The Alcoholic Post

Left: Shane, Meg (of AIDS LifeCycle fame), and I have fun with the camera as we get wasted in late December 2006.
Today makes one year since I quit drinking. One year, the amount of time seems unbelievable to me. If you asked me a year ago if I thought I would make it a year, I would have been lying if I said yes. Then again, I lied a lot back then. I lied about what I'd done last night, I lied about how much I drank and with whom, I lied about where all my money was going, I lied about why I was shaking, and I lied about stupid shit that I didn't need to lie about because I was so ashamed of myself that I didn't know where to draw the line at what was acceptable and what wasn't. But hell, if you ask me today if I could make it another year, I'm still not sure. It sucks. It sounds so trite, but you really do have to take it one day at a time.

Left: Celebrating getting my TEFL certification, getting positively wasted and having a smoke with one of my students in Barcelona (March 2006).

You would think it would get easier with time, smoking sure did. After a couple of weeks it doesn't even cross your mind to have a cigarette, after a couple of months the thought grosses you out. But not with alcohol. Imagine you had to go completely vegan, give up all meat, fish, dairy, eggs, and anything that had those things in it. No more chocolate (or all but the most disgusting, unsweetened, bitter stuff), no more pizza, no more milk in your coffee, no more steaks, no more cake, or bread (because most bread has eggs in it), or cheese, or hamburgers, or ice cream. All your friends can continue to eat normally, but you can't. All the restaurants' menus will stay the same, but you can't eat anything but the salads. Could you do it for a day? Could you do it for a month? Could you do it for the rest of your life? That's a bit like what quitting drinking was like for me. I hadn't gone a day in months without drinking, I loved beer and wine. I drank more than I ate. When I quit, bars didn't stop serving alcohol, liquor stores didn't disappear, my friends didn't stop drinking, the world went right on as it always had, but I had to somehow cut out this integral part of my life.

Right: Already so drunk we can barely

stand up, my friend Blair climbs on my shoulders

before we hit the bars in January, 2004.

I heard an interview with Todd Crandell, the founder of Racing for Recovery once. He said that he doesn't like to tell stories from back when he was using, because it glorifies it and makes it sound "cool". I can see where he's coming from, people just want to hear about the lowest points in your life just like they enjoy watching the same gruesome unraveling of someone's life on TV. Hey, it's why Lifetime: Television for Women is so popular. The fact is that I don't have many gruesome stories. I was what they call a "functional alcoholic". I liked to write when I drank, and some of the best papers I ever wrote in college I wrote while trashed. I got a 4.0 GPA the second two years of college -- the two years when I was able to actually purchase alcohol (legally). I didn't like drinking with other people because I would get too drunk to handle myself, but never wanted to stop at that point, so I would just drink alone. And I would write, and write, and write because there isn't much else to do when you drink alone. Most of my old No Wetsuit Girl posts were written while I was drunk off my ass or as I was getting there. I don't have any interesting stories of getting arrested (although I should have, who knows how I avoided a DUI with the frequency that I drove drunk), waking up in crazy places, or anything like that. Mostly I just stole shit from my friends (drinks and money for drinks), slept around, and urinated inappropriately (and not the cool kind of inappropriate urination that I'm proud of like I do now).

Right: I pretend to make out with my friend

David to make his boyfriend jealous while my

girlfriend takes the picture. You think these

things are funny when you're wasted.

(September 2006)

I threw up a lot. Not necessarily because I was drunk, but because I had no stomach lining left. By the time I left Spain my muscles and liver ached miserably and I had a stabbing pain in my spleen and a splitting headache every morning. I would get the sweats and hit by waves of nausea at the strangest times and need to go outside for some fresh air. I could barely eat, but I kept drinking. If you ever woke up feeling like I felt every morning, you wouldn't think twice about calling in to work. I wasn't just hung over, I was sick. But since I'd done it to myself, I got up and went to work feeling like that for months on end. And then people wonder how I'm able to endure some of the long workouts that I do. When you have done things that fucked up to your body, things like forcing it to process a 12-pack and a pack of Marlboro Reds a day for 2 months straight, or forcing it to throw up just to make the dizziness pass so you can get on to more drinking, sitting through a 12-hour exercise binge doesn't seem quite so bad. If you've ever had to stumble home 3 miles when you're so drunk that you're seeing double and falling over with every step, shuffling the last 5K of a marathon doesn't seem so bad. Sure, it hurts, but at least you know which way is up.

Left: I ham it up while Jamie tells me how much he loves me.

The aprons were for the "birthday boys". My birthday is in May, this picture was taken in August 2007. It remains a mystery how I wound up with an apron that night.

