Infactorium

This weekend, BB and I, and our friend @SciTriGrrl, are running the Virginia Beach Half-marathon. I’m super excited even though my foot is not in great condition. I’m fit for the race, legs, lungs, heart, etc., but my left foot has been bugging me for a little more than a month. I get shooty nerve-things in the toes of my left foot when I walk barefoot on hard surfaces. And I get tingly and fiery feelings when I run too far, or too fast. I’ve bought new shoes and made a few changes to my training routine. I think I’ll be ok for the event.

BB and I have been really working hard. Training 5-6 days a week, gym and running. I’ve put in almost 50 miles running so far this month, and I did 60 in February despite taking a week off while sick. In the next two days my final training runs will be about 4 miles apiece. Then, 13.1 miles Sunday morning after two days of rest. I have fancy new shoes that are super cushiony, and supposed to be good for returning from injury. I’m hopeful that they, and the sensible training/rest regimen will allow my foot to heal.

We’re aiming for a personal record. And I think we’ll hit it. Currently, our record in the half-marathon is 2:14:44. But we’ve been consistently running at well under that pace in our long training runs. Less than two weeks ago, I crushed my personal record for a practice run in the 10K. 53:32. The idea that I can run six straight sub-9 minute miles is absurd. This former drunk, obese, pack-a-day smoker. All it takes is time, consistency, willingness, and the luck not to get too badly injured.

I’m thinking I may need to take another whole week off from running, let my foot heal, and build back up slowly. I don’t know what the best plan is. But I think a lot of shorter runs and slower paces will help. Luckily, the next race we have planned, in May, is not a race we’re going to try for any speed in. It’s a hillier course, and we’ll be running with a friend for whom it’s his first race. Our plan is to go slow and steady and just finish. I think that I can handle that.

And now I’m looking for a good challenging thing to do the week of August 10-16. BB will be traveling internationally for a trail running and yoga women’s retreat. I’m going to do something fun and physically challenging so that she can’t say she was the only one to do something hardcore that week. There are trail half marathons in Europe and the USA that week that I might do, including the possibility of the Pikes Peak Ascent, which is a 13.3 mile run straight up a 14,000′ mountain in Colorado.

We’ll see. I’m excited about various possibilities. Right now, I just want to run this weekend and have a great time doing it. Which means a 4 miler today, and again tomorrow. And then some rest.

I guess this is the seventh March 17th in a row I’ll be sober. I have nearly no memory of St. Patrick’s Day as a drunk. Not because I was too drunk to recall, but because I never bothered to note it. I was a daily drinker. In the 5 years prior to my getting sober, I bet there were only 5-10 days I didn’t drink at all. And probably only 15-20 I didn’t get drunk. So for me, there was nothing special about the holiday. But for many other drunks, holidays were really special.

First of all, let’s dispense with the notion that all alcoholics drink or drank the way I did. Yes, I was a pretty common archetype, but there are no rules when it comes to alcoholic drinking. Science and medicine have defined “abuse” and “dependency” and those are useful for studying physiologic effects, etc.. But they don’t define alcoholism the way we do. The way that’s important for recovering from alcoholism. There are alcoholics who drink every day, like me. There are alcoholics who drink monthly. The frequency and the amount don’t define an alcoholic. We tend to use this:

When you drink, can you reliably predict and control how much you’ll have? Do you drink more than you want to, and do things that wish you wouldn’t?

People who answer yes to these questions may or may not be identified as alcohol abusers or alcohol dependent. But they are likely in need of recovery, lest they end up suffering severe consequences in their lives, and cause irreparable harm in the lives of others. Which is why people like this, like me, tend to hide their drinking. We pour vodka into coke cans, we hide bottles around the house. We fill the gin bottle back up with water. All the little things that add up to attempting to conceal how bad the problem is.

St. Patrick’s Day, and other drinking holidays (which, let’s be honest, is most of them), allow us to throw off the cloak. It’s socially acceptable to get drunk today! No one can hector us and criticize us. The whole world is drunk today! Why shouldn’t we be as well?

The answer, of course, is long and categorical. First of all, we alcoholics manage to get far too drunk even for other drunks. We ruin even things that are centered around inebriation. I’ve done my share of that. And yours. And as well, when we are able to drink in public, instead of in secret, our resentment at having to hide our ordinary drinking often reveals itself in hateful ways. Recriminations against those who love us but who want us to be different. Against bartenders who think we’ve had enough. Against decorum and society itself.

