The Happy Little Morons Running Series

I love signing up for races. They give me motivation to train for something with a hard deadline; but, more importantly, they give me shirts, free snacks, and cool medals. I passionately love shirts, snacks, and medals. Unfortunately, since I am still on maternity leave, races are a little beyond my budget right now. Missing the anticipation and fun of running with a crowd, I decided to organize my own races.

I present to you the wildly popular Happy Little Morons Running Series that attracts nearly ten runners every race. For participants I enlisted the most reliable of comrades in adventure, my cousins, the Happy Little Morons. (We inherited the name Happy Little Morons from our parents who were lovingly given the moniker by my grandmother. The title fits the tone and disposition of the races and participants.)

Every other month we gather at a different location and run a 3-6 mile race. There are no timing chips, the route distances are roughly measured with google maps, and no one shuts down the streets for us, yet we manage to have a lot of fun. So far we have completed the I Love Me Run (a mild rebuke of Valentine's Day), The Aw Hill No! Run (two miles uphill and two miles down, and The Ebey's Landing Run on Whidbey Island. Coming in August is the Sun Bear Run which has an optional sun bear plunge into Puget Sound at the finish (think polar bear plunge, only slightly warmer).

Even though we represent a wide variety of gaits, paces, and running habits, no one finishes alone thanks to the HLM Finishing Protocol. It goes like this: When you reach the finish line, you turn around and run or walk back to the last runner and run with them to the end. This way everyone finishes together and the last runner (usually me) feels less lonely. We're all winners!

This running series brings me prolonged joy from planning the routes, to naming the races, to crafting the finisher swag bags (each race has customized swag bags, and they are awesome), to the actual running.

Outside of these races, running is consistently dispiriting right now. Being so out of shape makes me wonder if my goals are at best fantasies and at worst delusions. Even though I'm in a low place as a runner, the last thing I want is direct encouragement that reads as empty courtesy or pity and fuels my sense of pathetic-ness.

What feels so much better is being in the presence of people who are having fun, who are supportive in their enthusiasm for my silly plans, whose excitement about running buoys my soul. It's like running through a haze of warmth and belonging spiced with jokes. Even if most of my solo runs are a slog, when I look back on this year, I can know that there were six times when running brought me joy. It feels so good to be a Happy Little Moron.

I can't be the runner I want to be without support, and the Happy Little Morons are the best support a person could ask for. As my sister says, "Sometimes you just need someone to push you in the butt so you can be the giant's booger," which I take to mean we all need a little help to reach our goals. (She actually only said this once, in reference to my dad's request for a butt boost to position himself just below the Fremont Troll's nostril while we took a group race photo.)

Shhh, Brain, Shhh

The next post I planned to write was titled, "I'm Fat and Depressed and Running Sucks." In it I would chronicle my dearth of running and general distaste for exercise. Then I'd address my ongoing identity crisis -- Am I a runner? How can I call myself a runner if I don't run? Once you've accepted running into your heart are you a runner for the rest of your life or can you fall away from running to such a degree that you are no longer a runner? I would get into, like, deep denominational sports philosophy.

There would be no pithy little life lesson at the end -- no "Here's how I'm taking all this negativity, grinding it up, squeezing out the juices, adding some patented look-at-the-sunnyside serum, and using it to fuel my dreams and goals and self-esteem." Pfffft. Instead I planned to end the post abruptly, waist-deep in the bog of my existential crisis, like a good French film.

Up until June I ran twice in a four-month span of time. And then I found an easy half-marathon training plan, wrote down what I was supposed to do each day on a free gift calendar from some save the animals charity, and started running a bit. That was it. Here's the stupid, annoying thing: There was no magical catalyst, no inspirational documentary, no pep-talk. It barely even felt like a decision. I just did it. (Nike. I know.)

Maybe the magic was in not thinking. I have a tendency to roll thoughts around in my brain, turning them every which way to examine and fret about every surface. This type of thinking can be reflective and lead to thoughtful change. But it can also cross a threshold of usefulness and border on obsessive. For me, running is binary. I'm either running or not running. Obsessively contemplating not running does not lead to running, so why let my brain keep tumbling these dead end thoughts? (Why? Because my brain does whatever it wants. Stupid brain.)

In summary, I stopped running, and then I started again.

It's not going that well. The bones in my feet remind me of making toothpick bridges in math class to see how much weight they could hold before they collapsed, my knees conjure images of a mortar and pestle vigorously grinding tissue into paste, and my low back and hips have the flexibility of Trump-era political views.

But it's getting incrementally better. Of course incremental improvement is not very satisfying, so I'm going to try to not think about it.