Sarah Cypher

I said I would never run a marathon. Marathons are long, bad for the knees, unnecessarily strenuous, require a lot of training time I don’t have… And as it turns out, they’re a healthy way to feel satisfied with one’s progress. So I ran one. It hurt. And I’m happy about it.

My father belongs to the school of thought that there is no point in doing anything without tangible benefit to one’s family or society. This includes going back to school for the fun of it, running marathons, or having hobbies. I must have inherited some of his sense of productivity, but not the discipline to see it through. If you can’t pass your DNA down to your kids, the last resort of human significance tends to be work. Work–and life–are not satisfying unless they allow you to be creative. To be curious and knowledgeable and practical and clever all at once, in a single inventive spark.

Running a marathon is still its own thing. It’s usually ugly and smelling and shambly. It has no higher purpose unless you invent one for it. You can stay healthy on far less exercise. There’s a study out there somewhere that says exercise reduces your cognitive function to 2 percent of its normal capacity because the rest of your body is screaming for the oxygenated blood normally reserved for your brain. And as a social event, well, as one little girl’s sign proclaimed from yesterday’s crowd, a marathon is the “Worst Parade Ever.”

And yet, you still wake up with the satisfaction of having done something that is somehow good. It is a shared memory with my wife and her family, who ran it with us. It got me out of my chair. For someone in a creative profession, where some much of one’s success depends on luck and other people’s judgment, it’s also nice to set out at 8 a.m. and achieve a pervasive sense of completion by noon of the same day.

And really, best of all, after running for over four hours in the sun and humidity: cold water and fresh bread never tasted so good.

WARNING: Attempts to be a lone kicker/screamer will fail. Your training buddies, spouse, partner, or significant other must be enthusiastically committed to Ironman, ultra-marathon, or Xterra racing, have goals, and follow a strict training plan.

1. Commit to fitness, but refuse to form specific goals or said training plan.

2. Attempt to complete your partner’s workouts, especially as they increase in duration and intensity, but only on days when you feel like it. (Contravening factors may include fatigue, lack of interest, sore legs, hangnails, and clouds.)

3. Develop a robust OCD complex about exercising and a neurotic fear of being left behind.

4. Buy a heart rate monitor. Panic when your number looks too high, and back off.

5. Quit often, but only when you’re at the far side of an eight-mile loop. Un-quit when you get bored of walking.

6. Move to a neighborhood where all “convenient” run routes begin uphill.

7. Lift weights as much as possible. The workout yields the most minutes of sitting and doing nothing per hour of your time.

8. Place a spin bike in the apartment building’s basement. You can exert yourself in cool darkness, entertain yourself by visually cataloging the neighbors’ belongings, and startle anyone who comes downstairs to do laundry (unless they expect to find a sweaty person humming Lady Gaga next to their boxes of stuff). But on the bright side, the basement is a great place to feel sorry for yourself as you suffer through anaerobic threshold workouts.

9. Relentlessly berate yourself for slowness, tiredness, social awkwardness–anything will do–as your partner/spouse/training group tackles another hill interval. Follow. Repeat. Otherwise you’ll be left behind.

10. Reestablish your relationship with swimming. It is the only place where you don’t have to listen to Lady Gaga, commercials, and annoying cell phone ring tones. Listen to your breathing, and rejoice in the fact that you aren’t running, biking, or grunting through Sisyphean weights workouts. Just try not to pick the lane with the snorkler.

11. Sign up for many inexpensive half-marathons. At mile eight of each, remind yourself that you will never, ever, under any circumstance, sign up for a marathon, Ironman triathlon, or other extremely expensive race.

12. Trust your OCD to carry you through this routine, such as it is, for months. Attain a PR by finishing fifteen seconds behind your spouse/partner/training pal at the 2010 Race for the Roses, to complete the half-marathon course in 1 hour, 55 minutes, 41 seconds.

E and me, getting into our superwoman suits

Time to finish: 2 hours, 35 minutes, 8 seconds.

Cost to enter: $70

Cost of two Bloody Marys after the race: priceless.

Miscellany: Troutdale’s Blue Lake is actually rather brown.