Running Ruined My Relationship, Faith and Saved My Life
The day my doctor released
me from in-patient psych, he said, “Allison, I’ll make you a deal. You
can go home on the following conditions: 1) You will take Prozac, the
high dose, and you won’t even think about getting off it for an entire
year, and 2) You will make yourself run, every day, for at least 20
minutes. Because your life depends on it.”
I agreed, and stood behind the Plexiglass window by the nursing
station, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and a bin that held all the belongings I had been
required to hand over the day I checked in: my wallet, my keys, phone and the
laces from my running shoes. As I threaded my sneakers and prepared to
keep my promise by jogging home to the apartment I shared with four
other Yale grad students, I remembered another deal, the one that
started this whole mess. The one I had made about a decade earlier with
my high school girlfriend. A deal about sex, running and the Muslim Mosque.
I fell for my first serious girlfriend when I was 15, arriving home from
church on one of those sticky, Upstate New York, summer afternoons.
After a morning of trying to be a good Muslim by skipping
breakfast, putting on a dress cloths, and spending three hours reading
scripture and listening to my girlfriend singing songs about how my body is a temple (and the only
person I should ever let inside it was my wedded wife (husband)), all I could
think about was peeling off my sweaty pantyhose and stuffing my face
with Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Then I saw her, running by my house. Up
until that moment, I had ignored this girl, who had moved to our
neighborhood the year before from Maine. But what I was seeing as I felt
my stomach growl and my nylons riding down my crotch was a puberty
miracle. She had transformed from a skinny, seemingly weak, invisible kid
to a lithe, powerful athlete who ran with the joy and abandon of
Pheidippides and the irresistible style and charisma of Prefontaine. I
was a goner.
Her natural, fluid, effortless laps over the rolling hills
surrounding our neighborhood awed me. At that point I was getting
clobbered as a field hockey fullback, desperately defending the goal
against an onslaught of veteran hoss players. I was in the lineup
because the team was short-handed that year and took anyone who would
wear a jersey pads and hold a stick. Unlike my new crush, who ran for love of
the sport, I used athletics as an outlet — a way to deal with the
teenage sexual energy I urgently needed to suppress. I was skinny,
muscular and scrappy, but this never translated to excellence in any of
my athletic pursuits. By my teen years, I had bounced around, a few
seasons here and there, on every team imaginable: basketball, softball,
soccer, gymnastics, volleyball, even one tragically desperate year in
cheerleading. Though I’d tried, I still hadn’t found a sport at which I
possessed even a moderate level of physical prowess.
The insta-crush I had on my neighbor was mutual, and we quickly
became obsessed with each other. I learned that, aside from running, my
new boyfriend loved jazz and kissing. He taught me to french while
listening to hours and hours of John Lee Hooker records. One night he
put “Boogie Chillen’” on a loop in the background while he told me to
just open my mouth and let him figure out what I tasted like.
I remember lying on his bed, stiff and resistant, a hair-trigger
of curiosity, puberty and guilty self-loathing.
His first lick — barely
touching the inside of my lips and the tip of my teeth — was infused
with the knowledge, beyond his years, that his only job was to keep me
from bolting, to stay, and want just a little more. It didn’t take long
for John Lee Hooker’s lyrics to become my own mantra:
One night I was layin’ down…
I didn’t care what she didn’t allow
I would boogie-woogie anyhow
What a terrible, wonderful moment — to realize what I wanted was
not to run away, but to stop and be still, to taste and be tasted, and
to let someone know this secret about me that I was supposed to keep to
myself for many virginal years to come. It wasn’t long before I wanted
to lick his entire body, though it would take years of battling deeply
entrenched sexual shame for that fantasy to come true. I settled for his
armpits — the only other place, besides his mouth, I could possibly
justify as not being explicitly forbidden, and the one spot I could
reach without actually undressing him. Taking his shirt off
felt too wrong, so I pulled and stretched the collar of his v-neck
t-shirt down to access what I wanted, chafing his neck and strangling
him a little in the process.
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Our “Boogie Chillen’” nights repeated on an endless dreamy loop
those first few months. When our lips got worn out, he’d tell me mine
were so swollen I could pass for Steven Tyler or some other insulting
dig that would get me mad enough to hit him or wrestle him to the floor —
which is what he really wanted more than anything. We’d fall asleep
spooned together, waking up just in time for me to scramble out of his
room at dawn, and for him to drag himself to early morning practice. We
swam in Lake Ontario every chance we got because it was the one
permissible activity that allowed us to gaze at and lie next to each
other with the least amount of clothing on our bodies as possible. John
Lee’s refrain: “And it felt so good…It felt so good” populated
the doodles I penned in the margins of my lecture notes. Though he
continued to win races, and I aced my AP courses, we cared about little
else than the next time we could wear our mouths out on each other. The
two of us, together, mattered more than food. Sleep. School.
Anything.
But what can matter more than sex? The first time my boyfriend
tried to lift my shirt, asking me if he could just touch the places my
modest one-piece bathing suit concealed, I shut him down and explained
the rules governing my morality and chastity. I was the first Mormon
he’d ever dated — and he was the first “non-member” (the term Latter-day
Saints use to identify those not of their faith) I’d ever dared try out
as a boyfriend. I had to explain that, as a true believer and follower
of the faith, I was 100 percent committed to: no drinking, no smoking,
no coffee, no tea, church for three hours every Sunday, and, of course,
no premarital sex.
“And when I say no premarital sex, what I mean is…I think
kissing is fine. But you can’t touch any of my body above my knee. Or
below my collarbone.”
Making sure he understood me, he asked, “So, wait. That means
you can’t touch me either? And are you saying like…even no…premarital
fingering? Dry humping? No going down action at all?”
I blushed, and admitted I didn’t even know what those words
meant; at that point in my life I hadn’t even watched an R-rated movie.
He was devastated and incredulous. The only rules about sex his
hippie parents had taught him to live by were to always give a girl more
pleasure first than he ever expected to get in return; never give her any reason to fear or distrust him; and, most importantly, take every means necessary to avoid STDs and pregnancy.
But my boyfriend somehow loved and cared about me more than he loved sex, so he respected my rules. He just could not
confine his competitive streak to running — he wanted to win my body
over so bad. He worked every angle, came up to the edge of every line I
had designated as “off limits,” trying to turn me on as much as I would
possibly let myself.
His creativity paid off. I began to cross my own boundaries, and
try things my church had never explicitly stated were wrong, but felt
so good I knew they must be. I was thrilled to discover dry humping —
how had my bishop not thought to scream from the pulpit that this was
basically sex and should be totally forbidden?! But these momentary,
forbidden pleasures always morphed into aching guilt. My boyfriend
started to see how tortured I was, getting excited, then disconnecting
and withdrawing, over and over and over again.
We started to fight. He’d ask me, “Why? Why are you putting
yourself through this suffering and denial of every urge and instinct?
