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Marathon (Wo)Man: 30 Years Down, 18 Weeks To Go

On the first day of junior high phys ed class, the teacher — Mr. B., a tall, toe-headed, rangy fellow — glanced down at the roster, then looked up excitedly. “Eber, where’s Eber?!” he said.

I raised my hand. Our eyes met. “Oh,” he said, flatly, as best I can recall. My brother had passed through his class two years earlier. He is, and was then, tall and dark and lean; gifted with natural athletic ability and an easy way that makes me wonder if I somehow got an uneven helping of the neurotic gene, while he got none. More »

Marathon (Wo)Man: Running For A Cause, But Not Without Headphones

Over the past two years, I’ve run races to support colon cancer awareness and prevention, fitness programs for underserved children, and an awareness of Scottish culture… among other things. I’d like to say that I chose these races because these were issues that were near and dear to me, but I’d be lying. More »

Marathon (Wo)Man: I’m Just Not That Into My Insoles

If Blisstree editors would allow it, every Marathon (Wo)Man column would probably have a picture of feet… or shoes… or both. My feet in their fancy running socks (see two weeks back). My feet next to a bottle of rosé (see alternative photo to last week’s post). A gruesome close-up of a blister and some calluses (you probably don’t really want to see it). They’d conjure a cliché girl-with-shoes-and-a-camera moment plucked from any number of rom—com movies together…except with more blood and fewer toenails. More »

Marathon (Wo)Man: The Running Shoes And The Rosé

Marathon (Wo)Man: The Running Shoes And The RosÃ©

Oh running shoes, they take up so much space, you’re already bringing 4 pairs of shoes for less than that number of days, besides, it’s just a long weekend, the last thing you’ll want to do is run… I mean it’s a romantic getaway, c’mon now.

I went away for a few days. My running shoes stayed home. Between “packing” for said getaway and then “recovering from jet lag” and then “family in town,” I didn’t run for a solid week. Well, as long as we’re being honest, a solid week plus a couple of days. More »

Marathon (Wo)Man: Training Runs, 10ks, And What I Wore

I have developed a strange inability to leave a sporting goods store without a new pair of running socks. Two years ago, I thought it perfectly acceptable, desirable even, to run in a standard pair of cotton athletic socks. Then, my life was flipped upside down by a single $10 pair of socks. Synthetic material to wick away the moisture from my little tootsies. Dual layers of said material to prevent blistering and chafing. That perfect percentage of elastic to snugly hug foot and ankle. It was a revelation. More »

Marathon (Wo)Man: A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To The Marathon…

“This is my favorite kind of night in the park,” Coach Shelly says wistfully as we do a steady jog through Central Park in between grueling one-mile intervals. It’s a perfectly lovely early summer night. Not too humid. Some sort of nouveau Joni Mitchell type emanating from the band shell. People picnic on the lawn, absorbing the music at no cost. Ticket scalpers rove about, something vaguely romantic – in the New York Sense, at least – about their sketchy enterprise. More »

Marathon (Wo)Man: Hitting The Wall, Or, The Bitter End

“How was the half marathon?” That’s a question I’ve been getting a lot of late. I suppose it’s related to the fact that I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon on Saturday and/or the fact that earlier this week I ascended and descended stairs with the speed and grace of the average nursery home resident.

So how was it? It went pretty well, I guess. I finished several (a number with two digits) minutes faster time than I did last year, when I ran my first half at a very, very slow pace after getting injured while training. So yay!? More »

Marathon (Wo)Man: Your “NUMBER”… No, Not That One.

Marathon (Wo)Man: Your â��NUMBERâ��â�¦ No, Not That One.

“So, what are your personal goals for tomorrow’s race?” she asked.

We were on a pseudo-girls-weekend – which is a girls’ weekend where a penis inevitably becomes involved (see Real Housewives, various) (Also, hey Jason, no worries if you’re reading this, love you! Great to see you!) – in San Francisco to run a 12k, but really to eat, drink, shop, and maybe run a 12k hung-over on little sleep.

The friend-of-a-friend on said trip was asking me about my goals for the race, but really, I sensed, she wanted to talk hard numbers. I mumbled a vague hope for my run, something about how I’d be happy just to able to shove through the crowds at under ten minutes a mile, no visions of personal records jogging through my head. “What about you?” I asked. More »

Marathon (Wo)Man: Every Journey Begins With A Facebook Badge

When I was laid off at the end of 2009, I thought I’d hit the proverbial jackpot (after I got over the fact that the news had come in a post-Thanksgiving email). I hadn’t loved my job, for one. And there was unemployment! And a COBRA subsidy! At last, I’d write my novel, finish my website, start running again.

A year and a half later, that novel remains unwritten. That website, still under construction. But, I did get running again.

The thing with running is that it’s easy. Well, it’s easier. It’s not that I have a runner’s build, Ethiopian heritage, or any sort of natural aptitude for it. I have feet so flat I’ve been told by doctors that I wouldn’t be allowed in the military, a slight leg length discrepancy, a mind that requires constant distraction, and a body type most kindly described as “curvy.” I am prone to strained hips and plantar fasciitis. I have spent all too many lunch hours in a podiatrist’s office. I am not naturally fast. I require all treadmills to have televisions…preferably playing Teen Mom or Gossip Girl. More »

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Blatant Commercialism: Why I Secretly Love Valentine’s Day

I have a dirty little secret. As with many things, I blame it on my parents and my Catholic school upbringing.

