The Long Run

by Mishka Shubaly

I was somehow both fat and skinny. Still, it wasn’t hopeless, I decided. Were I merely to amputate my entire torso, turn it upside down and then somehow reattach it so my beer gut became a barrel chest, my sunken chest became a flat stomach and my sloppy love rungs became bulging lats, then I would look okay. True, I would have a belly button in the middle of my chest, but it would still be a marked improvement over the current monument to inactivity I saw before me.

“The tragedy is not that you’re gonna die this way,” my mother had said to me once, “it’s that you live this way.”

So where do we go now, Sweet Child O’ Mine? There is no Google maps app for your life. There is no clearly marked destination—a red dot—with an illuminated purple line showing you the correct path, where you should go and how you should get there and when you have deviated from it. And that really sucks.

Running is different. I warm up with self-flagellation: “You fat fuck. You pasty shrine to stagnation. You useless turd of bloat. Put the remote control down and step away from the couch.”

It’s not just been expensive, discouraging and time-consuming, it’s also humiliated me. Exercise has made me sweat, cry, burp, fart and throw up in front of friends, loved ones and strangers. I have gone places I have sworn I would never go—the gym, sporting goods stores—and willfully pay for and wear the most bizarre clothing and accessories. Headbands, armbands, silky polyester “performance shirts,” the platypus of men’s undergarments (the boxer brief) and, yes, even those hideous shoes-with-toes which appear to have been designed solely to seek out and destroy any shred of sex appeal left intact while performing this torturous “exercise,” shoes so criminally unsexy that the US Military has officially forbidden the use of them by active troops.