Pittsburgh Half Marathon: Complete!
Well, dear friends and readers, I did it. With the exception of a brief pee break at mile 2, I ran the entire half marathon from beginning to end. I finished in 2:38:05. Good enough for about 12,000th place. Or 750th or so among my sex/age group (Males, 35-39). My entire goal was to finish. I had no designs on time. I vaguely hoped to finish without having to stop running and walk. And I did. I set that goal for myself about a half year ago, if you recall. I wrote that this year I wanted to run a half-marathon without stopping to walk. Well, I did it. It’s done.
I was emotional at the beginning of the race. I teared up during the national anthem. I kept imagining breaking down and crying at the end of the race. Each time I saw the images in my head I would feel my eyes filling up. But when the time came, and I crossed the finish line, I didn’t feel like that. I didn’t feel especially elated either. Mostly, I felt tired and sore and my foot hurt. I felt happy. I felt privileged. My new partner ran every step of the way with me, even though she’s much faster than me and could have left me in the dust. We ran with three other friends from twitter (SciTriGrrl, Scicurious, and NParmalee), and stayed at Geeka’s house. It was fabulous.
I feel like people must be tired of reading about my gratitude. I fear that it may come off as insincere “humblebragging”. And you know what? I am damned proud of my accomplishments. I have done some things these past six and a half years. But I can’t take credit for all of it. Not even most of it. I am not sober by my own will or hand. The best I had, the best I could do, was drink and ruin and raze. By finding people who had quit drinking, and doing what they told me to do, and by working the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have managed to stay sober now for more than six years.
When I’m sober, I can do things that astonish me. But not just when I’m sober. Because I’m sober. If I had never been a drunk, I could not do many of the things that I do successfully today. I had no plan for living. Because I know that I have a disease lurking in the wings to kill me, I have learned to make (mostly) better use of my time; my efforts. I still have all the same miserable deficiencies I did when I was a drunk. I just also now have a plan for mitigating them. I usually do a halfway decent job of putting it into action. Not always.
I don’t fight alcoholism. I can’t. I lose every time I try. I fought cigarettes. I feel like I won. Though I know that that addiction, too, is just waiting for me to return to nurse. And I am fighting my tendency to obesity and diabetes. And so far, today, I feel like I’m doing a good job at it. I fight my laziness and my resignation. I try to recognize and accept the things about myself I can’t control. And I try to engage with and take agency in the things I can.
I’m doing reasonably well in life, all things considered. I can focus on negatives and challenges. AA helps me to step back and focus on positives and solutions. I am sober. I am sane. I am capable of running (well, jogging) for two hours and forty minutes in a row. At least, I was on May 4th, 2014. That’s good enough for me. For now. Who knows what the future holds. And compared with where I’ve been, it’s really something amazing to have a future.
UPDATE:
My medal:
Running Away.
With all the problems my new house has, and some of the very frustrating developments at work which are making me feel like I could have done a far better job planning and practicing my job, I’m starting to feel like I wish I could just run away. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. This weekend I’m renting a car, and my girlfriend and I, and my friend Nancy, are going to get in a car and drive from ECC to Pittsburgh. There we’ll meet up with several other friends, and run in the Pittsburgh half-marathon.
I’ve done precious little training. But two weeks ago I did do a 10 mile run in a few minutes under 2 hours. Not fast. Not impressive. But steady. I was very tired at the end of it, but I wasn’t wrecked. In fact, BB and I even went walking afterwards and ended up doing another 4-5 miles I think, that day. So I have no doubt that I’m capable of pushing my body from one end of the course to the other. Whether I’ll run the whole way or not, I don’t know. It looks like a tough course, and 13.1 miles is a long way.
But I’m going to try. Here is where I put the principles of my program into practice in my other affairs. Three years ago, I could not run to the end of the next block from my home. A quarter-mile was my functional limit for running without stopping. Now, I’ve done more than ten straight miles. Sunday, I will try to do 13.1. I might make it. I might fail. But if I don’t I won’t have failed in the larger, important sense of it. Just being in a place to contemplate it is already a success from the perspective of life and health and sobriety.