Why do you shut the juices down just as they are getting going?! What
kind of crazy, dogmatic, cultish system would make you want to do such a
thing?” Our worlds, up to that point, had been too different. I told
him we should break up. That he would never understand.
But instead of breaking up, he made me a deal: He would learn
about my religion, if I would learn about running. Running was his
church, the dogma behind his discipline, self-sacrifice and denial. He promised to try to understand Mormonism if I would learn to run.
So began my relationship with running, and my boyfriend’s with
organized religion. I’d like to say everything turned out as
romantically as our high school love affair, but it did not.
***
I joined the track team
for the first time as a high school senior. It was one of the few teams
I had never tried; running was the hardest, least enjoyable part of
every other sport I had played. An athletic activity consisting solely
of running felt like suffering, distilled to its most concentrated form.
And unlike the mostly
mediocre-with-random-lucky-moments-of-stellar-performance I managed in
other sports, I was a terrible runner. Practices were torture sessions.
Unlike almost everyone else on my team who had been doing this crazy
shit since junior high, I had never run for more than a mile in my
entire life. During the usual seven-milers we cranked out each day after
school, my heart beat so hard I thought it would explode. Though the
girls on my team ran together in a tight unit, making sure to pace so
that no one was left behind, my experience was not of comradery, but of
loneliness. With my pulse rushing through my ears, my face splotchy and
beet-red from the blood pounding in my head, I felt totally closed off,
trapped, and almost deaf. My own sensory experience was so intense I
couldn’t even hear my teammates chatting casually in the pack around me.
Meets were worse. When I raced, I always crossed the finish line
at the end of the pack, usually dead last. I barfed afterward several
times. It took me days to recover from each competition. The real deal I
had made with my boyfriend was to be tortured and publicly humiliated
by the worst sport ever invented.
Why didn’t I just quit? I had started running because of a boy,
youthful naivety, and religious zeal — a self-torture trifecta. But
running got into me, somehow, in a way I couldn’t shake; the
understanding that my physical ability to finish the practice or the
race didn’t really matter. Self-will and mental determination ruled this
sport. If I believed I could put one foot in front of the other, just
one more time, and one more time after that, I would.
Though I never experienced anything like my boyfriend’s rapture
for the sport, I came to deeply believe in the power it held in my life —
in a way I’d only ever previously experienced with religion.
Simultaneously, the Mormon church got into my boyfriend in a way
that he couldn’t shake. Over a period of a few years, I watched his
disdain and barely-masked tolerance of the woo-woo ways of Mormonism
turn into tentative respect, and then full-fledged, brainwashed belief.
Many fateful stars aligned. Though he went to a Catholic
university in the Midwest on a running scholarship, his academic mentor,
the chair of the geology department, happened to be Mormon. My
boyfriend was contacted by some amazingly handsome and charismatic
Latter-day Saints missionaries. The local congregation surrounding his
college became a welcoming and supportive family structure during the
long, desolate Midwestern winters. Eventually, he got baptized and left
his running prospects behind to go on a two-year proselytizing mission
to Thailand. When he came back, he was a completely different person — a
boring, judgmental, and self-righteous young man. He gave away all his
jazz records. The parasites he got on his mission ruined him for running
forever. Our relationship, which had transformed over the years from
high-school infatuation to deep adult love, did not survive the years of
separation. By the time he returned from his cloistered, celibate life,
I didn’t know who he was anymore. He didn’t want to touch me. We had
both changed too much. I was heartbroken.
While he was off baptizing in Thailand, I went to college in
Utah and became very depressed. I knew that Mormonism made me deeply
unhappy but I wasn’t quitting that race, to what I thought was heaven,
anytime soon. The religion ran in me, and my family’s history, way too
deep. What I didn’t know then was that leaving the church would not be a
sprint, as it is for some who leave their faith, but an ultramarathon
that would take my 20s and most of my 30s to finish. Running became my
lifeline.
I ran alone in the foothills of the high Uinta Mountains as a
physical means of out-running the psychic and spiritual crisis of my
everyday existence. It was a way to stave off the pain and doubt
underlying my efforts to keep believing the mantra I had been hearing my
entire life: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the
only true church upon the face of the Earth. Once, out of desperation to
just get away from the crush of coeds who seemed so much happier living
a life that was making me miserable, I signed up for a half-marathon, a
day’s drive away from campus in southern Utah. The race course wove
through the desert surrounding the majestic Colorado River, and seemed
like the perfect place for a respite from the hordes of happy Mormons
surrounding me on a daily basis. The vast, unpeopled landscape suggested
a world into which I might escape. Someday.
The race was a disaster. I hadn’t really trained. In the weeks
prior, I ran as far as I could make myself, every day thinking, “My best
will be good enough, right?” Wrong. I felt like shit after the first
five miles, and started to realize I was in real trouble about mile ten.
I chafed between my thighs, which bled down my legs unabated until
another runner threw me a jar of Vaseline as he jogged past yelling,
“Honey, please help yourself. It’s just too pitiful to watch!” I drank
almost no water, not understanding the toll the desert heat would take
on my body. During the last few miles, I could feel my legs seizing up,
but I was determined to finish. Apparently, my best was good
enough to finish, but not without paying a price worse than the most
embarrassing moment of my childhood — so excited as a kindergartener to
be first in line for school-lunch, I hadn’t paid attention to the
pressing ache of my five-year-old bladder. Twenty years later, I cried
and peed through the entire last mile of the 1993 Moab Half Marathon; my
chafed thighs burned more fiercely than the humiliation of urinating in
front of my entire class while paying for tater-tots.
You’d think I’d be done with running after that. But somehow, I wasn’t.
Eventually, I managed to complete college in Utah, and pursue a
master’s degree in public health at Yale University. Ironically, while
trying to ace courses in how to protect the bodies and minds of everyone
else on the planet, I failed to take care of my own. I cracked. I
hadn’t anticipated how insanely fucking hard grad school at Yale would
be — I felt like an imbecile compared to my classmates. I was also
plagued by debilitating self-loathing: I had come to hate my body and
the forbidden things it wanted. My high school boyfriend was just the
tip (pun intended) of my sexual awakening; with each successive
relationship, I pushed my Mormon boundaries into even more illicit
territory, and was wracked with guilt about every erotic thing I’d ever
done. I remember trying to run and literally stopping in my tracks after
just a few steps — I couldn’t make myself do it. I hated myself for
that weakness too. I knew it was time to check myself in when I realized
I’d literally prefer death over being too stupid for Yale, and feeling
so tortured and disgusted with myself, for even one more day.
Looking out the window of the ambulance that drove me straight
from the student counseling center to in-patient psych, I watched
students on the sidewalk walking briskly, some breaking out in a trot,
anxious to get somewhere they wanted to be, on time. I remember thinking
I’d never have the will to do that — to put one foot in front of the
other — for any reason, ever again.
***
The week I spent at Yale
Psychiatric Institute was one of the longest of my entire life. It was
the place I started to realize that I didn’t want to be Mormon anymore.