Addiction is a funny thing. You look around you and say, "God, my life sucks, my body feels toxic, and I hate my life," but you still can't stop. You wake up every morning and say, "I'm never drinking again," but by the time you finish your first cup of coffee you're already planning how you're going to get your next drink, if you haven't started already. You know you have a problem, so you go to great lengths to hide it so no one else will try and stop you. By the time those around you pick up on it, you're too out of control to be able to do anything about it, no matter how much you want to. To this day I still have a coffin-sized storage container sitting under my bed filled with empty beer bottles from three weeks I spent at home last summer. They were all my "night caps", and I still haven't figured out what to do with such a huge number of bottles without drawing someone's attention and having to come up with an explanation for it. It could have been much worse, but I'm thankful that I was able to catch myself when I did, before really bad shit started happening. I was one of the lucky ones.

Right: I now pee in these, most of the time.

When I quit I had to start my whole, entire life over. I broke off a relationship, quit my job, left the country, left the continent, and moved back in with my parents in Boston, a place I hadn't lived in more than 7 years. I didn't call any of my old friends (still don't) and started from scratch. But I needed something to keep my occupied during all that time I would have spent drinking. There is a lot of time to be filled when you quit drinking, time I didn't even know existed. What the hell does one do when one is awake and alert at 9:00 on a Sunday morning? Go to church? I dreaded nighttime, because what in the WORLD is there to do after sunset other than get shitfaced? I had to write myself a note to put next to my bed that said, There's nothing to fear about going to bed sober. And who does one spend their time with when everyone else their age spends all their free time drinking?

So I threw myself headlong into training because, what else was there to do with my time and energy? It was a reason to tell friends that I couldn't go to bars ("Aw come on, you don't have to drink... Just have water!" - as if that were possible), because I had a race in the morning. Also, if I had a big race looming, something just slightly out of my reach, then it would force me to stay on the straight and narrow. And as my fitness grew, so did the challenges and it kind of took on a life of its own.

When you've done such shitty things to your body as an addict has, you develop an ability to disregard your limits. I've had enough alcohol to kill me at times, and still made it home to my own bed. When you've survived that, you take other kinds of limits with a grain of salt as well. An epic training week isn't all that different from a binge anyway. All it takes is too much time, a little bit of money, and a little push to get you started before you get past the point of no return. Then you wake up one morning and think, "Fuck, my body hurts. What the hell have I been doing the last few days?!" You even get that, "I am never, ever doing that again... until next time," feeling.

This week I rode 330 miles, as a celebration of my year back in the land of the living. I rode 4 23-mile commutes to work, then 100 miles on Saturday with Mindy and a 145-mile ride on Sunday (I rode a century ride, plus rode the 20-miles to and from the start/finish). I wanted to get to 365 miles, but it would be silly to ride around in circles for 30 miles just to reach a silly number. This year was about building up a tremendous base, but I think I've proven all I wanted to prove. Next year I don't think I'll be doing as much crazy volume. But I have to say, if I hadn't been such a hopeless alcoholic, I wouldn't have been mad enough at myself to do some of the amazing things I've managed to beat out of my body this year. If you don't mind, I'd like to take this moment to reflect back on some of the highlights:

Over 936 miles run (my training log only starts in mid-November so I'm sure I'm well over 1,000), including 5 races of marathon distance or longer (I will have done 7 in a calendar year come Halloween).

Over 3,000 miles of riding, plus an additional 100 hours on the trainer, including a 7-day ride from San Francisco to LA, setting a course record at a 12-hour ultracycling event, and 10 rides over 100 miles. Probably the best part of this year has been discovering a love of cycling and a talent that I never knew I had.

Swimming about 258,000 yards in 2 oceans, 2 rivers, and 4 lakes and not discovering a single dead body in the process.

I've done over 30 races in 8 states, setting personal records in a 5K, 10K, half marathon, marathon, sprint distance, olympic distance, and half ironman distance as well as completing my first 50K and ironman, and winning the first prize I've ever won for more than just showing up, then winning hardware 6 more times.

At the risk of sounding cheezy, this year has been a real gift, and every single day that has gone by I really do stop and take a moment to remember that I almost stayed home and had a beer (or 10) rather than seeing all the cool stuff I've seen. And I've met some pretty cool people all over the country and the world.

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I've decided to dis-allow comments on this post, because I just don't think that "courtesy comments" are appropriate here. If you do have something meaningful to say, feel free to e-mail me. We'll be back to your regularly-scheduled nonsense soon, maybe with more detail on my 250-mile weekend. But before I go, I just wanted to thank everyone for reading my stuff and humoring me with all my race reports. If it hadn't been for this blog, I wouldn't have gotten to share my little (or big) adventures with anyone!

The Before and After pictures: (Left: August 2007, Right: August 2008)