Peter Magill - The Born Again Runner: A Guide to Overcoming Excuses, Injuries, and Other Obstacles - for New and Returning Runners

Things do not change; we change.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

BY ALL RIGHTS, I shouldnt be writing this book.

I should be grossly overweight, plagued with a smokers hack, tasting last nights whiskey at the back of my throat, and sucking wind from the effort it took to roll my desk chair forward so that my fingers could reach the keyboard.

Or I should be dead.

Dead was the prediction of the emergency room physician who treated me late one night during the winter of 2000. I was thirty-eight years old, recently divorced, fifty pounds overweight, splitting care of my six-year-old son, Sean, with my ex-wife, Jinny, and working around the clock as a struggling Hollywood screenwriter. I was sleeping two to three hours per night. Was living on a diet of junk food, hard liquor, Marlboros, and various amphetaminesonly sobering up long enough to attend weekly court-ordered meetings for my various alcohol-related offenses. My physical activity consisted of thrice-weekly outings to local parks with Sean; hed chase me around playground equipment until my face turned red and I got too dizzy to stand (think Marlon Brando in The Godfather just moments before he pitches face-first into the tomato plants). And then one night, alone at home, I did collapse, tumbling unconscious to the floor.

Later that night, at Verdugo Hills Hospital, the ER physician explained that Id gotten off easy, that I hadnt had a heart attack, stroke, or something more serious. Instead, I was exhausted, overworked, and suffering the predictable effects of massive substance abuse. And then he added, Of course, at the rate youre going, you wont live to see your son graduate from high school.

Something had to change.

But where to start? Everything about my life was a mess. My workload. My diet. My weight. My sleeping habits. My parental obligations. Not to mention my attempt to manage all of the above with a suspended drivers license, morning shakes, heart arrhythmia, anxiety attacks, and zero friends who werent headed down the same road, who werent accelerating toward the same brick wall.

I was overwhelmed. And Id lost control of my life.

Of course, you didnt open this book to read about me. You opened this book to find relevant, effective, and practical information on starting a running program that works for you. You have your own hurdles to clear. If not, youd already be running. You have your own bad habits, your own physical shortcomings, your own work problems and health issues and personal foibles. In short, you arent focused on how I did it, how I crawled out of my rabbit hole and rejoined the world a fitter, happier, and saner person. You need to know how you can do it.

I hear you.

And I want to assure you right now, as we decide whether to step out the door together and follow the path laid out in the chapters ahead, that this book doesnt tell my storyeven if thats where it starts, and even if Ill be injecting elements of my story into its pages.

This book tells your story.

It tells the story of your busy life and full schedule. And of the reasons youve procrastinated about starting an exercise program. It addresses weight, health, chronic injury, disability, lack of time, and other issues that might have gotten in your way. It recognizes the anxiety (and even fear) that sometimes holds potential new runners back from taking the first step. And for those of you who simply want a dos and donts manual, it offers comprehensive instruction for every step of your new program.

This book is a road map for changing yourselffor becoming a runner and achieving the results you associate with that goal (whether that means weight loss, improved health, decreased stress, simply having fun, or finishing the Boston Marathon).

And thats where my story comes into play, because before youll believe me when I say you will succeed, you need to know that I succeeded, that like the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes, I conjured a practicing runner from the mess Id made of my life.

The ER physicians warning was a wake-up call. But my takeaway wasnt a fear of impending death. Dying was an abstract concept, and one that even the physician had admitted lay in a semi-distant and nebulous future. My motivation was far more immediate: I didnt want to continue living the way that I had. The problem was figuring out an escape plan. Too much was wrong with my lifeand had been for a long, long time.

Id started drinking at age thirteen, on the basketball courts at Foothill Intermediate School. Id meet a couple friends during lunch, and wed mix vodka or gin or whiskey with Coca-Cola that wed purchased in the cafeteria. A painfully shy, one-hundred-pound weakling, I gained confidence from alcohol during a time when I was pretty much terrified of every other kid in the school. My behavior only got worse in high school. Even as I made the varsity cross country team my freshman year, earning a status upgrade among my classmates, I added cigarettes and drugs to my ever-increasing alcohol consumption. After high school, I hitchhiked around the USA and traveled Europe by train, managing to get blackout drunk in multiple major cities on both continents. And then I tried college, at UC Berkeley, USC, Glendale Community College, and Cal State L.A. I tried running at each. And I tried studying at each. But it didnt work out. Every time, partying eventually won the day. So I bought a cheap around-the-world airline ticket (a single-fare ticket that allowed me to fly unlimited legs and miles to anywhere in the world, as long as I kept moving in a single direction) and headed west. If I couldnt manage my life, maybe I could run away from it. After most of a year, my final leg deposited me in the Caribbean, on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. A couple months of blackout drinking later, I ended up co-owner of a rock n roll nightclub, World Headquarters, on nearby St. John. Now buried in the substance-abuse lifestyle, I smoked four packs of cigarettes per day, drank beer and rum from the time I woke up until the time I passed out, and added as much speed, in its various guises, as my heart could handle without exploding. When a DEA agent investigating Caribbean cocaine distribution got stabbed in my club, I panicked (paranoid that Id be wrongly implicated in the stabbing or cocaine trade) and fled back to mainland USA. And tried to turn things around. I got married, started running again, coached high school track, coached club cross country, returned to school, and thrilled to the birth of my son, Sean. And then, as was my modus operandi, I threw it all away to return to a life of drinking, smoking, and drugging. By age thirty-six, I was divorced, jobless, broke, and a few weeks away from homelessness (again). Desperate, I asked a friend in the film industry to send me some screenplays, so that I could see how they were done. I read the scripts, then banged out one of my own, www.death.com, and was signed by the agency CAA. That script didnt sell, but two months later my second one did, to New Line Cinema. And a month later, I signed to do a script rewrite for Disney. I moved into a nice house, began working more and sleeping less, and, naturally, increased my drinking and drugging. And a little over a year later, I ended up in the Verdugo Hills ER. Which is where you came in.

Film character Buckaroo Banzai famously said (OK, its possible he pilfered it from Confucius or some other non-celluloid source), No matter where you go, there you are. While I lack Banzais multidimensional experience, Ive always taken that to mean that you cant change your life or who you are by changing your location. On my travels across the country and around the world, Id always been disappointed to discover that no matter how much geography I put between myself and my past behavior, I could never shake the person responsible for that behavior: me. And it was never long before I was repeating that behavior in my new location. And then fleeing to some other city or country or continent.