Less than three years ago, I was 50 lbs overweight. Less than five years ago, I smoked a pack a day. Less than 7 years ago, I drank a bottle of liquor a day. Through working daily, one step at a time, making progress, I have let go of my vices and surrendered in my battle with alcohol. I relinquished nicotine. I remain addicted to these chemicals, but I am free of them. And through slowly increasing my exercise, first just walking. Then walking and running, periodically cross-training, I have come to a place where running for 2.5 hours straight is a real, if ambitious, possibility.
I might make it. But even if I don’t, I am full of wonder and gratitude and joy and life. And I will try again. Because it’s all about progress. Not perfection.
Can You Blame Us?
Pete Rose, or someone purporting to be Pete Rose, has a twitter account. He tweeted about having pushed an Umpire, and receiving a suspension. In response to this, Hope Jahren tagged me asking:
@lukedones sigh … Pete Rose: to what extent can you blame someone for the stuff they do while in the throes of addiction? cc: @Dr24hours
— Hope Jahren (@HopeJahren) April 30, 2014
It’s an interesting question. And one for which I don’t think I have a satisfying answer. I think there are a couple of important different questions actually being asked though. First, there’s the question of moral culpability. How much responsibility does an addict have for the acts they commit while in an active addiction? Second, there’s the question of interpersonal affront. How much restitution is an aggrieved party entitled to if an addict injures them while in an active addiction? Third, there’s the question of offense and insult. How angry are we justified in feeling toward an addict when they injure us while in active addiction?
Each of these has its own answer, and for its own reasons. And I doubt it would be easy to get any two people to agree on precisely what they are. Especially from a legal or ethical perspective. And yet, we addicts in recovery – at least in the 12 step programs – have come to a fairly uniform and comprehensive answer to all three of these questions. For ourselves, anyway.
How much responsibility do we have for acts we commit while in active addiction? All of it. We are completely responsible for our actions, behavior, and damages. Being an addict does not justify our behavior. It may explain it. It may help us to understand it. It may enlighten us about it. But it does not excuse it. We are fully morally culpable for bad acts committed while in active addiction.
How much restitution is an aggrieved party entitled to when we injure them in active addiction? The same as they would be if we injured them in active sobriety. Where we do damage, we should make amends. Making amends means trying to set right, as they were before. Insofar as that is possible, and it is often not. But often, things can be made far better than before. We are not, however, required to do whatever is asked of us by an injured party. We return things to a pre-injured state, if we can. We do not become hostage to our victim’s whims. The fact that we are addicts does not really come to bear on this topic. This is just how people should behave.
Finally, how angry is an injured person justified in being at an addict that harms them while in active addiction? It is not our place to mediate such matters. People’s emotional responses are their own. I have found in my own life that people are rarely (but sometimes!) angrier at me than I deserve. One task of recovery is to try to set right the things the things we’ve done wrong. It is not to manage the emotions of persons we have harmed. Their feelings are theirs. They are entitled to them, and how anyone expresses their own emotions is no business of mine.
Addiction is a compulsion. Yes. But our behavior is deliberate. I’m not entirely sure how to reconcile those two statements, and yet they are, in my own experience, entirely in concert. I am powerless over alcohol. I chose to drink every time I drank. I have irresistible cravings for alcohol when I drink any at all. I deliberately and knowingly wrought ruin in my life, and in the lives of others, through my drinking.
The matter of blame? I have no difficulty accepting blame for the harm I’ve caused. While actively addicted and subsequently in sobriety. Seeking to shirk blame is a symptom of precarious recovery, in my experience. What I don’t have to accept is continuous vilification. I do not have to prostrate myself interminably. I neither dwell on the past, nor seek to shut the door on it, just as it says in our promises.
How you choose to blame an addict in your life who harms you is up to you. How we choose to blame ourselves is up to us. Recovery depends upon accepting responsibility, making restitution, and then moving forward.
