Making Friends with Agony

A New Year's Resolution, Resolved

Fireworks: an appropriate metaphor for our attempts at positive change, burning up into nothing against a bleak void.

Most of my New Year’s resolutions have been abject failures.

• The year I tried to stop cussing? Didn’t fuckin’ take.

• The year I attempted polyphasic sleep, clocking just two hours a night and three 20-minute naps a day? I temporarily lost my mind and tried to convince my wife that she should surgically remove my fingernails to optimize my creativity.

• The year I tried to be more positive? Everything became an opportunity for schadenfreude, like when I took my kids to SeaWorld and left feeling legitimately disappointed that the killer whale didn’t maim any of the trainers.

I have had a few successes.

• In the early aughts, I drank a gallon of water every day for a year. The only change? I spent a lot of time peeing. After I finished the year, I went to a fish store to look at aquariums that were roughly the same size as 365 gallons. It wasn’t that impressive. In fact, the total volume was a little depressing.

• One year I wrote three pages a day that became a story I developed with my kids. We named it Cobbler’s Gulch. It’s about a witch who turned parents into goats, so the orphanage would fill with children that she could use as ingredients in her spells. I turned it into a podcast in the vein of Roald Dahl. If you have a road trip ahead of you and kids you want to keep off their phones, you can listen to the teaser and trailer here and find the entire series wherever you listen to podcasts.

• One year I also trained for and completed a marathon. And although I completed the marathon, it was hardly a triumph. Let me explain.

I found a program online and stuck to it. I ran four times a week—shorter runs on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a longer run on Saturday. The program assumed you could run three miles without stopping. I could go three miles, but I’m not sure it could be called running. It was more of a trot or a poke or a lope. Whatever you’d call the slow step below jogging, that’s what I was doing.

And let me be clear, I entertained no fantasies about placing, hitting a certain time, or proving something to myself. I just wanted the t-shirt and the story.

Honestly, the training wasn’t that bad. I’m pretty sure I experienced the fabled runner’s high. I once heard Jon Stewart use this simile: “…it's like eating ice cream on a roller coaster made of blowjobs.” It wasn’t exactly that, but it was pretty nice, maybe the most carefree feeling I’ve ever had. Definitely the closest I’ve ever felt to spiritual weightlessness.

Speaking of weightlessness, the best part of training for a marathon is that you don’t have to worry much about weight. As the Saturday runs got longer, my diet became more indulgent, some might even say nutritionally corrupt. One morning I ate a Costco pumpkin pie for breakfast—the whole pie. I followed that up with a sixteen-mile trot, and then slammed two In n’ Out Double-doubles into my face hole. The next morning, I lost a half a pound.

Peak marathon runners—this is their nutrition of choice.

The Saturday runs increased each week, peaking at a 20-mile run three weeks before the marathon. I did the 20 miles and felt pretty good. But here’s the thing: a marathon is 26.2 miles. And what nobody tells you is this—the difference between 20 miles and 26.2 miles may as well be a billion. Unfortunately, that’s not something that can be understood intellectually. You have to feel it for yourself.

I ran the marathon on a beautiful May morning. If you’ve never run an organized race, you should. All demographics, some competing, others volunteering, everyone cheering each other on—it’s a celebration of the best of the community. Until it turns into a nightmare.

For me, the nightmare started at the 13-mile mark. I had been running for two hours, pretty close to my training pace. At 13 miles, there was a fork in the course. The marathon went one way, the half-marathon went another. As I approached the fork, a Kenyan runner passed me and veered toward the half-marathon finish line.

He had started an hour after me and covered the same distance. But more incredible than that was his stride. Ruling out the wife and kids, I’ve experienced three sublime moments in my life:

1. A horse got out of its barn in Laguna Canyon and stopped all traffic, galloping down the highway, wild and free and powerful. It reminded me of that moment in Animal Farm when Boxer and the other livestock staged their agricultural coup.

2. While eating breakfast at a coffee shop, an ancient man in a three-piece navy suit whistled as he strolled past. It was as if he was a student of The Juilliard School, and when they asked him what his instrument was, he just licked his lips and channeled the gods. This guy was half nightingale. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the son of a bitch could lay eggs. The entire coffee shop—waitresses, cooks, patrons, even the screaming baby—stopped to listen to this guy whistle. And after he passed, it felt like the entire shop thought, “Maybe there is a heaven?”

3. This Kenyan runner. Number three on my list of all-time sublime beauty.

He smiled as he ran. His feet barely touched the earth. His forefoot seemed to kiss the ground before kicking back behind him, his heel arcing up to his mid back. No wasted movement. His head cocked back and his arms pumped smoothly at his sides. It was less a run and more an expression of joy aimed at the divine.

