talk. I read Kafka and Dostoevsky and Camus and Hesse. I studied classical music and traveled and blah blah blah. If anyone was talking about these things, I thought it was crucial that I contribute my experience and opinion.
In sobriety I’ve tried to temper that a bit. I’m still self-important and puffed up. I assume that people care about my internal world. Hell, if I didn’t why would I write a blog instead of a diary? The whole point is that other people might read and benefit from my thoughts. Blogging is an inherently egotistical act.
But it’s a relief not to feel like I have to be the smartest or the wisest or the loudest. At work I am a small cog in a big machine. In AA I am a guy who sits in a chair and talks for 3 minutes an hour. I don’t have a lot to contribute other than my presence and my narrow range of expertise. I try to be thoughtful. That’s not the same as profound.
A life of sobriety, live the AA way, tends to be a relatively simple life. At least from an emotional and spiritual perspective, I think. I try to relax. Accept things. Let go of things. When I don’t lie so much, I have fewer troubles to confront. When I’m kind to people, I make friends. When I say what I mean and I do what I say, things tend to work themselves out. Life can be simple if I let it be. There’s nothing profound about it. There doesn’t need to be.
Speed.
I have a complicated relationship with speed. I don’t really do speed work in my running. Sometimes I do tempo runs, where I just push a little harder and see how fast I can run between 3 and 7 miles. My personal record at the 10K distance (6.21 miles) is about 53 minutes, according to my GPS. But it reads a few percent long, so it’s probably really about 54. I’ve never run a 10K race, though that changes in three and a half weeks. I don’t know how fast I’ll go, but BB and I have planned to try to push for an up-tempo pace. Late August? Who knows what that will mean.
Last fall, when I was thinking about running a marathon, BB wasn’t convinced. She’s run a marathon before, and took about five and a half hours, and it was apparently a fairly miserable experience. She didn’t want to do that again. And after our 2:38 time at the Pittsburgh half, there was no way we could finish a full marathon in under five hours. She wanted to work on speed, at the half-marathon distance.
For that, I wasn’t convinced. First, I didn’t think I could. I’m 41. I’ve never been athletic. I’ve never been fast on my feet. I am overweight and a former smoker, and a former drunk. My body, even after running my first half-marathon, was like a balloon half-filled with Crisco. I wanted to keep up my slow, steady pace and go further and further, because I didn’t think I had the physical ability to go faster, but I felt confident I had the mental ability to go further. But I committed to BB’s course. She wanted to go faster and I love running with her. And we agreed that if our desired diverged, we’d find a way to make it work.
I discovered, as usual, that when I listened to BB it worked out. She’s remarkably thoughtful about fitness, and communicates in a gentle way when I’m being absurd. The first thing she did was get me into the gym. But fumbling through a few workouts a week, and then preparing more thoroughly, we took 21 minutes off our half marathon time without doing any speed work. Two months later, another half marathon, another 3 minutes off. The next one, in March, we took 8 more minutes off.
Now we sit with a personal record of 2:05:25. We did that at Virginia Beach, and we didn’t have a great first four miles because of a deplorable coffee situation. I don’t think we’d have gotten under two hours. But we might’ve shaved another minute or two off. But that gets me to the other thing about speed.
I don’t care.
I’m happy when I run faster. I run faster now that I ever imagined possible. When the weather is good (read: cold and dry) I can run for miles and miles at a sub-9 minute per mile pace. It’s exciting and outside the realm of what I thought was possible for me. But I don’t really care. I don’t run to run fast. I run to finish.
So many people I see obsess over reaching milestones for speed. They want to break 8 minutes per mile, or two hours in a half marathon. About two years ago I worked hard to try to run 10K in under an hour and I was really happy when I got there. But my heart was never really in the quest for a time goal. I do get a lot of satisfaction about distance goals though. And the reason I don’t care so much about time goals? I want to enjoy my runs.
I had a real epiphany after the Virginia Beach race, when someone I follow on twitter, who ran it much faster than I did, went on a long rant about how terrible a race it was because he’d missed his time goal and felt like crap. I couldn’t relate to that. More importantly, I don’t want to relate to that.
Coming from where I’m coming from, a suicide drunk and pack-a-day smoker, 65 pounds overweight, I find it thrilling and amazing to be where I am now: Seven and a half years sober, Almost six years without a cigarette, and now only about 10 pounds overweight. I’ve been on a three-quarter decade-long health drive that has had innumerable benefits and changed my life in huge and exciting ways. But one thing it hasn’t been is fast.