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, and yes, we all wore bouncy little checked skirts of the variety that child molesters favor and yes, there were nuns, though it’s worth noting that we never washed our super sexy wool (winter) or polyester (spring) skirts, and that the nuns got called back to the nunnery shortly after I graduated due to some unspecified scandal. They never returned.

In my high school, there were also bathrooms that smelled distinctly of vomit around prom time, and a strange importance placed on Valentine’s Day. It was a big, creepy deal in teen-girl prison. The flowers – mostly garish, generic red roses or carnation bouquets of the sort you’d expect from teenage boys in the suburbs – would start arriving the morning of February 14, along with the balloons and stuffed animals and chocolates in giant heart-shaped boxes. The pricey loot would steadily stream in throughout the day, a consistent flow of teen infatuation and crass commercialism. In fact, so much stuff arrived that the school didn’t allow its girls to collect their loot as it came in. Rather, it was all stored in the chapel until the end of day. Then, during final period, a list would go around with the names of all those lucky gals who had Valentine’s treasures waiting for them to pick up.

I was never on that list. More »

Cutting The Cord: How I Canceled My Abusive Relationship (With Cable TV)

I knew we needed to end things. He was never there for me. I’d come home after a long day at work, wanting nothing more than a glass (well, a bottle really) of wine, a couch, and some of his sweet loving, and he’d give me nothing but grief.

“He” was my cable TV provider. (I’ll let him remain anonymous, but let’s just say his initials are TWC and he’s sort of a big deal.) We were together for just over two years (at least in our last incarnation, but you know, there were several more years of “on and off” stuff before that). There were good times (many of them having to do with Bravo or Tina Fey), but there were bad times too. Oh, were there bad times.

“I just can’t take this anymore,” I tipsily told a customer service representative one night. There I was, wanting nothing more than to erase my workday with some Viognier and Top Chef, but it wasn’t working. The sound popped in and out of the recording, rendering it tragically unwatchable. More »

Running and Body Image: What Is a “Runner’s Body” Anyway?

“You never can tell,” a co-worker said to me the other day.

We were standing at the water cooler engaging in the perfunctory “what did you do last weekend” chatter. I mentioned that I’d run a race of some sort, a 5k or 10k.

“You run?” he asked, a little too incredulously.

“Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of short races all year to get auto entry into next year’s marathon,” I replied.

“Hmmn…You’re a runner,” he continued, voicing one of those slimy sentences that is neither absolute question nor statement. “It just shows, you never can tell.”

I looked down at my empty water bottle, thinking that the possibility of dying of thirst might be preferable to this tedium.

Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I do not have a physique similar to Kenyan marathon runners, or most American marathon runners, for that matter. Even after training for and running a half marathon, there are not one but two digits in my dress size. But yes, I run. More »

Puppy Love: How My Beloved Pooch Almost Ruined My Long-Term Relationship

I’m at my friend K’s apartment, crying and drinking whatever Trader Joe’s wine she happens to have on hand. “We just can’t stop fighting,” I mumble. “We just have different ideas as to how he should be raised. He wants me to stay home more; he doesn’t want us to put him in day care.”

K nods. I can see her analytical, lawyer-brain quickly equating my relationship and its issues with the one she left a year or so ago. “This is totally déjà vu,” she says. She’s silently thinking my long-term boyfriend and I are destined for the same fate as her and her ex – and her ex-cat.

Across the room, my six-month-old puppy sniffs a pile of junk belonging to K’s annoying roommate, blithely unaware of the drama he’s created. I flash forward to images of my life as a single mother. A dog walker. A tiny studio apartment or a strange, annoying roommate of my very own. Girlish glasses of Sauvignon Blanc and giggles over failed relationships and the pets that pushed them to the brink. How did it come to this? More »

“Parenthood” Season Premiere: Too Much Family Is Boring

In your standard television drama, family stuff takes a backseat to whatever’s going on at work, typically at a hospital, law firm, or police precinct. A noble surgical resident has more time for her patients than her husband (Grey’s Anatomy), a scorned wife gets back on her feet by returning to work as a high-powered lawyer (The Good Wife), an alcoholic detective tackles the city’s drug problem but can’t make it to his kids’ ball games (The Wire). NBC’s Parenthood, which had its season premiere last night, reverses the work-family dynamic: Work is what gets in the way of family, not vice versa.

In last season’s pilot, Julia (Erika Christensen), a high-powered lawyer, struggled to put down her Blackberry long enough to take a family picture with Santa. In this season’s opener, she tells her husband Joel (Sam Jaeger) she wants a second child, but he’s already feeling restless staying home with their one child. Crosby (Dax Shepard) struggles with a long-distance relationship with his young son and former girlfriend, who recently moved across the country to New York to take a dream job dancing with Alvin Ailey. Eldest son Adam (Peter Krause) is reprimanded at work by a jerky boss (a slick William Baldwin) for letting his family interfere too much with his work.

The show’s focus on the family is admirable, but it’s not all that entertaining. Without the thrills of the E.R. or the courtroom, we’re left with only the character’s suburban personal lives to amuse us. And, while said lives are depicted by a flock of talented, you-loved-them-on-that-other-show actors—Peter Krause from Six Feet Under, Lauren Graham from Gilmore Girls (again playing a single mother), and Craig T. Nelson from Coach and The District, just to name a few—Parenthood’s characters, and the situations they find themselves in, feel more like archetypes than unique, fully fleshed out people and moments. More »

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