Formation and Reformation.
I was raised by liars. It should surprise no one that I became one of them. Both of my parents are educated and intelligent. And both of them assert more than they know. Manufacture narratives about themselves. And, I think, work very hard to deny certain central truths about themselves. Externally, anyway. I am of course not privy to private thoughts. But fabulous tales and bizarrely needless fabrications are part of both of their routine existences. Along with deep rationalizations.
I remember a time I was with my father. We went to a food pantry. My father was constantly out of money. Sometimes because he didn’t work. Sometimes because he drank or gambled. When we went to the food pantry, he told the person working there that he had five dependents. He was given an additional allotment. My father had zero dependents. I was about 10. I asked him to explain. He did. It was a tortured labyrinth. But it allowed him to claim five dependents without feeling like he was telling lies.
So I learned to rationalize. Deceive. Inflate and aggrandize. I made myself bigger than I was and smarter. More important. I made up stories I still cringe at, embarrassed for my adolescent self.
But the reason that I told these lies about myself, and to myself, was not simply that that’s why my role models did. It was because I was so ashamed of what I really was. I was, and am, terrified of being stupid. That was precisely my mother’s weapon of choice when I made mistakes as a child; “How could you be so stupid?” she would hiss. And so I learned that being stupid was the worst thing that a person could be. And that I had an inescapable propensity toward stupidity.
And so I lied. I always had to know everything first. I always had to be the expert. No one could teach me anything, because if I didn’t already know it, I was stupid. I treated my shame with lies. Eventually, I started treating my shame with alcohol as well. Alcohol was an excellent remediator of shame. As long as I stayed drunk, all the time.
Sobriety requires honesty. In the first place, it requires telling the truth. I lie reflexively sometimes. Without knowing why and with nothing to gain from it. It’s rarer now. But I continue to have to fight it. It’s not a struggle, exactly. Just an awareness I need to keep. But telling the truth is only the barest imprint on the surface of what is needed for sobriety.
Forged and formed in a furnace of lies, I needed to be reformed. I needed to build an entirely new image of myself. I needed to understand the truth of who I am inside. I still can’t write this without tears: I am not stupid.
I have done many things in my life, even in sobriety, of which I am, and deserve to be, ashamed. But I was born in a cauldron of shame which I had no stake in. No claim to. The core of the honesty, the blade-to-bone integrity required for my sobriety is to see that. To scour out the mildew there and say – say and believe – that this is not mine. I have been a receptacle for tragic shame that has been borne from generation to generation. And it is not mine.
I don’t blame my parents. Like most parents they did the best they knew how in the places where they were and they clearly succeeded with me: I am well and happy and productive. Every parent leaves every child with scars and bruises and bandages. Apes bringing up smaller apes in a jungle none of us really understand.
This is my time in my life. And to be useful and productive and content in my time in my life I need to be honest with myself in intimate ways. I am not perfect. I am not always honest. But I am better today that yesterday. The terrible thing of it is: I love my shame. Relinquishing it is painful, and difficult, and sad. There is mourning there. But it is necessary. So see myself as I am. As I was formed and as I am reformed.
Grantwriting: You Should Already Be Done Thinking.
At my last institution I had, like I do now, a weird position. I was hired to be the concierge systems engineer for the chief of staff, who was a physician and chemist and university professor of medicine and of chemical engineering. He had about a 20 year uninterrupted history of R01-level funding. He treated me like a post-doc for about a year and a half, and then promoted me to PI. He’s the one who taught me to write grants. My doctoral advisor never once asked me to write paper or a grant, and publishing was not a requirement of my program.
What he told me, when writing my first grant (of which he was PI, and I was key personnel, and which was triaged), was that when writing a grant, you need to be done already. All of the thought, all of the innovation, all of the ingenuity and inspiration, all the things we think of when we think of cool science, all that needs to be done before you write the grant. Granted work isn’t the sexy part of science. All the dreaming and imagining happens before you get any money. Before you do any writing.
