A world without dancers

I ran a marathon last week! I did.

Running a marathon never seemed like something I would do. I never really liked running but one thing led to another and eventually I was running a marathon. Like in a children's story where someone tells a lie and that leads to a bigger lie and soon they’re having a confrontation with an elephant and the king, but this confrontation was just four hours of sweating followed by a bunch of gluten-free bagels.

People ask “Are you a runner?” And I don’t even have an answer because I don’t really care about that question. I don’t know if I’m a runner. But I am definitely a crier.

I'm not just a recreational crier, crying isn't just a hobby for me. I cry like no one else cries. I cry at happy things, at sad things, at nothing, alone, and I try not to cry in public but sometimes it happens. I started wearing contacts in seventh grade mostly so that I could tell people they were flipped inside out whenever I started crying.

“These contacts,” I’d sniff when a PBS segment on the discovery of cell mitosis got me worked up. “I just think my eyes are the wrong shape or something.”

I wasn’t proud of it, but I knew I’d be crying by the end of the marathon.

I didn’t know that they sang the national anthem before the marathon even started. The national anthem makes my cry no matter what. Just hearing the word “national” said in the right way can make me cry.

I was standing with thousands of strangers at 6:45 in the morning, with a crooked race bib, with my apartment keys tied to my shoe, with really no idea what I was doing, and someone started singing the national anthem and my eyes were soaked. Everyone was taking videos, and so I invented a new warm-up stretch that involved hiding my head in my shirt so no one could see my face.

My friend Nick is way better at attaching a race number than I am.

Finally the singing stopped and I dried my face and assumed the worst was over, and the race finally started. I got a hold of myself and started running.

And then, standing at the starting line was, for no good reason, a group of Marines stoically cheering us on. Compared to being a Marine, running a marathon is the lamest thing in the world. It is expensive and time-consuming and requires new shoes every few months. The idea of a Marine cheering for my dumb fancy little hobby seemed so backward that it made me start crying again. It’s embarrassing but it’s what happened.

After a mile we passed a terrible band where every member was playing bongos. “Bongos!” I thought. “Everyone on the earth is different but we all have one thing in common - we all hate bongos.” It seemed like the most beautiful thought I’d ever had. More tears.

A lot of people say it helps to have a mantra when you’re running a marathon so I made one up then: Pull yourself together, Brooke.

At mile two we passed an alleyway that smelled like marijuana. “My apartment building smells like marijuana” I thought. More tears. I was really a mess at this point.

Pull yourself together, Brooke.

At mile three I noticed a woman whose running shirt said IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT DANCERS “Oh my goodness what a wonderful place that would be” I thought, before I noticed it actually said a world without cancer.

 At mile four a woman behind me said to her friend “Can you keep a secret?”

 “I’m pregnant” she whispered. “It’s only nine weeks and we’re not supposed to tell anyone until twelve, but I just couldn’t wait any longer.”

That’s when I knew I was going to cry the entire marathon.

When I signed up for the race in January there was a box to personalize your bib with a name or nickname and I scrolled past it faster than anything. This isn’t spirit week. Why do I need my name on there?

The reason you need your name on there is apparently so strangers can cheer for you. There were thousands of them lined up all over the course for no good reason, shaking noisemakers, spraying water, giving us oranges, and screaming our names if we had them printed on there.

Most of the people cheering (who were these people?) held signs - about forty people independently had the idea to write NO TIME FOR WALKEN with a photo of Christopher Walken. Everyone wanted to high-five me but nice try. I am only interested in touching your hand if you are holding a cup of water.

I needed lots and lots of water because I was losing liquid so fast from all the tears. That Christopher Walken sign really made me emotional.

Everything was a reason to cry: middle school cheerleaders, a runner with the same shoes as me, a woman in front of me whose ponytail was so completely saturated with back sweat that droplets flew into my face every time she took a step. It was all too beautiful, it was all too much.

Pull yourself together, Brooke.

Mile 23 is where you're supposed to hit a wall, so there were more people cheering there than anywhere else. My legs still felt great. My feet felt great, my heart, arms, face, ankles, shins everything felt great but I could barely breathe because of how aggressively I was choking back sobs.

I may never be able to pull myself together. But I can run for 26.2 miles. And that seems pretty impressive, for someone who may not even be a runner.

Write me a rap song

I run almost every day, but never in shorts.

I always wear running tights. I like running tights because they look like what a superhero would wear but mostly I wear them because I'm a girl and it's 2014 and so, I hate my legs. That's what girls do in 2014.

Boooo, legs, right? Hate 'em. I have the worst legs.

But then a few weeks ago all my running tights were all in the wash and so instead I put on shorts and, you guys. I was completely wrong. It turns out I actually have amazing legs.

There are some things words can't describe but there are other things that inspire millions of words, that deserve thousands of volumes of literature describing them and my legs are that second type of thing.

If I were a poet I would write poems about these legs. I'm not great at poetry but you know what I am great at? Legs. I have the best legs.

So now it's weeks later and I wear shorts every day and sometimes when I run past a bus stop or restaurant or dog-walker someone will yell "I love your legs!" and I keep running even though I want so badly to stop and talk to them because we have so many similar interests: I also love my legs.

Your heart will beat 150 times while you read this

I hate everything about going to the doctor except a few things, and one of those things is getting my heart rate measured. I love getting my heart rate measured.

