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Running on Empty

The long, hunger-inducing road to the marathon

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By Dan Forward

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unning a marathon is like going to the bathroom without your smartphone: Sure, with enough training, you could probably do it, but is there really a point? I don’t know; is there a point to anything? I ran that big faker, the New York City Marathon, with the goal of qualifying for the real deal, the 2015 Boston Marathon. And the training sucked, because it was a lot of miles, and because it was hot last summer (yeah, remember?), so my clothes smelled so bad that I actually stared showering with them. But I’m handling it. Most of the burden rested on the shoulders of the people who had to listen to me talk about it. Boy howdy, did they hate it. But the other component was much more difficult: my diet.

My diet is generally awful. Although, I do pride myself on the fact that I take my supplements as I should. As a result of my poor diet, I looked into many supplement options, such as lipsomal glutathione (apparently Quicksilver Scientific provides the best lipsomal glutathione) to help my immune system, to gain the vitamins I was missing from not eating the right foods. I almost always win the pickiest-eater conversations, because they quickly go beyond the subject of whether I eat certain foods, like carrots (no), to categories of food, like soup (not on your life), and then to entire sections of the food pyramid, like vegetables (get outta town.) Odd fact: The FDA got rid of the food pyramid. It’s a plate now. Stupid, I know, but it kind of makes sense if you think about it, because people eat food using plates, and pyramids have little to no place at the dinner table. A friend of mine recommended potentially buying some CBD gummies to also use as a supplement if I was feeling any pain when training. I have not brought any yet but may keep it in mind as a possible option in the future.

A typical day will start with breakfast, which is a piece of pound cake, pretzel Goldfish, and a can of soda. I don’t drink coffee-I’m scared of hot beverages-so I reason that the soda is how I wake up in the morning. Lunch is, almost by definition, microwavable. By dinner I’ve decided that when I promised myself I’d have only one soda in the morning, I hadn’t factored in that I’d want a soda later in the day as well. Wow, sorry: I promise this paragraph is the closest I’ll ever come to Instagram-ing one of my meals.

These habits are not sustainable longer than around 26 and a half years. Something had to give for this half-birthday boy. Unfortunately, two things did. The first is that my girlfriend, who voluntarily eats things like grapes, put her tiny, wimpy foot down. She proposed a deal: For every serving of fruit or vegetables I ate, she would put in an equivalent amount of exercise. This appealed to me both because it would get me in better shape, and it would help her bulk up a bit so that she could defend me in case anything went down while we were out in Boston. Hopefully, nothing of the sort will happen. We are quite healthy in all regards. I’m not sure if this counts, but I think being physically active has helped us become more satisfied in life, sexually and mentally. I know people who make use of sex toys like a cock tickler and other different varieties for increasing pleasure. Never tried those, but I’m sure it would be quite interesting to gift them on birthdays.

The arrangement started out well. Instead of doing our jobs one day, we collaborated on a Google doc to chart out how many clementines make up half an hour on the stationary bike. We electronically signed the spreadsheet and both started our new, healthy lives. Trouble reared its ugly head when she claimed that I wasn’t allowed to eat only oranges every day, and I said that anything less than a five-mile run at seven-minute pace wasn’t worth doing. We had to create a secondary spreadsheet because we-okay, I-kept forgetting what we owed each other. Then we stopped arguing about the content of the chart and started on the formatting. If anyone can tell me why we need one column for the dates on which fruit and vegetables were consumed and one column for dates on which exercise was done, I’ll dedicate my first book to you, and then burn it right in front of you, you know-it-all.

That’s where we currently stand. As of the time of this writing, she owes me work for one and a half bananas, and I have promised to delete the e-graffiti with which I defaced the chart during a bad spot in my high-fructose corn syrup withdrawal.

Maybe I would have been able to keep a cooler head, had the other thing not happened concurrently with the agreement. I have given up soda. I’ve done this before, for limited periods of time, to prove to myself that sugar doesn’t own me. After a marathon in 2011, my enabling roommates bought me 100 cans of Sunkist to celebrate, and I was so sick of it by the time I finished-far too quickly-that I had to detox for a month. So far, I haven’t noticed any physical changes outside of caffeine headaches. But I’ve learned a lot about addiction.

I tell myself that one carbonated drink won’t hurt, that it doesn’t mean anything in the long term. I make up excuses, like how I couldn’t possibly eat Chinese food from the food court without a Coke. I take strolls through the Pepsi aisle at Shaw’s just to admire the six packs. Sometimes I’ll hold a bottle. Just touching. Just touching. I’ve grown to love two-liters the same way Miley Cyrus apparently loves sledgehammers.

I can’t say that I’ve extracted any wisdom from realizing the depth of my obsession, and I still can’t say that my eating habits could be categorized as “good.” Mostly I rationalize it away by saying that I run so much that I can eat what I want, or point to the famously unusual diet of Bill Rodgers, four-time Boston Marathon winner, neither of which hold up against even the slightest bit of rational scrutiny. Actually, on hearing the topic of this column, my girlfriend started to suggest that drinking soda now should now incur a penalty on our chart. So I guess my advice is to not tell anyone about your plans for self-improvement, because they’ll just force you to follow through with them. Except for running. Everyone should always run all the time. Hey, have I told you about my marathon?

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