There’s an old saying in AA: “You want to know how to get 30 years sober? Don’t drink, every day, for 30 years.” There’s no shortcut. There are no shortcuts. Some of us are so driven to find an easier, softer way. There is no easier, softer way. Not for me. I work on my sobriety daily. I work on my fitness daily. Luckily, smoking has become something I rarely think about, and don’t need to put much effort into. But I think that that’s partly true because of the work I do on other things.
I am not interested in racing through life. I don’t have the energy. I don’t have the motivation. I’m not in a rush. I’m glad that my times have dropped, because it represents the work I’ve put in. But I’m not willing to sacrifice my joy and sense of accomplishment for an endless drive to be faster. I don’t want to define my accomplishments by what I’ve failed to do. I don’t want to make my successes rare and my failures frequent. Every time I go out to run, I ran. Every mile I put on my feet is another mile. It’s all success. It’s all progress. There is no perfection for me.
This week I’m running about 31 miles. None of them will be fast. It’s hot, and I’m stretching out my distance. So I’m going slower on purpose to extend my range. Maybe I’ll be faster again in the fall when it cools off. Maybe not. But whatever the case may be, I’ll be running. Because I’m running for my life.
Anxiety Creeping Up.
I am really looking forward to my vacation next week. Like, really. I’m not doing any incredible international travel or anything. I’m just going home to St. Louis for five days. I have to check on my house there that I’m renting out, which likely needs a new roof. Luckily, St. Louis is a relatively cheap town for housing repair; it’s a cheap labor city. So it will be reasonably affordable to get it done, I hope. And of course, when you rent out a house, repairs are tax deductible. Which means that come next April/May, I’ll get some of it back. That house has been so bulletproof for so long that I’m starting to get scared that a bunch of things are going to happen at once.
Work anxiety is up a little bit too. We’re hiring someone to help me, and now I’m afraid: what happens if I don’t have enough work for them to do? What if I have to work a huge amount harder because of them? Why am I being ambitious here? Shouldn’t I just shut up, keep my head down, and do the work that I can do and do it quietly? Maybe that would be the better way to go. Maybe it would be the best thing for my recovery. Don’t be too ambitious. Find a quiet spot where I can settle into a calm, relaxed career.
But I’m looking forward to going back to St. Louis. I’ll be going to a baseball game with Lawn Boy and Jimmy Legs. I’ll be seeing my old shrink, and my old marriage counselor each, for a check in. I expect to cry a lot. Which will be good for me, I think. And I’m going to go to my AA Men’s Meeting next Wednesday. And boy will that be good. I miss the hell out of those guys. I like my men’s meeting here in ECC, but the group of guys at the Lindell Club Wednesday night is special.
And I’ll be running in St. Louis. Marathon training doesn’t pause for vacation. This past weekend BB and I ran a 14.4 miler, which basically ties for my longest run ever. According to my GPS, I missed my longest run ever by about 30 yards. We did it in about 2:34, which means that even in the heat and humidity of midsummer, we’re running much faster than 15 months ago when we ran our first half marathon. 10% further in 4 fewer minutes. But I know that this weekend will be a challenge. 15 miles without BB running beside me for inspiration will be very difficult.
BB leaves for Iceland Friday evening. She’ll be there for a week, running trails and so forth. I expect she’ll have the world’s best time, though traveling “alone” (she’ll be with a running group) can be lonely sometimes. I know that I’ll be lonely without her. We’ve spoken nearly every single day since we first met. I think we might’ve missed one while I was in London last summer. Next week, we’ll certainly miss several days while she is in the Icelandic wilderness. Apparently, the geniuses in Reykjavik haven’t finished installing the wifi tundra routers yet.
Things are good. But I definitely need time to rest, recuperate, and unload. I’m looking forward to time with old friends and familiar places.
Progress in Fitness, Progress in Life.
Tomorrow morning, we have 14 miles on the schedule. Twice before in my life, I’ve run 14+ miles. Once about 2 weeks ago, and once last fall. I’m excited but also feeling a little tired. My training this week was good, but I monkeyed around with the schedule. I took Monday off entirely, feeling tired and having a sore throat. Well, not sore exactly. The feeling came on overnight and I felt like someone had punched me in the throat three days before. It’s still not quite right.
Then Tuesday I did a full strength and conditioning workout with my trainer, followed by a 5.3 mile run. It was slow, but it felt good to do a lot of work. Wednesday I was scheduled to run, but my knee felt tight after the hard day Tuesday, so I rode 16.35 miles on the bike instead, which took about 75 minutes. A good cross-training day. Yesterday I ran 5.6 miles.