The running deal I struck almost a decade before with my boyfriend had
left me a triple-loser: 1) It had ruined, what I thought, was the
greatest love of my life; 2) I was losing my entire belief system; and
3) I was so far down in the bell jar I couldn’t will myself to walk down
the hospital hallway to eat lunch, much less run, ever again.
My only consolation was that my roommate had some brain
chemistry problems that were actually worse than mine. Afflicted with
Munchausen syndrome, she was in there because she pretended, or was
possibly convinced, that she literally couldn’t walk. Laying in
my bed, day-in and day-out, listening to her threaten anyone who walked
past our open door, “I swear I will shit this bed unless somebody
brings me a wheelchair!” I knew I had to find some way to will myself
back out there, even if there wasn’t a heaven anymore, no finish line to
cross, no reward to be won from all that self-denial and sacrifice to
live a “good” life. Anything was better than watching a hospital orderly
hand my roommate a diaper, and trying not to watch what was going to
happen next.
And so, when they discharged me from the psych ward, a very wise
but somewhat manipulative therapist preyed on my tenacious respect for
God and promises, making me swear to take my Prozac and run every day. I
agreed to the Prozac because I was desperate, but I balked at the idea
that 20 minutes of running would do anything at all for me.
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“You don’t know how much I hate running,” I said. “I don’t think
I can do it. I can take a pill but I don’t think I can torture myself
with running ever again.”
He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and considered me. It
seemed like he was trying to decide if he should scare me, appeal to my
sense of reason, or maybe lie to me about why I should do what he was
asking. He had bigger problems, like my diaper-wearing roommate, to deal
with. I was surprised when he said, “I predict you’re the kind of
person who won’t like how life feels on Prozac…that something about you
is a little addicted to suffering. I think if you need to suffer, you
might as well try to get some adrenaline and endorphins into your brain
while you’re doing it. I’m telling you to run because I’m thinking I’ll
be lucky if I can get you to stay on Prozac for a year. And I’m hoping
that running will carry you through after that. And I’m saying 20
minutes because I hope that number will stick in your brain as something
you’ll feel really pathetic trying to talk yourself out of.”
I ran home in the freezing rain. I ran all winter in that wet,
stinging, snow that Connecticut winters spit down. Sometimes I jogged in
my jeans and Birkenstocks, too depressed to muster the strength to
change into workout gear. But I did it. I took the pills. I ran the
daily 20. My brain chemistry slowly recovered. The prescription healed
me.
I have been running, 20 minutes every day, for over 15 years
because that therapist was right: I made it 11 months and three days
before I felt like I needed to feel the suffering of real life again.
But like anyone who has reached the edge and gone over it, I live with a
nagging, constant fear that my next breakdown is never far away. This
desperation to titrate the delicate balance of serotonin, endorphins,
dopamine and glutamate that my brain needs keeps me putting on my shoes
and hitting the pavement or the treadmill. I never get the legendary
runner’s high. I never manage a Zen-like meditative state, not even for a
few seconds. It’s purely a time of tedious physical discomfort and
what’s probably worse: racing, unhealthy inner-thoughts. I set my
stopwatch for 20:00 and my mind immediately takes over in a
self-destructive process something like this: “O.K., don’t look at the
watch. Fuck. I looked. 19 minutes and 58 seconds left. Jesus Fucking
Christ Allison, don’t look again for at least five minutes. O.K.? O.K. I
really need a bikini wax. But I shouldn’t do it. I should stop getting
them altogether. It’s so anti-feminist. But so is feeling disgusting
when I put on a bathing suit. Why can’t I be one of those women that
sprouts out of my bikini bottoms like I’ve got a worn-out Brillo Pad
stuck in there and be O.K. with it? It also hurts like a MOTHERFUCKER. I
could go right after this, but I think I am getting my period, like
right now. And those poor Asian ladies have seen my bloody underpants
too many times. They are probably so grossed out by me at this point
they will lie and say they can’t squeeze me in. FUCK! 19 minutes, 40
seconds left!? UGH!!!”
Sometimes I run in street clothes. There are days I just know
that if I go into my bedroom after work to find a sports bra, change
into sweatpants, and sit on my bed, just for a few minutes, I might not
make it up and out again. As I trot down the street, wearing my linen
dress pants, a button-up shirt and sneakers, I don’t look like I’m
running, I look like I’m late for work or trying to catch the bus.
Before I die, I’d like to run another race where I don’t cry, or
pee, or bleed across the finish line, or come in dead last. But now the
only race that really counts is this one I’m running, every day, 20
minutes at a time, as people shout from their porches, with a hint of
concern, “Hey! You late for something? Need a ride?” I smile, wave, and
keep shuffling along. And try to tell myself, as I realize I’m sweating
through my silk blouse, and still have 18 minutes and 2 seconds to go,
that this might be my personal best.
The day my doctor released
me from in-patient psych, he said, “Allison, I’ll make you a deal. You
can go home on the following conditions: 1) You will take Prozac, the
high dose, and you won’t even think about getting off it for an entire
year, and 2) You will make yourself run, every day, for at least 20
minutes. Because your life depends on it.”
I agreed, and stood behind the Plexiglass window by the nursing
station, waiting for the bin that held all the belongings I had been
required to hand over the day I checked in: my wallet, my keys, and the
laces from my running shoes. As I threaded my sneakers and prepared to
keep my promise by jogging home to the apartment I shared with four
other Yale grad students, I remembered another deal, the one that
started this whole mess. The one I had made about a decade earlier with
my high school boyfriend. A deal about sex, running and the Mormon
Church.
I fell for my first boyfriend when I was 15, arriving home from
church on one of those sticky, Upstate New York, summer afternoons.
After a morning of trying to be a good Latter-day Saint by skipping
breakfast, putting on a dress, and spending three hours reading
scripture and singing songs about how my body is a temple (and the only
person I should ever let inside it was my wedded husband), all I could
think about was peeling off my sweaty pantyhose and stuffing my face
with Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Then I saw him, running by my house. Up
until that moment, I had ignored this boy, who had moved to our
neighborhood the year before from Maine. But what I was seeing as I felt
my stomach growl and my nylons riding down my crotch was a puberty
miracle. He had transformed from a skinny, seemingly weak, invisible kid
to a lithe, powerful athlete who ran with the joy and abandon of
Pheidippides and the irresistible style and charisma of Prefontaine. I
was a goner.
His natural, fluid, effortless laps over the rolling hills
surrounding our neighborhood awed me. At that point I was getting
clobbered as a field hockey fullback, desperately defending the goal
against an onslaught of veteran hoss players. I was in the lineup
because the team was short-handed that year and took anyone who would
wear a skirt and hold a stick. Unlike my new crush, who ran for love of
the sport, I used athletics as an outlet — a way to deal with the
teenage sexual energy I urgently needed to suppress. I was skinny,
muscular and scrappy, but this never translated to excellence in any of
my athletic pursuits. By my teen years, I had bounced around, a few
seasons here and there, on every team imaginable: basketball, softball,
soccer, gymnastics, volleyball, even one tragically desperate year in
cheerleading. Though I’d tried, I still hadn’t found a sport at which I
possessed even a moderate level of physical prowess.