The grant describes all the innovation and exciting idea-work you’ve already done, and lays out what you will do to prove your imagination is right or wrong (but really, right). You can’t write a grant to go dream big dreams. You write a grant to pay for labor. That was my PI’s instruction: “A good grant reduces everything to labor. You should already be done thinking. Now it’s all just work.”
That line stuck in my head hard. “Reduce everything to labor.” Convince the reviewers that all you have to do is collect samples and data. Apply your formulas. Write the code that makes the conceptual model come alive. All the concepts are already laid out. The hypotheses are there, just waiting to have the statistical tests applied. All you need to do is hire some people to wrangle the numbers, statistic the stats. The best grants are about the boring work you need to do to prove your exciting idea.
Your idea which is already polished, shiny, and perfected. Which will reimagine the universe and upend the current state of knowledge in the field. Which will transform society and make children smarter and better behaved and adults healthier and more attractive. Which will make pointers fetch and retrievers herd. Which will undo the intricate puzzles of mystery and majesty in the heavens and lay waste to human ignorance.
But which, crucially, is already done.
Isolation Kills.
One of the things I hungered for, when in the final stages of my drinking, was isolation. I just wanted to be alone. Alone with my alcohol. I sat in the bath. I drank. I read terrible books. And I cut myself. There is a kind of toxic majesty to sliding as deeply as possible into mirthless misery. Slow, bitter silence while little scarlet rivers stream off into the bathwater. I simply wanted to be alone. I imagined that I was purifying myself by bleeding: replacing all this internal sludge with clear, clean water.
I was not well.
This is my portrait of terminal isolation. Yes, I was locked in a bathroom. But the isolation was, for lack of a better word, spiritual. I shared this intense hatred of myself with no one. Not the therapist I shared other kinds of pain and hate with. Not the woman I had married and said that I loved. Not the doctor who saw the scars and asked if I was hurting myself. No one. I locked my self in a chamber, meticulously maintained – or so I pretended – so that no one could see how utterly shriveled I had become. I was an unwatered vine, wilting from the light.
When I write about this, I still, after all this time, fear judgement from those who have no experience with these things. Or worse, I fear their pity. I was sick and I was undignified and I was miserable, but I neither wanted nor deserved any pity for it, and I still don’t. Because I was doing it on purpose. I knew my potential. I knew my privilege. And I was deconstructing it deliberately. One day at a time trading life for death. An iniquitous obsession with misery.
When I finally, indescribably decided that somehow I was to turn myself from this fractured persistence and look up and try to find the light again, when I came to the place where I could not go on, but I could not change myself, I went to where people who once drank like me congregated. And I told them through a sheet of tears how I lived my life, how I drank, how I bled. And the men and women in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous understood how I felt. Because they had, to a person, lived in the spiritual desert I had inhabited.
Through the shared understanding, the aggregated experience and strength in those rooms, around those pressboard folding tables and in those sheet-metal chairs, I began, slowly, to emerge from my isolation and share in the hope that fills those spaces. I am still not well. I carry the alcoholism, the depression, the rage, and the compulsion to isolate myself in small dark spaces. I always will. But I know where to go to find the people who know that obsession. Who have risen from those graves. And I know how to be sober and social and productive among them. One day at a time, living life for life.
This is what I believe. Most of us are ashamed of something within ourselves we want to hide. Most of us have challenges we wish we could surmount, but cannot. Most of us need help. I believe that most of us want to be better than we are. And I believe that we all need something outside of ourselves, bigger than ourselves, to achieve that.
I believe, dear reader, that the challenges you face are real, and daunting. But isolation kills. And you are not alone.
Letters of Support.
So for the R03 I’m writing, I’ll get letters of support from all the key personnel and my department head, etc.. But I wonder about other letters. When I wrote my first R03eq grant at my former employer, I got a local famous person in a closely-related field to write me a letter that basically said, “Hi! I’m famous and I think Dr24hours is super awesome. We expect this to be a success, and when it is, we’d love to collaborate directly on the follow-up R01eq!” That grant was funded.
