Running On Empty

It was the summer of 2004, and I was curled on my bed, sobbing my eyes out. Earlier that evening, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend had borrowed ten dollars from me, only to pass it along to one of the Suicide Girly, razor thin go-go dancers he booked at his nightclub. After that slight, fueled by many drinks, I called him on what I perceived to be his unfair lending of my money. This conversation disintegrated in to an argument wherein I told him I spent most of my time feeling ugly and unloved. His response? "Well, you're no great beauty, but you're cute." Rather than breaking up with him on the spot and kicking him out of my house, where he was crashing until he found a new place, I internalized the criticism. The next day, I wrote: "I may be respected, and I may be admired/ but none of it matters, I'll never be desired." Then I threw the contents of my fridge in the trash and joined a gym.

Until the summer of my 24th year, I cared very little about my weight. I had a lightning fast metabolism as a teenager, and even when I gained the freshman fifteen, and then the sophomore twenty, I didn't really pay much attention to the scale. My ultra-fit parents occasionally offered criticism of my sad, sedentary state, but I brushed it off. At the time of the sobbing fit, I weighed 110 pounds, 3 pounds over the "underweight" category for my height.

Desperate to make the thirty-something, barely employed, perpetually broke loser I was dating find me attractive, I started my own version of the supermodel diet: dining on lettuce and lemon juice and hour-long daily visits to the gym. A few months later, I got on the scale and saw a double-digit number. Size zeros were too big on me. And I celebrated. None of this saved my relationship, of course. I could have wasted away to Karen Carpenter standards, and I still would not have been good enough.

Post-break-up, I still clung to the idea that my thinness was a virtue, that I was a saintly modern day fasting girl of Northeast Portland. There had to be some reason gluttony was a sin and that all the reporters who talked about the obesity epidemic did so with a condescending sneer. At the time, I was accomplishing all sorts of great things: becoming a music editor, getting in to grad school, coaching a winning debate team. And yet my proudest moments of those months were fitting in to a size 24 pair of jeans, weighing the same as Lindsay Lohan, and having a man on the street look me up and down and offer the appraisal: "too skinny." I've called myself a feminist since high school and have a degree in Women's Studies; intellectually, I knew this was sick. But not even the strongest political ideologies could overcome years of cultural programming and the pain of the man you love telling you that he finds you physically repulsive.

Throughout all this I continued to run every day, mostly because I was deathly afraid of gaining weight and bumping in to my ex. After I moved to New York and that meeting became less likely, I kept up my gym habit because I found myself getting cranky if I didn't fit in my daily workout. Sometime last spring, I walked by a personal training studio in my neighborhood and saw a sign for a marathon training course; acting on sheer impulse and wanting to give myself a new goal, I signed up.

And I ran. I did not run so far away, but I certainly was running all night and day. Somewhere along the road, the goal stopped being "stay skinny" and started being "stay healthy." I could jog three miles on an empty stomach, but the first time I attempted to run ten without having eaten anything, I almost passed out. I started to see food in a different light; where it had previously been an enemy to be avoided at all costs, it was now fuel to keep me going. My poor body, which I had at one point starved in to submission, forgave me and bounced back, carrying me through Times Square in the pouring rain as I ran the New York City half marathon, across the Brooklyn Bridge as I ran a twenty mile training run, and finally across the finish line of the Portland marathon. In my mind, though, the real victory came at mile 25, when I flew past my ex's former nightclub. Though he had long since quit to move back home with his parents, the physical space still held a great deal of meaning for me. I slapped the wall of the building as I passed, having finally outrun all the demons haunting me from that relationship. Then I headed for the finish line.