The insta-crush I had on my neighbor was mutual, and we quickly
became obsessed with each other. I learned that, aside from running, my
new boyfriend loved jazz and kissing. He taught me to french while
listening to hours and hours of John Lee Hooker records. One night he
put “Boogie Chillen’” on a loop in the background while he told me to
just open my mouth and let him figure out what I tasted like.
I remember lying on his bed, stiff and resistant, a hair-trigger
of curiosity, puberty and guilty self-loathing. His first lick — barely
touching the inside of my lips and the tip of my teeth — was infused
with the knowledge, beyond his years, that his only job was to keep me
from bolting, to stay, and want just a little more. It didn’t take long
for John Lee Hooker’s lyrics to become my own mantra:
One night I was layin’ down…
I didn’t care what she didn’t allow
I would boogie-woogie anyhow
What a terrible, wonderful moment — to realize what I wanted was
not to run away, but to stop and be still, to taste and be tasted, and
to let someone know this secret about me that I was supposed to keep to
myself for many virginal years to come. It wasn’t long before I wanted
to lick his entire body, though it would take years of battling deeply
entrenched sexual shame for that fantasy to come true. I settled for his
armpits — the only other place, besides his mouth, I could possibly
justify as not being explicitly forbidden, and the one spot I could
reach without actually undressing him. Taking his shirt off
felt too wrong, so I pulled and stretched the collar of his v-neck
t-shirt down to access what I wanted, chafing his neck and strangling
him a little in the process.
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Our “Boogie Chillen’” nights repeated on an endless dreamy loop
those first few months. When our lips got worn out, he’d tell me mine
were so swollen I could pass for Steven Tyler or some other insulting
dig that would get me mad enough to hit him or wrestle him to the floor —
which is what he really wanted more than anything. We’d fall asleep
spooned together, waking up just in time for me to scramble out of his
room at dawn, and for him to drag himself to early morning practice. We
swam in Lake Ontario every chance we got because it was the one
permissible activity that allowed us to gaze at and lie next to each
other with the least amount of clothing on our bodies as possible. John
Lee’s refrain: “And it felt so good…It felt so good” populated
the doodles I penned in the margins of my lecture notes. Though he
continued to win races, and I aced my AP courses, we cared about little
else than the next time we could wear our mouths out on each other. The
two of us, together, mattered more than food. Sleep. School. Anything.
But what can matter more than sex? The first time my boyfriend
tried to lift my shirt, asking me if he could just touch the places my
modest one-piece bathing suit concealed, I shut him down and explained
the rules governing my morality and chastity. I was the first Mormon
he’d ever dated — and he was the first “non-member” (the term Latter-day
Saints use to identify those not of their faith) I’d ever dared try out
as a boyfriend. I had to explain that, as a true believer and follower
of the faith, I was 100 percent committed to: no drinking, no smoking,
no coffee, no tea, church for three hours every Sunday, and, of course,
no premarital sex.
“And when I say no premarital sex, what I mean is…I think
kissing is fine. But you can’t touch any of my body above my knee. Or
below my collarbone.”
Making sure he understood me, he asked, “So, wait. That means
you can’t touch me either? And are you saying like…even no…premarital
fingering? Dry humping? No going down action at all?”
I blushed, and admitted I didn’t even know what those words
meant; at that point in my life I hadn’t even watched an R-rated movie.
He was devastated and incredulous. The only rules about sex his
hippie parents had taught him to live by were to always give a girl more
pleasure first than he ever expected to get in return; never give her any reason to fear or distrust him; and, most importantly, take every means necessary to avoid STDs and pregnancy.
But my boyfriend somehow loved and cared about me more than he loved sex, so he respected my rules. He just could not
confine his competitive streak to running — he wanted to win my body
over so bad. He worked every angle, came up to the edge of every line I
had designated as “off limits,” trying to turn me on as much as I would
possibly let myself.
His creativity paid off. I began to cross my own boundaries, and
try things my church had never explicitly stated were wrong, but felt
so good I knew they must be. I was thrilled to discover dry humping —
how had my bishop not thought to scream from the pulpit that this was
basically sex and should be totally forbidden?! But these momentary,
forbidden pleasures always morphed into aching guilt. My boyfriend
started to see how tortured I was, getting excited, then disconnecting
and withdrawing, over and over and over again.
We started to fight. He’d ask me, “Why? Why are you putting
yourself through this suffering and denial of every urge and instinct?
Why do you shut the juices down just as they are getting going?! What
kind of crazy, dogmatic, cultish system would make you want to do such a
thing?” Our worlds, up to that point, had been too different. I told
him we should break up. That he would never understand.
But instead of breaking up, he made me a deal: He would learn
about my religion, if I would learn about running. Running was his
church, the dogma behind his discipline, self-sacrifice and denial. He promised to try to understand Mormonism if I would learn to run.
So began my relationship with running, and my boyfriend’s with
organized religion. I’d like to say everything turned out as
romantically as our high school love affair, but it did not.
***
I joined the track team
for the first time as a high school senior. It was one of the few teams
I had never tried; running was the hardest, least enjoyable part of
every other sport I had played. An athletic activity consisting solely
of running felt like suffering, distilled to its most concentrated form.
And unlike the mostly
mediocre-with-random-lucky-moments-of-stellar-performance I managed in
other sports, I was a terrible runner. Practices were torture sessions.
Unlike almost everyone else on my team who had been doing this crazy
shit since junior high, I had never run for more than a mile in my
entire life. During the usual seven-milers we cranked out each day after
school, my heart beat so hard I thought it would explode. Though the
girls on my team ran together in a tight unit, making sure to pace so
that no one was left behind, my experience was not of comradery, but of
loneliness. With my pulse rushing through my ears, my face splotchy and
beet-red from the blood pounding in my head, I felt totally closed off,
trapped, and almost deaf. My own sensory experience was so intense I
couldn’t even hear my teammates chatting casually in the pack around me.
Meets were worse. When I raced, I always crossed the finish line
at the end of the pack, usually dead last. I barfed afterward several
times. It took me days to recover from each competition. The real deal I
had made with my boyfriend was to be tortured and publicly humiliated
by the worst sport ever invented.
Why didn’t I just quit? I had started running because of a boy,
youthful naivety, and religious zeal — a self-torture trifecta. But
running got into me, somehow, in a way I couldn’t shake; the
understanding that my physical ability to finish the practice or the
race didn’t really matter. Self-will and mental determination ruled this
sport. If I believed I could put one foot in front of the other, just
one more time, and one more time after that, I would.
Though I never experienced anything like my boyfriend’s rapture
for the sport, I came to deeply believe in the power it held in my life —
in a way I’d only ever previously experienced with religion.
Simultaneously, the Mormon church got into my boyfriend in a way
that he couldn’t shake. Over a period of a few years, I watched his
disdain and barely-masked tolerance of the woo-woo ways of Mormonism
turn into tentative respect, and then full-fledged, brainwashed belief.