Now I’m writing another R03 to another agency. In this case, I’m again developing a pilot project to hopefully eventually lead to an R01 or R18. Because this project straddles research and quality improvement, and because it will directly impact several areas of MECMC, I’m thinking of asking the medical directors of those areas to write, essentially, amicus briefs. Once again, not really agreeing to participate, but saying, “Hi! We’re famous and we know about this research and its potential to impact our areas. We think those impacts will be great, and we’ve worked with Dr24hours before and he’s a total rockstar. We’d love to advise him informally throughout the process.”
Do these kinds of letters help? Do they mean anything? Do letters help at all, or are they just digital checkboxes for reviewers to say, “Yup. The dude got letters from people.”? What should a good letter of support say, if it’s from someone other than key personnel?
Grant Decisions.
It’s an R03. I’m not writing the R18. I’d love to, but frankly, there’re a couple of good reasons not to. First and foremost, I don’t have sufficient preliminary data/work to justify the government dumping $750,000 over three years in my lap. The R03 is only $100,000 over two. Second, my department’s entire grant history consists of my current small-five-figures grant. If we suddenly go a huge bolus of cash like that, there’d likely be confusion and squabbles and befuddlement. Risking that seems hazardous. The R03 isn’t as long and won’t go as far, but it would definitely satisfy my needs and my ego.
So. I wrote up an aims page. And today I put down about 600 words of my narrative. I’m going to do what I can to get this in in June.
Fifty-One.
Yesterday evening I stepped on a scale and it said 183.5 pounds. I haven’t specifically been trying to lose weight, exactly. I’ve been trying for about 6.5 years now to be a healthier human. I quit drinking. 18 months later I quit smoking. 18 months later I started running. And about 2 years after that, after I moved, I sold my car entirely and now I walk everywhere in addition to running. Though that means that my running has dropped off a bit, because when I walk 15-25 miles a week, my motivation to run 10-20 more is limited. And I have restructured my diet to diminish (but not eliminate) sweets, and to revolve around whole foods that are minimally processed. This means a lot of peanut butter and jam sandwiches on whole grain bread with skim milk.
183.5 pounds is a drop of 51.5 from what I believe is my peak weight of 235. I remember seeing 235 on a scale. I may have been a few pounds heavier at some point, but 235 is what hits my ear as correct for my peak weight. If I had not taken this path, I would certainly be diabetic at this point. I might be anyway, though my blood numbers are good. My doc says, “Definitely insulin resistant.” But it’s in control with diet and exercise. My last A1c was 5.4 and I’m happy with that. Anyone with metabolic risk factors should be. And I have them.
But I also don’t want to go patting myself on the back too much. At 183.5, my BMI is still 26.7 (Quick! How tall am I?). I need to get down to 171 to be “normal” weight. Even at the high end. I don’t know if I will. I don’t know if that’s even a goal. My goal is to be healthy, feel healthy, and look good naked. I don’t feel like I’m at that last one yet. I know BMI is a rough guide and doesn’t work for everyone, but for me it feels really accurate and it tracks my blood numbers well. When I’m below 27, I’m objectively healthier.
Having spent so much of my supposed wild and care-free youth essentially in the grips of a terminal illness, I cannot begin to explain quite how remission from that feels. It feels wonderful, and it feels like work. I’m proud, but I’m grateful. I worked for this. But I didn’t earn it, exactly. I feel like I am a confluence of effort and serendipity and immense, immense thanksgiving. There are a lot of challenges and problems and difficulties and bullshit in the world. I’ve had my share, and I’ve been granted incredible opportunities and privileges as well.
Tomorrow, I intend to put on a pair of light, bouncy shoes and then run in them for two hours without stopping. It’ll be a hell of a thing if I succeed. And if I fail, well, I’ll try again another day. One day after one day and then another. Here I am.
The Easier, Softer Way.
