The Truth Comes Out

I have to expose the truth before my benedryl kicks in and the lights go out....

I just got off the phone with my friend, Debbie. Some of you have met her and I'm sure some of you have found her rather sane. But I knew better. I just didn't want to say anything, but things have gone too far and you must all learn how incredibly insane she is.

Several years ago, she convinced me to run a marathon after both of our doctors said it wasn't happening that year. We ran it, and it was a dumb idea. Her response to that when I brought it up in conversation tonight: "It's a good thing we were young."

About a week ago, she convinced me to do another one, my third. I told her how I was trying to convince my friend Corey to do it with us, because misery loves company. This is when the conversation got awfully suspicious.

"Well that's good! Tell Corey I'm going to run it really slow. I'm actually going to try to run it as slow as I can." She said.

"What? What do you mean?"

"Well, I tried running them fast and it isn't working, so I'm gonna run it slow."

This wasn't making any sense. I mean, sure, if you're pacing it too fast in the beginning, I can kinda understand that way of thinking....

"Whaaaat?" I asked, getting more doubtful by the second.

"Have you ever heard of Marathon Maniacs?" She asked.

Oh no. Whatever it is, it can't be good.

"What? No. What's that?" Dumb question. The correct reply would have been "What's that? I can't hear you, you're breaking up. It must be this freak storm that just blew in. I better let you go."

"Yeah, google it. Marathonmaniacs.com." I figured I would look it up the next day, whatever it was, it didn't sound interesting. "You run 33 marathons in 90 days and-"

"What?! What did you just say? How many?!"

"Three. Three marathons in 90 days."

"Oh, I thought you said 33."

"No, 3. In 90 days." She said.

"Oh my god! And what do you get out of this, a t-shirt?!"

"A t-shirt." She replied. I laughed. She continued "It's yellow". I bet it is.

I got out my laptop and googled it. Geez. People make really bad decisions all the time.

"I can tell you're intrigued," she said, "I'm glad I was able to plant the seed."

Damnit Debbie, I am not running 3 marathons in 90 days.I clicked on a couple links trying to find this infamous t-shirt. Debbie continued on while I searched.

"So there's the LA marathon in March, so we'd just have to find one in February. See, it's kinda bad for you having to come down here, so I could come up and do one up there."

"I don't see the shirt" I said.

"Oh, well it's yellow, and it's really cool. Ok, it's not really cool, but I'm pretty certain it's yellow. Anyway, you'll have to cut out booze and caffeine."

"What?! I'm not cutting out booze and caffeine! No way!" WTF? How could this ever have seemed like a good idea?

"Well it helps you recover better." She explained. "And you won't have to train for each one because you'll get in shape for the first one and then just stay in shape."

"Ok, maybe booze, but there's no way in hell I'm cutting out coffee."

I have some unstable friends. For real. And maybe sometimes I'm not really all that stable either. But geez, this one was getting ridiculous.

"Have you tried Marathonguide.com?" I asked.

"Yeah..."

I typed it into the address bar and started looking for February marathons.

"We should do the Canadian Death Race" I said while clicking on the next month's races.

"What's that?" She asked.

"Google it. It's a 72 mile race...in Canada of course. It's kinda based off Roman beliefs of there being a River Styx when you die. They put you on a funeral pyre with coins on your eyes so that you can pay the ferryman of the dead to take you across the River Styx into the afterlife. If you don't have the coins, he won't take you across and you'll be forced to pace the riverbank for eternity in a sort of purgatory deal" I explained.

"Oh yeah." She said.

"So they give you this coin at the beginning of the race and you carry it with you until you reach this river. You give the ferryman your coin and he takes you across. If you lost the coin you're disqualified and they take you back to the start."

"There's 12,000ft of elevation gain!" She exclaimed.

"Yeah, well you run up three different mountain peaks. You have to finish in 24 hours or they come pick you up..."

"Oh, 24 hours. Who needs sleep?" She said.

"Right. So instead of running 3 marathons in 90 days, you can just run them back to back in 24 hours. Then at the end of the 24 hours, you can just say 'I'm done' and there you have it, 3 marathons. And you don't have to run anymore after that."

"Hahaha!" She laughed. "'I'm done'! Ok, well I'll work crew for you when you do your death race. Anything with the word 'death' in it we probably shouldn't do...Don't you want to do the Death Valley Marathon?"

We discussed a few more marathons and she again proclaimed how happy she was that she had planted the seed in my head. I'm disgusted. I don't know why she thinks I'm so easy like that. I've agreed to nothing. I may or may not look into this in further detail. I still have yet to see the shirt. It's just insane really. Who does stuff like this?