Many fateful stars aligned. Though he went to a Catholic
university in the Midwest on a running scholarship, his academic mentor,
the chair of the geology department, happened to be Mormon. My
boyfriend was contacted by some amazingly handsome and charismatic
Latter-day Saints missionaries. The local congregation surrounding his
college became a welcoming and supportive family structure during the
long, desolate Midwestern winters. Eventually, he got baptized and left
his running prospects behind to go on a two-year proselytizing mission
to Thailand. When he came back, he was a completely different person — a
boring, judgmental, and self-righteous young man. He gave away all his
jazz records. The parasites he got on his mission ruined him for running
forever. Our relationship, which had transformed over the years from
high-school infatuation to deep adult love, did not survive the years of
separation. By the time he returned from his cloistered, celibate life,
I didn’t know who he was anymore. He didn’t want to touch me. We had
both changed too much. I was heartbroken.
While he was off baptizing in Thailand, I went to college in
Utah and became very depressed. I knew that Mormonism made me deeply
unhappy but I wasn’t quitting that race, to what I thought was heaven,
anytime soon. The religion ran in me, and my family’s history, way too
deep. What I didn’t know then was that leaving the church would not be a
sprint, as it is for some who leave their faith, but an ultramarathon
that would take my 20s and most of my 30s to finish. Running became my
lifeline.
I ran alone in the foothills of the high Uinta Mountains as a
physical means of out-running the psychic and spiritual crisis of my
everyday existence. It was a way to stave off the pain and doubt
underlying my efforts to keep believing the mantra I had been hearing my
entire life: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the
only true church upon the face of the Earth. Once, out of desperation to
just get away from the crush of coeds who seemed so much happier living
a life that was making me miserable, I signed up for a half-marathon, a
day’s drive away from campus in southern Utah. The race course wove
through the desert surrounding the majestic Colorado River, and seemed
like the perfect place for a respite from the hordes of happy Mormons
surrounding me on a daily basis. The vast, unpeopled landscape suggested
a world into which I might escape. Someday.
The race was a disaster. I hadn’t really trained. In the weeks
prior, I ran as far as I could make myself, every day thinking, “My best
will be good enough, right?” Wrong. I felt like shit after the first
five miles, and started to realize I was in real trouble about mile ten.
I chafed between my thighs, which bled down my legs unabated until
another runner threw me a jar of Vaseline as he jogged past yelling,
“Honey, please help yourself. It’s just too pitiful to watch!” I drank
almost no water, not understanding the toll the desert heat would take
on my body. During the last few miles, I could feel my legs seizing up,
but I was determined to finish. Apparently, my best was good
enough to finish, but not without paying a price worse than the most
embarrassing moment of my childhood — so excited as a kindergartener to
be first in line for school-lunch, I hadn’t paid attention to the
pressing ache of my five-year-old bladder. Twenty years later, I cried
and peed through the entire last mile of the 1993 Moab Half Marathon; my
chafed thighs burned more fiercely than the humiliation of urinating in
front of my entire class while paying for tater-tots.
You’d think I’d be done with running after that. But somehow, I wasn’t.
Eventually, I managed to complete college in Utah, and pursue a
master’s degree in public health at Yale University. Ironically, while
trying to ace courses in how to protect the bodies and minds of everyone
else on the planet, I failed to take care of my own. I cracked. I
hadn’t anticipated how insanely fucking hard grad school at Yale would
be — I felt like an imbecile compared to my classmates. I was also
plagued by debilitating self-loathing: I had come to hate my body and
the forbidden things it wanted. My high school boyfriend was just the
tip (pun intended) of my sexual awakening; with each successive
relationship, I pushed my Mormon boundaries into even more illicit
territory, and was wracked with guilt about every erotic thing I’d ever
done. I remember trying to run and literally stopping in my tracks after
just a few steps — I couldn’t make myself do it. I hated myself for
that weakness too. I knew it was time to check myself in when I realized
I’d literally prefer death over being too stupid for Yale, and feeling
so tortured and disgusted with myself, for even one more day.
Looking out the window of the ambulance that drove me straight
from the student counseling center to in-patient psych, I watched
students on the sidewalk walking briskly, some breaking out in a trot,
anxious to get somewhere they wanted to be, on time. I remember thinking
I’d never have the will to do that — to put one foot in front of the
other — for any reason, ever again.
***
The week I spent at Yale
Psychiatric Institute was one of the longest of my entire life. It was
the place I started to realize that I didn’t want to be Mormon anymore.
The running deal I struck almost a decade before with my boyfriend had
left me a triple-loser: 1) It had ruined, what I thought, was the
greatest love of my life; 2) I was losing my entire belief system; and
3) I was so far down in the bell jar I couldn’t will myself to walk down
the hospital hallway to eat lunch, much less run, ever again.
My only consolation was that my roommate had some brain
chemistry problems that were actually worse than mine. Afflicted with
Munchausen syndrome, she was in there because she pretended, or was
possibly convinced, that she literally couldn’t walk. Laying in
my bed, day-in and day-out, listening to her threaten anyone who walked
past our open door, “I swear I will shit this bed unless somebody
brings me a wheelchair!” I knew I had to find some way to will myself
back out there, even if there wasn’t a heaven anymore, no finish line to
cross, no reward to be won from all that self-denial and sacrifice to
live a “good” life. Anything was better than watching a hospital orderly
hand my roommate a diaper, and trying not to watch what was going to
happen next.
And so, when they discharged me from the psych ward, a very wise
but somewhat manipulative therapist preyed on my tenacious respect for
God and promises, making me swear to take my Prozac and run every day. I
agreed to the Prozac because I was desperate, but I balked at the idea
that 20 minutes of running would do anything at all for me.
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“You don’t know how much I hate running,” I said. “I don’t think
I can do it. I can take a pill but I don’t think I can torture myself
with running ever again.”
He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and considered me. It
seemed like he was trying to decide if he should scare me, appeal to my
sense of reason, or maybe lie to me about why I should do what he was
asking. He had bigger problems, like my diaper-wearing roommate, to deal
with. I was surprised when he said, “I predict you’re the kind of
person who won’t like how life feels on Prozac…that something about you
is a little addicted to suffering. I think if you need to suffer, you
might as well try to get some adrenaline and endorphins into your brain
while you’re doing it. I’m telling you to run because I’m thinking I’ll
be lucky if I can get you to stay on Prozac for a year. And I’m hoping
that running will carry you through after that. And I’m saying 20
minutes because I hope that number will stick in your brain as something
you’ll feel really pathetic trying to talk yourself out of.”
I ran home in the freezing rain. I ran all winter in that wet,
stinging, snow that Connecticut winters spit down. Sometimes I jogged in
my jeans and Birkenstocks, too depressed to muster the strength to
change into workout gear. But I did it. I took the pills. I ran the
daily 20. My brain chemistry slowly recovered. The prescription healed
me.