By contrast, my feet barely left the ground. I demonstrated less a run and more a shuffle. My shoulders sloped forward, and my gaze aimed at the ground, anticipating a fall or, perhaps, a good place to bury myself in the likely event that I died on this run. Certainly, nobody looked at me and made comparisons to anything holy or glorious.

An accurate depiction of my emotional state after being passed by the Kenyan runner.

While the Kenyan was a sight to behold, he propelled in me a wave of self-pity. It’s no shame to be beaten by a Kenyan runner, I know this. But his joy, his bliss, his light and airy gait, it made me wonder what I’ve been doing with my life.

And let’s be clear, I wasn’t getting beaten by just a Kenyan runner, I was getting beaten by every demographic you can imagine: kids and senior citizens; pregnant women in their first, second, and third trimesters; skinny people, fat people; barefoot hippies and marines with rucksacks, running in combat boots, holding an American flag mounted on a six-foot wooden flagpole; mentally and physically disabled people; and I have no way to measure this, but I’m fairly certain I was also beaten by several morally, spiritually, and creatively disabled people.

When you train, you train alone. At least I did. You don’t account for the mental strain of watching every other person on the planet best you. It was the most humbling experience of my life.

And I hadn’t even gotten to mile 20.

Around mile 10, I noticed volunteers at water stations offering tongue depressors with globs of petroleum jelly on the ends, and I thought, "Hmm, wonder what those are for?”

Well, after mile 20, I knew exactly what those were for. They were for the high, inside tender area betwixt my legs, the skin that had been rubbed so raw and rough, you could sand a canoe with it. If Elon Musk knew what he was doing, he would use the inside of marathon runners’ thighs for SpaceX rocket parts. I’m fairly certain, if someone had cracked an egg down my pants, I could have turned it into a well-done omelet.

In addition to the horrors of the upper thigh, miles 21 to 26.2 also ushered in nihilistic despair. My body and my brain started to conspire against my spirit. “Norm, if you want to hold your grandchildren someday,” my brain said, “Stop running.”

“Shut up, brain,” I told myself. “We’re doing this.”

“Oh, you think so? How dare you talk to me like that, you grandstanding son of a bitch!” my brain said before sending a pain down my back on par with thumbscrews, death by elephant trampling, the iron maiden, take your pick.

I knew I had slipped into total darkness at mile 24. A Girl Scout troop set up shop to hand out water and encouragement. “Only two more miles,” one freckle-faced Girl Scout said, “You can do it!”

“Fuck you, Girl Scout!” I said to myself. “You don’t know how bad this hurts.” At least I think I said it to myself. I may have said it aloud. It’s hard to say. I could have been speaking in tongues at that point for all I remember.

At mile 25, I was deadlocked with an old man who I was fairly certain had been one of those who had begat someone in The Old Testament. I would later learn he was in his nineties. No way was I going to let this old man beat me to 26.2. I dug deep, gave it my all, but when I saw him smiling, it knocked the wind out of me, and he pulled ahead. I tried drafting him, but then I heard him whistling “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” I used to love that song, and now he was using it to play mental games with me. The bastard! He had the same light, airy presence as the Kenyan runner.

Accurate depiction of the old man who beat me.

I once heard on a podcast that Kenyans are such good runners because of their rites of passage. When a boy is ready to become a man, he must go through a 30-day ritual. On the first day, the elders spread mud on the boy’s face, and when it dries, the elders conduct a circumcision ceremony that involves puncturing the foreskin with a wooden spike. If the boy winces and the dried mud on his face cracks, the elders beat the boy with sticks to their hearts’ content. As long as the boy never cries uncle (so to speak) he continues along the rite of passage. If at any time the boy gives up, he’s excommunicated and no longer allowed to marry within the community. I can’t verify the veracity of this, but after running a marathon it makes sense.

The Kenyan runner, the 90-year-old man, and so many of the other runners—they were familiar with the pain. They’d been through it. They knew what it was like to wear the t-shirt on the other side of the finish line.

As I get older, I understand that most of my successes—and many of my joys—are the result of making friends with pain. I don’t seek it out, mind you. I’m not one for black leather or floggers or activities that require safe words, but it’s certainly easier to feel the discomfort and know my heart is expanding, growing, beating harder so that it’s able to withstand all the great things that are still on the way.

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Thanks for reading! I dream of some day telling these stories at Carnegie Hall, which means I’ll need to grow this audience. So tell your friends. Forward it, share it, talk about it!

In the meantime, if you enjoy schadenfreude, or need some help brainstorming a New Year’s Resolution tactics, consider reading “Tell Stories, Get Fit: A Guide for Six Packs, Thigh Gaps, and Shoulder Caps.”

Or for something more uplifting, maybe throw your eyes at “The Dubious Act of Hugging.”

Or if you need a little boost of gratitude, “Bloody Towels” is worth your time.

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If you have any painful experiments of your own…