I have found that the only path to freedom from addiction is in embracing it. That’s not to nullify others’ experiences, everyone is welcome to their own. But my experience, and that of many others that I know who have recovered by taking the same path I have, is that the only true release from alcoholism is to acknowledge and accept that I am an alcoholic. That I will never be cured. That I cannot fight it. That the only relief is through total abstinence. And that alone, I have no hope of recovery. Alcohol is bigger than I am, and more powerful. And finally, that alcohol itself is really only a symptom of my problem. As long as I focus on alcohol as the source of my miseries, I am neglecting my recovery.
In the third chapter of the book “Alcoholics Anonymous”, there is a discussion of how we approached treating our alcoholism prior to recovery. It talks about how we may have tried switching beer for wine or liquor. Tried to drink only at home, or only at bars, etc.. All the things we tried to do to manage our drinking and assert power over alcohol. And then, in the fifth chapter, it names this behavior: we tried to find an easier, softer way. We seek to find the way to live in the world and still do what we want. But it doesn’t work. Because what we want, usually, is to emotionally isolate ourselves and drink to insensibility. From there, we become hazards.
And so, when finally ready, many of us are willing to abandon the easier, softer ways that don’t work for us and embark upon the steps. And when we do that earnestly and thoroughly, most of us recover, we’ve found. I have.
This is a long-winded way to coming round to homeopathy, and similar “miracle cures”. I was reading the Science Based Medicine blog, exposing more quackery and pseudoscience in health care today. (And I’m sure they have serious problems with AA, because it isn’t an “evidence-based treatment*” according to their narrow definitions of evidence. But where we know how to measure, we ought to be applying evidence.) I think people are always looking for the easier, softer way. It’s not unique to alcoholics.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if Vitamin C cured cancer? This person who puts letters after their name says it does. Give it a try! Wouldn’t it be great if water that once had a little bit of sulfur in it cured allergies? This person wearing a lab coat says it does. Give it a try. And because of placebo effects, people are likely to feel better, at least transiently, and believe it works. But these methods not only have no evidence, there’s powerful evidence against them. They are proven to fail.
And yet we consume them. Because medicine is expensive, and may have side-effects. And treating disease with the things that work best is often invasive and unpleasant. And even then, we often die. Inevitably we die. It would be fantastic if an eyedropper of water negated the need to have a colonoscopy. But there’s no easier, softer way. There’s just sedation and a camera that goes up your butt in a room full of strangers.
Science is hard. Medicine is hard. Human health and wellness is bafflingly complex and subject to peculiar vagaries we are – in many ways – just beginning to understand. My health starts with not drinking. But it doesn’t end there. Because my sobriety, my quality of life, requires that I also examine how I live. My relationship with the truth. My willingness to accept things I don’t enjoy and don’t like. My understanding of my alcoholism and how my mind will occasionally turn against me. How my emotions can be brittle and quixotic.
I know that not everyone looks for shortcuts. Some people are invested, seemingly from birth, in doing things the right way. Indeed, some people make things deliberately difficult for themselves. I find myself searching for easier, softer ways. But I have to recognize that that’s a character flaw. Doing things cheaply means doing them badly, for the most part. And when it comes to medicine, and ethics, and science, there are no shortcuts. There are no miracles. There’s only taking the right road. One step at a time.
I don’t believe my recovery from alcoholism is a miracle. I believe it happened because I somehow found the willingness to recognize my disease and work a program, buoyed by others as part of a community and network of people in recovery, that allowed me to abandon fighting alcohol and surrender to it. I stopped fighting, so the war ended. But why that happened, why I was able to find recovery and others – better souls than mine – don’t? That still falls into a realm of ignorance. We don’t know. We may never know. But I know this: there’s no easy, soft way out of hell and up into the light.
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*And as soon as anyone learns how to meaningfully measure sobriety, I’ll be happy to review, consider, and comment upon evidence-based treatments for addiction. Until then, people who criticize AA for lack of evidence should come to open meetings and see all the changed lives.
Infactorium 