I have been running, 20 minutes every day, for over 15 years
because that therapist was right: I made it 11 months and three days
before I felt like I needed to feel the suffering of real life again.
But like anyone who has reached the edge and gone over it, I live with a
nagging, constant fear that my next breakdown is never far away. This
desperation to titrate the delicate balance of serotonin, endorphins,
dopamine and glutamate that my brain needs keeps me putting on my shoes
and hitting the pavement or the treadmill. I never get the legendary
runner’s high. I never manage a Zen-like meditative state, not even for a
few seconds. It’s purely a time of tedious physical discomfort and
what’s probably worse: racing, unhealthy inner-thoughts. I set my
stopwatch for 20:00 and my mind immediately takes over in a
self-destructive process something like this: “O.K., don’t look at the
watch. Fuck. I looked. 19 minutes and 58 seconds left. Jesus Fucking
Christ Allison, don’t look again for at least five minutes. O.K.? O.K. I
really need a bikini wax. But I shouldn’t do it. I should stop getting
them altogether. It’s so anti-feminist. But so is feeling disgusting
when I put on a bathing suit. Why can’t I be one of those women that
sprouts out of my bikini bottoms like I’ve got a worn-out Brillo Pad
stuck in there and be O.K. with it? It also hurts like a MOTHERFUCKER. I
could go right after this, but I think I am getting my period, like
right now. And those poor Asian ladies have seen my bloody underpants
too many times. They are probably so grossed out by me at this point
they will lie and say they can’t squeeze me in. FUCK! 19 minutes, 40
seconds left!? UGH!!!”
Sometimes I run in street clothes. There are days I just know
that if I go into my bedroom after work to find a sports bra, change
into sweatpants, and sit on my bed, just for a few minutes, I might not
make it up and out again. As I trot down the street, wearing my linen
dress pants, a button-up shirt and sneakers, I don’t look like I’m
running, I look like I’m late for work or trying to catch the bus.
Before I die, I’d like to run another race where I don’t cry, or
pee, or bleed across the finish line, or come in dead last. But now the
only race that really counts is this one I’m running, every day, 20
minutes at a time, as people shout from their porches, with a hint of
concern, “Hey! You late for something? Need a ride?” I smile, wave, and
keep shuffling along. And try to tell myself, as I realize I’m sweating
through my silk blouse, and still have 18 minutes and 2 seconds to go,
that this might be my persona
The day my doctor released
me from in-patient psych, he said, “Allison, I’ll make you a deal. You
can go home on the following conditions: 1) You will take Prozac, the
high dose, and you won’t even think about getting off it for an entire
year, and 2) You will make yourself run, every day, for at least 20
minutes. Because your life depends on it.”
I agreed, and stood behind the Plexiglass window by the nursing
station, waiting for the bin that held all the belongings I had been
required to hand over the day I checked in: my wallet, my keys, and the
laces from my running shoes. As I threaded my sneakers and prepared to
keep my promise by jogging home to the apartment I shared with four
other Yale grad students, I remembered another deal, the one that
started this whole mess. The one I had made about a decade earlier with
my high school boyfriend. A deal about sex, running and the Mormon
Church.
I fell for my first boyfriend when I was 15, arriving home from
church on one of those sticky, Upstate New York, summer afternoons.
After a morning of trying to be a good Latter-day Saint by skipping
breakfast, putting on a dress, and spending three hours reading
scripture and singing songs about how my body is a temple (and the only
person I should ever let inside it was my wedded husband), all I could
think about was peeling off my sweaty pantyhose and stuffing my face
with Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Then I saw him, running by my house. Up
until that moment, I had ignored this boy, who had moved to our
neighborhood the year before from Maine. But what I was seeing as I felt
my stomach growl and my nylons riding down my crotch was a puberty
miracle. He had transformed from a skinny, seemingly weak, invisible kid
to a lithe, powerful athlete who ran with the joy and abandon of
Pheidippides and the irresistible style and charisma of Prefontaine. I
was a goner.
His natural, fluid, effortless laps over the rolling hills
surrounding our neighborhood awed me. At that point I was getting
clobbered as a field hockey fullback, desperately defending the goal
against an onslaught of veteran hoss players. I was in the lineup
because the team was short-handed that year and took anyone who would
wear a skirt and hold a stick. Unlike my new crush, who ran for love of
the sport, I used athletics as an outlet — a way to deal with the
teenage sexual energy I urgently needed to suppress. I was skinny,
muscular and scrappy, but this never translated to excellence in any of
my athletic pursuits. By my teen years, I had bounced around, a few
seasons here and there, on every team imaginable: basketball, softball,
soccer, gymnastics, volleyball, even one tragically desperate year in
cheerleading. Though I’d tried, I still hadn’t found a sport at which I
possessed even a moderate level of physical prowess.
The insta-crush I had on my neighbor was mutual, and we quickly
became obsessed with each other. I learned that, aside from running, my
new boyfriend loved jazz and kissing. He taught me to french while
listening to hours and hours of John Lee Hooker records. One night he
put “Boogie Chillen’” on a loop in the background while he told me to
just open my mouth and let him figure out what I tasted like.
I remember lying on his bed, stiff and resistant, a hair-trigger
of curiosity, puberty and guilty self-loathing. His first lick — barely
touching the inside of my lips and the tip of my teeth — was infused
with the knowledge, beyond his years, that his only job was to keep me
from bolting, to stay, and want just a little more. It didn’t take long
for John Lee Hooker’s lyrics to become my own mantra:
One night I was layin’ down…
I didn’t care what she didn’t allow
I would boogie-woogie anyhow
What a terrible, wonderful moment — to realize what I wanted was
not to run away, but to stop and be still, to taste and be tasted, and
to let someone know this secret about me that I was supposed to keep to
myself for many virginal years to come. It wasn’t long before I wanted
to lick his entire body, though it would take years of battling deeply
entrenched sexual shame for that fantasy to come true. I settled for his
armpits — the only other place, besides his mouth, I could possibly
justify as not being explicitly forbidden, and the one spot I could
reach without actually undressing him. Taking his shirt off
felt too wrong, so I pulled and stretched the collar of his v-neck
t-shirt down to access what I wanted, chafing his neck and strangling
him a little in the process.
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Our “Boogie Chillen’” nights repeated on an endless dreamy loop
those first few months. When our lips got worn out, he’d tell me mine
were so swollen I could pass for Steven Tyler or some other insulting
dig that would get me mad enough to hit him or wrestle him to the floor —
which is what he really wanted more than anything. We’d fall asleep
spooned together, waking up just in time for me to scramble out of his
room at dawn, and for him to drag himself to early morning practice. We
swam in Lake Ontario every chance we got because it was the one
permissible activity that allowed us to gaze at and lie next to each
other with the least amount of clothing on our bodies as possible. John
Lee’s refrain: “And it felt so good…It felt so good” populated
the doodles I penned in the margins of my lecture notes. Though he
continued to win races, and I aced my AP courses, we cared about little
else than the next time we could wear our mouths out on each other. The
two of us, together, mattered more than food. Sleep. School. Anything.
