When I look back on the course my life took as a teenager, it's amazing to think that I ever took up running, or writing for that matter (especially writing a blog).
In the case of running I'd always enjoyed sprinting through crowded places like malls, but I never had very much endurance. This fact was driven home when I joined the "polar bears" in high school, which was a gym program where students ran progressively longer distances outdoors in progressively colder temperatures as fall turned into winter. I think they topped out in the neighborhood of three or five miles. For my part, I found just one mile to be a struggle. I'd push for about a quarter mile, then have to take a long break, then try pushing again. It was getting so that I wouldn't even be able to complete the class's mileage before we had to go back inside, so eventually I gave up and switched over to the weightlifting class, where I could go at my own pace and stay in relative warmth. I remember lifting the entire rack on the squat machine in that class, which my young back fortunately survived.
Then there was the writing, which I had a couple of odd experiences with in middle school. The first was when I took an admissions test for a specialized school and had to write an essay, which was something I'd never done formally in my life. I had a vague notion that an essay was like a story, so in order to write mine---on the topic of the difference between intelligence and wisdom---I told a clumsy allegory that heavily ripped off a scene from The Princess Bride. Needless to say, I did not get into that school.
Then a year or two later I took a summer writing course out in the wilds of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I'd done other courses through the program the two previous summers---in math and computer programming---and had a pretty good time both those years. Math and computers have always come easily to me, and beyond that I fondly recall setting many a high score on the Star Wars pinball machine in the tiny mall across the road from the college campus where the program took place. That year it was different though. I thought I had gone there to write stories, but it turned out that they expected us to write nonfiction. Nonfiction about our own lives. I panicked. What had I ever done that was interesting enough to write about? I didn't know the first thing about structure, or choosing an event that represented a theme. And there was so much reading we had to do... After only a few days I couldn't take it anymore, and went to see my resident advisor about dropping out. He said that I wouldn't be able to leave unless I was considered a suicide risk, so I went so far as to say that I was seriously thinking about killing myself. He let me play Doom on his computer that evening while my parents were contacted. They picked me up the next day, and took me to Action Park (which I've since learned was something of a death trap) to cheer me up. I recovered, but I never did go back to that program again (though that may not have been my choice to make---my parents kept those kinds of details away from me back then).
Looking back on those experiences, the high school running I can live with, since that was long before I discovered how to breathe steadily and pace myself (which they didn't really give us much help with in the class). Maybe I'd have been able to accomplish something in track and field on the academic circuit if I started running earlier in my life, but then again that could just be wishful thinking, and at any rate I'm really happy with where I am with it now.
The writing, though... It bothered me then, and it still bothers me now. Granted, it came at a time in my life when I was bullied relentlessly, to the point where I developed an instinctive fear of expressing myself. Even so I wish I'd found a way to stick it out, especially given how dramatic the circumstances of my exit were. I've learned the most in my life from the situations where I've gone out of my way to make myself uncomfortable---to shake up my routine and try new things. But even that realization wouldn't come to me until many years later, so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on thirteen-year-old me. There are only two things I know for sure. The first is that there's nothing I miss about being that young, naive, selfish, and lost. The second is that I now have events in my life worth writing about (and probably always did).
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