The average human heart beats 60-100 times per minute at rest. The whole time you’ve been reading this your heart has been beating, it’s beating while you sleep and while you shower, and while you listen to your favorite song or shop online.

At a doctor’s appointment last year I found out my heart beats 55 times per minute at rest, which the doctor said was very impressive, the rate of a marathon runner or a half decent Olympic athlete. Lately I've been running even more and yesterday at the doctor took my pulse and go to the next line:

47 beats per minute! That’s what my resting heart rate is.

Look at all this chart do you even see 47? I don’t. But my eyes aren’t that strong, it’s my heart that’s super strong. According to this chart it's even better than EXCEL'T.

When I was growing up my heart wasn't super strong, it was full of holes. Murmurs is the word for heart holes, it probably comes from the whispering sound of blood slipping out of your heart every second but I'm not sure. I got my heart holes when I was eight, as a side effect of Rheumatic Fever, which I got because I had strep and didn’t do anything about it.

There were five kids in my family, and complaining about feeling sick seemed like an annoying thing to do. I thought "not a big deal, this seems like something I can sort of handle myself" which is a dangerous thought I've had hundreds of times. It's the type of thought that puts you in a hospital with a disease people usually only get in Little House on the Prairie. It's how my heart got full of holes.

On the way home from the hospital my dad decided to take me to McDonald's. Either he thought I was so brave I deserved it, or he figured that my new sponge-like heart condition would make transfats just sort of float through it like gentle rain. The gentle rain theory seems the most likely. Because he didn’t make a big show of it, we just went through the drive-through and ordered a Happy Meal, and the McDonald’s employee who couldn’t see me in the backseat, asked if it was for a boy or a girl.

My dad and I pondered this question while we waited at the second window.

The internet is amazing because I searched "glitter nugget" and found this.

“I bet there are two different toys you can get, and one's for boys and one's for girls,” I said. I was hoping I was wrong and it was actually two different types of McNugget dipping sauces, a glitter sauce for girls and one with crunchy peanut pieces for boys, and suddenly I was starving for glitter sauce even though seconds ago I had never imagined such a thing existed. 

My dad also hoped my toy theory was wrong, he said there was no such thing as toys for boys and toys for girls. My parents were strict about this growing up, we owned only gender-neutral blankets, toys, and books. And clothes, as babies we wore as much green and yellow as newborn die-hard Packer fans or Oregon State fans GO DUCKS. And probably a few other teams but I don't know that much about sports because I'm a girl.

Our parents reminded us all the time: other families thought boys and girls were different but other families were wrong. There are boys and there are girls but on the inside, our hearts are all the same. Except mine, my heart was full of holes.

Ten years and maybe two trips to McDonald’s later I found out at a doctor's appointment that the holes, or the murmurs, had miraculously sealed up, and that my heart was pretty much as watertight as a really expensive brand of ziplock bag. 

And now, ten years after that, or less than ten, now my heart beats half as slowly as a lot of other human hearts, like a whale floating slowly through a crowd of panicked guppies in a McDonalds, now my heart is super muscular and strong, the type of heart some families would say a boy would have, and now exactly forty-seven times a minute it grabs a heart full of blood and holds all of it tight for 1.3 seconds, and none leaks out because there aren’t any holes.

It was a different toy for girls and for boys, in case you were still waiting on why they asked that question at McDonald's. I got a mini Barbie, and a boy with holes in his heart would have gotten a mini Hot Wheels.

Running secrets

The thing about being a runner in 2014 is if you want to break any sort of record, you’d better be able to run at least a three minute mile. (Zero research on actual running records was done before writing this blog post.)

Because at this point humans have done it all. Women weren’t allowed to run marathons until forty years ago (again, no research), but now they definitely can. And the worst part is, I’m not a fast runner. So there’s really only one record left for me to break: the record for how many miles someone can run while only listening to Desperado.

The hit 1973 song by the Eagles. You can listen to it while you read this if you want:

I’ve listened to it a lot since I decided it was the best running song in the world and started listening on repeat on four-mile runs in the morning. I’m not a fast runner, so that usually adds up to over thirty minutes of listening to Desperado.

Did you click on that link to start playing it earlier? If you’re feeling bad that you didn’t here’s another one:

Then I signed up for this marathon, and made up a running schedule that involves a lot of running (surprise). And everyone knows, the best running song in the world is Desperado. 

I started running ten, then twelve, then fourteen miles, and I’m not a fast runner, so that’s almost two and a half hours of listening to Desperado on repeat. Sometimes I mix it up with one of the twenty cover versions (it's a very popular song), but usually not.

Now it’s been long enough that fourteen miles is starting to feel normal, now after about an hour my legs know what they’re doing and I’m just sort of on a three-minute-thirty-three-second-loop autopilot, it’s hard to tell the night time from the day, or one step from the next, or Desperado from the other songs I'm listening to. Just kidding, I'm only listening to Desperado.

The beat drops about four times in Desperado, which I think is the main reason, or possibly the only reason, I like it so much.

They say that running a marathon is proof of the human spirit, proof that people can do anything they set out to do. I say another equally beautiful test of human endurance, and one with way more really great beat drops, is listening to Desperado on repeat for four hours while running a marathon. 

And in a few months I’ll prove it, if I still have knees.

Reasons I shouldn't go running today

Please choose three of the four excuses.
○ It's snowing.
○ My knees feel sort of loose. Is that a thing?
○ Maybe I should stay home and watch tv so I know more about pop culture.
○ My hair looks too good to mess up.