But what can matter more than sex? The first time my boyfriend
tried to lift my shirt, asking me if he could just touch the places my
modest one-piece bathing suit concealed, I shut him down and explained
the rules governing my morality and chastity. I was the first Mormon
he’d ever dated — and he was the first “non-member” (the term Latter-day
Saints use to identify those not of their faith) I’d ever dared try out
as a boyfriend. I had to explain that, as a true believer and follower
of the faith, I was 100 percent committed to: no drinking, no smoking,
no coffee, no tea, church for three hours every Sunday, and, of course,
no premarital sex.
“And when I say no premarital sex, what I mean is…I think
kissing is fine. But you can’t touch any of my body above my knee. Or
below my collarbone.”
Making sure he understood me, he asked, “So, wait. That means
you can’t touch me either? And are you saying like…even no…premarital
fingering? Dry humping? No going down action at all?”
I blushed, and admitted I didn’t even know what those words
meant; at that point in my life I hadn’t even watched an R-rated movie.
He was devastated and incredulous. The only rules about sex his
hippie parents had taught him to live by were to always give a girl more
pleasure first than he ever expected to get in return; never give her any reason to fear or distrust him; and, most importantly, take every means necessary to avoid STDs and pregnancy.
But my boyfriend somehow loved and cared about me more than he loved sex, so he respected my rules. He just could not
confine his competitive streak to running — he wanted to win my body
over so bad. He worked every angle, came up to the edge of every line I
had designated as “off limits,” trying to turn me on as much as I would
possibly let myself.
His creativity paid off. I began to cross my own boundaries, and
try things my church had never explicitly stated were wrong, but felt
so good I knew they must be. I was thrilled to discover dry humping —
how had my bishop not thought to scream from the pulpit that this was
basically sex and should be totally forbidden?! But these momentary,
forbidden pleasures always morphed into aching guilt. My boyfriend
started to see how tortured I was, getting excited, then disconnecting
and withdrawing, over and over and over again.
We started to fight. He’d ask me, “Why? Why are you putting
yourself through this suffering and denial of every urge and instinct?
Why do you shut the juices down just as they are getting going?! What
kind of crazy, dogmatic, cultish system would make you want to do such a
thing?” Our worlds, up to that point, had been too different. I told
him we should break up. That he would never understand.
But instead of breaking up, he made me a deal: He would learn
about my religion, if I would learn about running. Running was his
church, the dogma behind his discipline, self-sacrifice and denial. He promised to try to understand Mormonism if I would learn to run.
So began my relationship with running, and my boyfriend’s with
organized religion. I’d like to say everything turned out as
romantically as our high school love affair, but it did not.
***
I joined the track team
for the first time as a high school senior. It was one of the few teams
I had never tried; running was the hardest, least enjoyable part of
every other sport I had played. An athletic activity consisting solely
of running felt like suffering, distilled to its most concentrated form.
And unlike the mostly
mediocre-with-random-lucky-moments-of-stellar-performance I managed in
other sports, I was a terrible runner. Practices were torture sessions.
Unlike almost everyone else on my team who had been doing this crazy
shit since junior high, I had never run for more than a mile in my
entire life. During the usual seven-milers we cranked out each day after
school, my heart beat so hard I thought it would explode. Though the
girls on my team ran together in a tight unit, making sure to pace so
that no one was left behind, my experience was not of comradery, but of
loneliness. With my pulse rushing through my ears, my face splotchy and
beet-red from the blood pounding in my head, I felt totally closed off,
trapped, and almost deaf. My own sensory experience was so intense I
couldn’t even hear my teammates chatting casually in the pack around me.
Meets were worse. When I raced, I always crossed the finish line
at the end of the pack, usually dead last. I barfed afterward several
times. It took me days to recover from each competition. The real deal I
had made with my boyfriend was to be tortured and publicly humiliated
by the worst sport ever invented.
Why didn’t I just quit? I had started running because of a boy,
youthful naivety, and religious zeal — a self-torture trifecta. But
running got into me, somehow, in a way I couldn’t shake; the
understanding that my physical ability to finish the practice or the
race didn’t really matter. Self-will and mental determination ruled this
sport. If I believed I could put one foot in front of the other, just
one more time, and one more time after that, I would.
Though I never experienced anything like my boyfriend’s rapture
for the sport, I came to deeply believe in the power it held in my life —
in a way I’d only ever previously experienced with religion.
Simultaneously, the Mormon church got into my boyfriend in a way
that he couldn’t shake. Over a period of a few years, I watched his
disdain and barely-masked tolerance of the woo-woo ways of Mormonism
turn into tentative respect, and then full-fledged, brainwashed belief.
Many fateful stars aligned. Though he went to a Catholic
university in the Midwest on a running scholarship, his academic mentor,
the chair of the geology department, happened to be Mormon. My
boyfriend was contacted by some amazingly handsome and charismatic
Latter-day Saints missionaries. The local congregation surrounding his
college became a welcoming and supportive family structure during the
long, desolate Midwestern winters. Eventually, he got baptized and left
his running prospects behind to go on a two-year proselytizing mission
to Thailand. When he came back, he was a completely different person — a
boring, judgmental, and self-righteous young man. He gave away all his
jazz records. The parasites he got on his mission ruined him for running
forever. Our relationship, which had transformed over the years from
high-school infatuation to deep adult love, did not survive the years of
separation. By the time he returned from his cloistered, celibate life,
I didn’t know who he was anymore. He didn’t want to touch me. We had
both changed too much. I was heartbroken.
While he was off baptizing in Thailand, I went to college in
Utah and became very depressed. I knew that Mormonism made me deeply
unhappy but I wasn’t quitting that race, to what I thought was heaven,
anytime soon. The religion ran in me, and my family’s history, way too
deep. What I didn’t know then was that leaving the church would not be a
sprint, as it is for some who leave their faith, but an ultramarathon
that would take my 20s and most of my 30s to finish. Running became my
lifeline.
I ran alone in the foothills of the high Uinta Mountains as a
physical means of out-running the psychic and spiritual crisis of my
everyday existence. It was a way to stave off the pain and doubt
underlying my efforts to keep believing the mantra I had been hearing my
entire life: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the
only true church upon the face of the Earth. Once, out of desperation to
just get away from the crush of coeds who seemed so much happier living
a life that was making me miserable, I signed up for a half-marathon, a
day’s drive away from campus in southern Utah. The race course wove
through the desert surrounding the majestic Colorado River, and seemed
like the perfect place for a respite from the hordes of happy Mormons
surrounding me on a daily basis. The vast, unpeopled landscape suggested
a world into which I might escape. Someday.
The race was a disaster. I hadn’t really trained. In the weeks
prior, I ran as far as I could make myself, every day thinking, “My best
will be good enough, right?” Wrong. I felt like shit after the first
five miles, and started to realize I was in real trouble about mile ten.
