College ended a few years ago. Every day that time seems more distant and in a wave of ambivilance I feel both regret and relief, animosity and apathy. In college I hung out with the greatest group of guys in the world, I don't exaggerate. We got drunk, we caroused through the nights boozed up searching for the next party to go to where someone knew someone. We danced with girls who we didn't even care to find out their names and who now we wish knew ours. Like a pack of absurd wolves, we went wild for years on end and it was wonderful.
I began to feel it more the next morning. I always felt it some, but there came a point where the drag, the pull, the headache hurt more. I became incapacitated for longer by shelling my body with ethanol. To couple with this we always said that we wanted to make the running dream happen, really fucking happen, to do what we had spent years at this point trying to perfect. For awhile we could train like monsters constantly hungover and tired and beat up and fucked up and beyond hope just training and drinking and drifting and flirting for nights and months and years on end. Then employment happened.
You wake up, it's early, and you can't blow this off. You can't skip on this, otherwise you're out on your ass back in your parents house like a loser wallowing in your impotence at social conduct. So you go to work, and you're tired, and you get off work and you're tired, and you run 10 miles easy, and you're fucking worn out and you get a text message 'boozes?' and you do it. And the next day hurts, and you drag through work wondering if death is better, and then you run an easy 10 and you're so fucked and fucking tired of being fucked but mostly tired.
You wake up one morning, slightly hungover from 1/4 of what it would take to put a dent in you 4 years ago, and you think about why you're doing this, why you're working this job, and it all comes back to why you went to that college, why you hung out with those guys, why you have done everything you've done for the past decade: this running thing. You realize you can half ass it and have fun, and get half ass results, and know that when it's all said and done it's a half ass job that maybe something full ass could have gone down had you put down the booze and got more sleep. You're tired of the headache, and the backache, and you say enough, this shit has got to stop. If you're going to do this, you're going to do it the way it needs to be done. You watch yourself socially isolate to do this, because you know that there is a piece of you that will always be in the back of your mind if you don't give it an honest chance.
So you stop going out. You're friends think you're a buzzkill, aloof, nuts. But you just have to give this one fair shot, with no distactions, no fucking, no booze, no bullshit. You feel bad, because all those guys you had the best times with, you're now seemingly disregarding to go pursue the hermit athletic thing, and they have moved on. Maybe you're too stupid to let it go, but like how things are for everyone they are what they are. And so you slip into an existence where you are suddenly no longer in college anymore, and you've grown up, and you realize that responsibility and all that bullshit are the things they should have taught in school, and that was the only thing that failed to grace your curricular menu. You find yourself going to bed before midnight on a Friday to wake up and run before work and go to bed and run and go to bed and...
- To all the guys I shared the wildest, craziest nights with back in college, best of luck with all of it. I feel like the asshole who left the party before the strippers show up, but then again, I think we all knew that was how things would end up with me anyway. Enjoy yourselves, have a drink for me, hell, have 12.
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