So, starting the week Sunday, I’ve done two gym workouts, 14.2 miles running, and 16.3 miles on the bike. I’ll do 14 tomorrow, and that will round out a successful week of training, I think, even though the schedule got mixed up. Today is normally a rest day, but since I took Monday off, BB and I are thinking of a light gym workout or a bike ride tonight.
In the past calendar year I have run 1015.3 miles. Of which 55.5 were competitive. I’ve also averaged two days a week in the gym, and now, over the past two months or so, I’ve ridden 197.6 miles. If you had told me a year ago that I would do all that, I’d have guessed I’d be a lot fitter than I am now. I’m discovering that fitness is really, really hard to attain.
I mean, yes, obviously. As a person on twitter said to me not too long ago, when has it been evolutionarily advantageous to lose weight easily? And yes, I know that fitness and weight are not perfect correlates, but they go together pretty consistently. But I seem to have hit a plateau. After losing about 50 pounds (22.7kg, for my metric friends, and 1.4 pood for the Russians), I’ve stalled. I’ve been hovering around 185 lbs for about eighteen months despite all the work I’m doing.
But my body has changed dramatically. I’m trimmer, and I even wear a 40R suit jacket for the first time in my adult life. I can do three pull-ups in a row without putting my feet down. Even though I still have a reasonably thick blanket of flab about the middle, I am capable of doing things that were so far beyond my abilities a few years ago that it didn’t even occur to me to dream of doing them.
And that’s the real goal of fitness for me. Yes, I’m incredibly vain and I’d love to look good naked and all that. But what I really want is to be healthy and active and able to enjoy the things I’d like to enjoy. Being active allows me to eat things I like to eat without much remorse. It allows me to participate in things that I enjoy without being miserable, like walking for hours and hours and hours in a strange city. Or just playing. This weekend, I think we’re going to go to a waterpark. I love waterparks and I almost never go. And I’ll have the energy and fitness to run around and play for hours, because of the work I’ve put in.
I am approaching my fitness much like I approach my sobriety. Incremental progress. Progress, not perfection. I am doing better than I was, better than I thought I could. I will never be perfect. Not in any aspect of my life. But I feel good about where I am and where I’m heading. Life is good. I feel strong and healthy and sober and happy. And I feel ready for the next challenge, whatever that is.
Inquiry and Highlights.
Given that I’m starting another year here, I thought I’d copy (well, adapt) a trend and ask a few questions of my readers.
1) Tell me about yourself. Who are you? Are you in recovery, or do you know someone who is? And if not, what brought you here and why have you stayed?
2) Have you told anyone else about this blog? Why? Was it someone who you thought needed to hear about sobriety? Ever sent anything to family members or groups of friends who don’t understand your situation?
3) How did you find us and how do you regularly follow us? through Twitter, Facebook and/or other beyond-RSS mechanisms?
I was asked in the comments of my last post, what has been a highlight of this past year, the year I was 40? There have been so many it’s hard to keep track. I have deepened my relationship with the woman I expect to spend the rest of my life with. I have improved my fitness and health in ways I never thought would be possible for me. I have advanced my career dramatically. I’ve published in new areas and I’ve been promoted. It’s been a good year. Thank you all for being a part of it.
Circling the Sun.
A morsel of flesh draped on a scaffold of bone, pressed against an enormous spinning ball whirling around a nuclear fire too massive to contemplate. Which is itself a pinprick of pale yellow light in a vast darkness. I am small. Forty-one circuits of this cone of gravity. A paper in the basement of a hospital somewhere says so. It is inked with the imprint of my feet.
I am my own kind of light. I am a thing of intention and I have in me whatever it is we have in us that makes us alive. I have learned, after a great length of indifference, to cherish that. To hold as precious the clockwork of living. To be in myself in the world a grateful part of it.
This is my line of fire in the sky. I am a beating heart, boiling in the void. Forty-one times that beating heart has circled its star. But whatever I am made of has been here from the beginning. And whatever I am made of will be here until the end. We are all eternal.
While I linger here, I will be a voice for gratitude. I will wonder without apology. I will stumble and I will stand and I will stride forward again. I am small. But I am big to me. I am the only me that I have. I have gone, in my estimation of myself, from the center to the periphery. I have surrendered to irrelevance. But I am still me, to me.
So here, a strange reaction of chemistry and physics has survived another passage of its great circle. This last one was a good one. I hope we all have a good one this time round. All these shining lights. We are a beacon. I am a flame in a fire of a whole burning world. A fire of life. Blazing in an infinite night.
Infactorium 