I chafed between my thighs, which bled down my legs unabated until
another runner threw me a jar of Vaseline as he jogged past yelling,
“Honey, please help yourself. It’s just too pitiful to watch!” I drank
almost no water, not understanding the toll the desert heat would take
on my body. During the last few miles, I could feel my legs seizing up,
but I was determined to finish. Apparently, my best was good
enough to finish, but not without paying a price worse than the most
embarrassing moment of my childhood — so excited as a kindergartener to
be first in line for school-lunch, I hadn’t paid attention to the
pressing ache of my five-year-old bladder. Twenty years later, I cried
and peed through the entire last mile of the 1993 Moab Half Marathon; my
chafed thighs burned more fiercely than the humiliation of urinating in
front of my entire class while paying for tater-tots.
You’d think I’d be done with running after that. But somehow, I wasn’t.
Eventually, I managed to complete college in Utah, and pursue a
master’s degree in public health at Yale University. Ironically, while
trying to ace courses in how to protect the bodies and minds of everyone
else on the planet, I failed to take care of my own. I cracked. I
hadn’t anticipated how insanely fucking hard grad school at Yale would
be — I felt like an imbecile compared to my classmates. I was also
plagued by debilitating self-loathing: I had come to hate my body and
the forbidden things it wanted. My high school boyfriend was just the
tip (pun intended) of my sexual awakening; with each successive
relationship, I pushed my Mormon boundaries into even more illicit
territory, and was wracked with guilt about every erotic thing I’d ever
done. I remember trying to run and literally stopping in my tracks after
just a few steps — I couldn’t make myself do it. I hated myself for
that weakness too. I knew it was time to check myself in when I realized
I’d literally prefer death over being too stupid for Yale, and feeling
so tortured and disgusted with myself, for even one more day.
Looking out the window of the ambulance that drove me straight
from the student counseling center to in-patient psych, I watched
students on the sidewalk walking briskly, some breaking out in a trot,
anxious to get somewhere they wanted to be, on time. I remember thinking
I’d never have the will to do that — to put one foot in front of the
other — for any reason, ever again.
***
The week I spent at Yale
Psychiatric Institute was one of the longest of my entire life. It was
the place I started to realize that I didn’t want to be Mormon anymore.
The running deal I struck almost a decade before with my boyfriend had
left me a triple-loser: 1) It had ruined, what I thought, was the
greatest love of my life; 2) I was losing my entire belief system; and
3) I was so far down in the bell jar I couldn’t will myself to walk down
the hospital hallway to eat lunch, much less run, ever again.
My only consolation was that my roommate had some brain
chemistry problems that were actually worse than mine. Afflicted with
Munchausen syndrome, she was in there because she pretended, or was
possibly convinced, that she literally couldn’t walk. Laying in
my bed, day-in and day-out, listening to her threaten anyone who walked
past our open door, “I swear I will shit this bed unless somebody
brings me a wheelchair!” I knew I had to find some way to will myself
back out there, even if there wasn’t a heaven anymore, no finish line to
cross, no reward to be won from all that self-denial and sacrifice to
live a “good” life. Anything was better than watching a hospital orderly
hand my roommate a diaper, and trying not to watch what was going to
happen next.
And so, when they discharged me from the psych ward, a very wise
but somewhat manipulative therapist preyed on my tenacious respect for
God and promises, making me swear to take my Prozac and run every day. I
agreed to the Prozac because I was desperate, but I balked at the idea
that 20 minutes of running would do anything at all for me.
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“You don’t know how much I hate running,” I said. “I don’t think
I can do it. I can take a pill but I don’t think I can torture myself
with running ever again.”
He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and considered me. It
seemed like he was trying to decide if he should scare me, appeal to my
sense of reason, or maybe lie to me about why I should do what he was
asking. He had bigger problems, like my diaper-wearing roommate, to deal
with. I was surprised when he said, “I predict you’re the kind of
person who won’t like how life feels on Prozac…that something about you
is a little addicted to suffering. I think if you need to suffer, you
might as well try to get some adrenaline and endorphins into your brain
while you’re doing it. I’m telling you to run because I’m thinking I’ll
be lucky if I can get you to stay on Prozac for a year. And I’m hoping
that running will carry you through after that. And I’m saying 20
minutes because I hope that number will stick in your brain as something
you’ll feel really pathetic trying to talk yourself out of.”
I ran home in the freezing rain. I ran all winter in that wet,
stinging, snow that Connecticut winters spit down. Sometimes I jogged in
my jeans and Birkenstocks, too depressed to muster the strength to
change into workout gear. But I did it. I took the pills. I ran the
daily 20. My brain chemistry slowly recovered. The prescription healed
me.
I have been running, 20 minutes every day, for over 15 years
because that therapist was right: I made it 11 months and three days
before I felt like I needed to feel the suffering of real life again.
But like anyone who has reached the edge and gone over it, I live with a
nagging, constant fear that my next breakdown is never far away. This
desperation to titrate the delicate balance of serotonin, endorphins,
dopamine and glutamate that my brain needs keeps me putting on my shoes
and hitting the pavement or the treadmill. I never get the legendary
runner’s high. I never manage a Zen-like meditative state, not even for a
few seconds. It’s purely a time of tedious physical discomfort and
what’s probably worse: racing, unhealthy inner-thoughts. I set my
stopwatch for 20:00 and my mind immediately takes over in a
self-destructive process something like this: “O.K., don’t look at the
watch. Fuck. I looked. 19 minutes and 58 seconds left. Jesus Fucking
Christ Allison, don’t look again for at least five minutes. O.K.? O.K. I
really need a bikini wax. But I shouldn’t do it. I should stop getting
them altogether. It’s so anti-feminist. But so is feeling disgusting
when I put on a bathing suit. Why can’t I be one of those women that
sprouts out of my bikini bottoms like I’ve got a worn-out Brillo Pad
stuck in there and be O.K. with it? It also hurts like a MOTHERFUCKER. I
could go right after this, but I think I am getting my period, like
right now. And those poor Asian ladies have seen my bloody underpants
too many times. They are probably so grossed out by me at this point
they will lie and say they can’t squeeze me in. FUCK! 19 minutes, 40
seconds left!? UGH!!!”
Sometimes I run in street clothes. There are days I just know
that if I go into my bedroom after work to find a sports bra, change
into sweatpants, and sit on my bed, just for a few minutes, I might not
make it up and out again. As I trot down the street, wearing my linen
dress pants, a button-up shirt and sneakers, I don’t look like I’m
running, I look like I’m late for work or trying to catch the bus.
Before I die, I’d like to run another race where I don’t cry, or
pee, or bleed across the finish line, or come in dead last. But now the
only race that really counts is this one I’m running, every day, 20
minutes at a time, as people shout from their porches, with a hint of
concern, “Hey! You late for something? Need a ride?” I smile, wave, and
keep shuffling along. And try to tell myself, as I realize I’m sweating
through my silk blouse, and still have 18 minutes and 2 seconds to go,
that this might be my personal best.
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