But I preferred the closet. Or strangers. I preferred to drink around people who wouldn’t judge me. Didn’t hate me. I liked to drink alone and in quiet. I could get what I needed from the alcohol and not have to justify myself to anyone or expose myself to greater risks than I was used to (driving drunk was habitual.).

I find the ridiculous paeans to drunkenness of St. Patrick’s Day mildly annoying, at least at some point during the day. I can often tell who’s spiraling toward irretrievable alcoholism and who’s just having a fun time. Not always. But I’m not tempted by the holiday. I count myself lucky for that. I know lots of sober drunks who really miss it on the manufactured drinking holidays. March 17th. May 5th. I’m fortunate that those have never been stumbling blocks for me.

Because I still like to be alone. Or, now, in intimate company. Real companions, quiet places. I just don’t need the alcohol to be there anymore. So go enjoy your St. Patrick’s Day. Get drunk if you like. I’ll be going to the gym after work, and then relaxing in the bath. Without my booze. Without my razor blade. I have roasted pork loin in the fridge. And a much simpler life than I used to. And a much happier one.

I had some bad dreams last night. Drinking dreams. I dreamed that on my recent vacation with BB, I had actually had a few drinks. Never been drunk, but had a drink or two from time to time. And in fact, I dreamed that I had done that several times since quitting my alcoholic-level drinking. In the “present tense” part of the dream, I was sitting with my old sponsor, Mickey, in a hot tub. He asked me if I’d drunk on the trip. I told him I’d had one sip. I said I didn’t want to give my coin back just because I’d had a sip. I hadn’t gotten drunk.

And there is my own signature brand of lying. Mixing truth in to the lie so that it’s easier to tell and harder to detect. The lies I tell when I drink. Using that ability to say false things convincingly, to sand edges off of sharp truths, to get what I want. To get others to agree I deserve what I want. I like to think I don’t tell lies in sobriety. But sometimes I still do.

In “How it Works”, the chapter of the book Alcoholics Anonymous, there is a paragraph on those who cannot seem to recover. It describes them as people who cannot or will not be honest with themselves. We say, “They are not at fault. They seem to have been born that way.” I am capable of being honest with myself: I know I am an alcoholic. I know I have a tendency to deceive. To manipulate. To jerrymander.

The most difficult part of my honesty with myself is deciding when I’m at fault. The easiest thing to do is to find reasons that someone else is to blame for my indiscretions. Or that no one is. But the truth, the difficult truth for me, is deciding that I am to blame, and that even if I don’t “deserve” the consequences, I still earned them. I feel this way about a lot of things. That even if I did contribute to my own difficult situation, I didn’t deserve the fallout.

The truth is, well, complicated. But I’ve earned the vast, vast majority of the bad things that have happened to me are largely of my own making. Through bad decisions, or lies. Telling the truth has gotten more natural to me. It takes training. I think it’s associated with fear, all this alcoholic mendacity. I am so terrified that someone would find and see the real, broken, ashamed, miserable, small, pathetic me, that I’d rather fabulate something entirely and risk that being exposed. Because even if you did uncover my lies, you still haven’t found the real self you could hurt. Pitchfork all my scarecrows. You can’t hurt me.

But that kind of dishonesty protects us from intimacy in addition to harm. I have come, in my sobriety and my maturity (such as it is) to respect and value intimacy and vulnerability in ways that I entirely abhorred as a young man; a drunk. Isolation is the helpmate of the drunkard. As a sober man, I’ve learned some of the value of being known. Being explored with tenderness rather than scrutiny.

Intimacy, as a younger person and an addict, all felt like a throat culture; a needle biopsy. Being penetrated painfully and scraped and examined and tested and torn. It was horrible and clinical and violating. It took several things to recover from that state. Including the careful and gentle efforts of a very fine psychologist. With whom I fought bitterly for a long time, only realizing after a long time that I was fighting with myself, my past, my fear. My lies.

Emotional intimacy in sobriety, now that I’ve done the work, is better. It’s… intimate. And sometimes still painful. It takes a long time to heal. But I have slowly put this self back together. One false step. One long stride. And now I’ve begun to run.